This book is a thumbnail sketch or overview of how we got our English Bible. Here, the author takes us into the lives, sacrifices, and even martyrdom of those who brought the Word of God to English-speakers: John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, Myles Coverdale, John Rogers, Thomas Cranmer, and others. Also presented are interesting vignettes of English Bibles, or parts of Bibles, which have become more or less famous because of certain peculiarities either in the translation or in typographical errors. For instances, there was THE BUG BIBLE. This is Matthew's Bible, 1551, and is so called because of the rendering of Psalm xci, 5. Instead of, "Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night," as in our version, it has, "So that thou shalt not need to be afraid for any Bugges by night." Dore suggests that "probably the word means bogies or boggarts, and not the objectionable little insect which is a terror to most people." A bogie or a boggart is a shape-shifting creature that will assume the form of whatever most frightens the person who encounters it.

Boggart is one of numerous related terms used in English folklore for either a household spirit or a malevolent genius loci inhabiting fields, marshes or other topographical features. Coverdale and Taverner have the same rendering. The word bug once signified something frightful, the same as bugbear. THE ROSIN BIBLE. The Douay Version, 1610, has, in Jer. viii, 22, "Is there no rosin in Gilead?" Cotton Mather tells of a Bible printed before 1702 in which David is made to say in Psalm cxix, 161, "Printers have persecuted me without a cause." (It should have been "princes.") Probably every modern writer can affirm the truth of this.