Featured Are the 1560 Geneva Bible and the 1611 KJV basically the same English Bible?

Was there really a group of "Bishops' Bible only" people?

William Fulke, a Purtian who had the New Testament of the Bishops' Bible printed along side the Rheims New Testament, would likely not have been a "Bishops' Bible Only" advocate. He wrote a book defending all the Protestant English translations.

In his 1583 book that defended the Protestant view of Bible translation, Puritan William Fulke (1538-1589) stated: "We say indeed, that by the Greek text of the New Testament all translations of the New Testament must be tried; but we mean not by every corruption that is in any Greek copy of the New Testament" (A Defence of the Since and True Translations of the Holy Scriptures into the English Tongue, p. 44).

In the preface of another book, Fulke noted: "The dissension of interpreters [translators] must be decided by the original Greek" (Confutation of the Rhemish Testament, p. 26). Fulke maintained: “The Greek text of the New Testament needeth no patronage of men, as that which is the very word and truth of God” (Confutation, p. 32).

Fulke observed: "We acknowledge the text of the Old Testament in
Hebrew and Chaldee, (for in the Chaldee tongue were some parts of it written,) as it is now printed with vowels, to be the only fountain, out of which we must draw the pure truth of the scriptures for the Old Testament, adjoining here with the testimony of the Mazzoreth, where any diversity of points, letters, or words, is noted to have been in sundry ancient copies, to discern that which is proper to the whole context,
from that which by errors of the writers or printers hath been brought into any copy, old or new" (A Defence, p. 78).

It is most likely that the KJV translators obtained their knowledge of the Rheims New Testament from a book by William Fulke which compared the Rheims N. T. side by side with the Bishops' NT. In his introduction to a 1911 facsimile reprint of the 1611, A. W. Pollard maintained that "probably every reviser of the New Testament for the edition of 1611" possessed a copy of Fulke's book that "was regarded as a standard work on the Protestant side" (p. 23). John Greider observed that “This work [by Fulke] was studied by the translators of the 1611 Bible” (English Bible Translations, p. 316). Peter Thuesen pointed out: “William Fulke’s popular 1589 annotated edition of the Rheims New Testament, though intended as an antidote to popery, in reality had served as the vehicle by which some of the Rhemists’ Latinisms entered the vocabulary of the King James Bible” (In Discordance, p. 62). David Norton noted that KJV translator William Branthwaite had a copy of “Fulke’s parallel edition of the Rheims and Bishops” in his personal library (KJB: Short History, p. 64). Norton also pointed out that the Bodleian Library in 1605 had a copy of Fulke’s edition of the Rheims and Bishops’ New Testaments (Ibid.). Even Gail Riplinger confirmed that the KJV translators had Fulke’s book with these verse comparisons, but she in effect ignored the evidence that they followed some of the renderings of the Rheims (In Awe, p. 536).

 

Miles Coverdale is said to have revised the 1537 Matthew's Bible in his making of the 1539 Great Bible, not his own 1535 Bible.

In his introduction to his modern spelling edition of Tyndale’s N. T., David Daniell maintained that the 1539 Great Bible “was a further revision of ‘Matthew’s’ by Coverdale, in a more Latinate direction, to appease bishops who were alarmed by the moves away from the Latin Bible” (p. xi).

Robert Sargent, a KJV-only advocate, maintained that in the Great Bible, Coverdale used the Latin Vulgate and the Latin translation of Erasmus in his revision of the New Testament of the Matthew's Bible and used the Latin Vulgate in his revision of the Old Testament of the Matthew's Bible (English Bible, p. 196; see also The KJV of the English Bible, p. 178).

David Sorenson suggested that in the Great Bible Coverdale "essentially updated printing errors of the Matthew Bible" (Touch Not, p. 45).

The 1535 Coverdale's Bible differs from the 1539 Great Bible in a good number of places.