Nov. 22, 2020, column:

Mayflower Compact filled with statements indicating allegiance to God

By Mike Haynes

The date of Veterans Day is easy for me to remember. It’s Nov. 11, which also is when I was born. I tell people, “Yeah, they fly the flags on my birthday.”

The flags actually go up that day because World War I ended on Nov. 11, 1918. It also is the date my great-grandparents got married in a field near Willow, Oklahoma, in 1903, according to the family story.

                Years and dates we were taught in school tend to stay in my memory, too, such as 1066, 1215; 1620; 1776; 1836; Dec. 7, 1941; and June 6, 1944; and some in our experience, including Nov. 22, 1963, and Sept. 11, 2001.

                But about that year 1620: Of course I knew that’s when the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. Until a few months ago, though, I had no idea it was on Nov. 11.

                I learned that from an email ad promoting the sale of a facsimile Bible. To mark the 400^th anniversary of those Mayflower travelers landing in America, a company is selling exact copies of the 1560 Geneva Bible.

For many, the best guess of what Bible version the English Separatists carried with them on the ship would be the King James Bible, first printed in 1611. And while the Mayflower’s captain probably had a copy of the Church of England’s King James Version, historians agree that the Bible used by those Puritans seeking religious freedom was the Geneva, an English Bible first printed in Switzerland because it wasn’t approved by the king of England.

                 The 1560 first edition being sold in facsimile form may not have been the edition read on the Mayflower, but almost certainly, those believers were reading some edition of the Geneva. It was the most popular Bible version in England at the time and the one most quoted by Shakespeare.

                The main objection King James I and the Church of England had to the Geneva Bible was its plentiful marginal notes, which were slanted toward the Puritan point of view and showed negativity toward the monarchy.

 

               Fleeing James’ unfriendly government, they had left England for the Netherlands in 1608, the same time that translation committees were working on the KJV. Eventually they decided they would be more comfortable in the New World, negotiated with a London stock company to finance the journey and sailed on the Mayflower.

                Only 35 of the 102 colonists on the ship were members of the English Separatist Church, which Encyclopaedia Britannica calls “a radical faction of Puritanism.” Most of the others were connected to the firm that paid for the trip.

                The first settlers were called “Old Comers” and later “the Forefathers,” says Britannica. The colony’s governor, William Bradford, referred to the “saints” who had left the Netherlands as “pilgrimes,” and the term wasn’t commonly used until Daniel Webster used the phrase “Pilgrim Fathers” in an 1820 speech.

                Whatever we call them, before leaving the ship on Nov. 11, 1620, 41 male passengers signed a 200-word document later called the Mayflower Compact, which set out a plan for a government, laws and regulations of the colony.

                The Geneva Bible facsimile sold by the Bible Museum Inc. at greatsite.com includes a photographic reproduction of Bradford’s handwritten copy of the Mayflower Compact showing its 41 signatures. The agreement is filled with statements indicating allegiance to God – it begins “In the name of God Amen” – and even shows deference to the king – it ends by referring to “our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland.” It was a historic beginning. But reality fell short of the Separatists’ vision.

            “Bradford's dream of a large community of sincere Protestant Christian Separatist Pilgrims creating a New Zion in the New World never really came to pass during his lifetime,” writes the Bible Museum Inc. “Bradford notes with disappointment that the newly arriving settlers were mostly adventurers seeking their fortune in the New World, and only a minority of them were Christians seeking to worship God freely.

“Nevertheless, the following generations of American settlers did establish a community of thriving Christians who were at last out from under the fist of England's kings and the government's Anglican Church.”

The pilgrims’ preference for the Geneva Bible certainly meshed with the early American ideal of protection of the church from the state.

                About that date: Bradford’s handwriting on the Compact does say “11 of November.” And “Nov. 11, 1620,” is printed on the cover of the new facsimile Geneva Bible. But that was under the Old Style calendar. Using our modern calendar, the signing was on Nov. 21, meaning yesterday was the 400^th anniversary.

                But I’m sticking with Nov. 11.

(By the way, the Bible Museum Inc. that's mentioned is not the Museum of the Bible that Kathy and I have visited in Washington, D.C. They're two different organizations.)