The Geneva Bible, one of the most…

The Geneva Bible, one of the most historically significant translations of the Bible into the English language,  precedes the King James translation by fifty-one years

The first full edition of this Bible, with a further revised New Testament, appears in 1560.

Geneva, ruled as a republic in which John Calvin and Theodore Beza provide the primary spiritual and theological leadership, had been a refuge for a number of English Protestant scholars who had fled during the reign of Queen Mary.

Among these scholars was William Whittingham, who had come to supervise what became the effort to create the translation now known as the Geneva Bible, in collaboration with Myles Coverdale, Christopher Goodman, Anthony Gilby, Thomas Sampson, and William Cole—several of whom had become prominent figures in the proto-Puritan Nonconformist faction of the Vestments controversy.

Whittingham is directly responsible for the New Testament, which had been completed and published in 1557, while Gilby has overseen the Old Testament.