The Bible with Wesley’s Notes

The English Bibles printed across the seventeenth century were never quite uniform — corrections and errors crept in from edition to edition. One of the first major revisions came from John Wesley himself, in his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755). Wesley set the text in paragraph form rather than the verse-per-paragraph layout of the original King James, and where the German scholar Johann Albrecht Bengel’s new Greek edition improved on the Textus Receptus that lay behind the KJV, Wesley updated the English — revising the translation in almost twelve thousand places.

Ten years later, in 1765, Wesley published the companion Notes upon the Old Testament, an explicit abridgment of Matthew Henry’s six-volume commentary alongside his own observations. Together the two volumes became one of the four doctrinal standards of early Methodism, and they remain the most sustained piece of biblical commentary Wesley ever wrote.

For the longer story behind the text, see History of Methodism, Episode 11. Recurring Wesleyan concerns are highlighted in the notes — see the themes index.