By the age of Elizabeth Tudor, the representation of the true Church as a second Israel,
suffering bondage to Roman idolatry just as the Israelites had suffered bondage during the
Babylonian exile, had become a commonplace among radical elements of the international
Reformation. Luther's famous 1520 attack on the Catholic sacraments, which confutes the
doctrine of transubstantiation as a primitive superstition, invoked the allegory in its title, The
Babylonian Captivity of the Church. In setting out to liberate the true, hidden Church of
"protestant" believers from Roman bondage, Luther's tract advocates eliminating five of the seven
Catholic sacraments -- ordination, matrimony, confession, confirmation and extreme unction -- as
encrustations of Latin superstition, wholly lacking in scriptural foundation. There are only three
sacraments originally instituted by Christ: "Baptism, penance, and the bread" (152). Even these
three, moreover, have been "subjected to a miserable captivity by the Roman curia, and the
church has been robbed of all her liberty” (152).
Significantly, Luther uses the word "bread" when writing of the Eucharist. At stake in this
innocuous transfer of terminology is the doctrine of transubstantiation itself, which declared that
the "bread" employed in the Eucharist was converted in toto into the body of Christ through the
intervention of the priest in mass. Affirming this traditional doctrine, the Council of Trent
declared that anyone who denied "that wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance
of the bread into his body and the Wine into his Blood, the species [ie appearance] of the Bread
and Wine remaining…." should be condemned as anathema.
This theological context may be worth considering as we proceed to examine the Bible verse,
marked in the de Vere Bible, which Richmond Noble in 1935 termed the "strongest of all" proofs
testifying to Shakespeare's preference for the wording of the Geneva Bible over the Bishop's or
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