Is the Episcopal Church a Bible-based Church?
A. Absolutely. In fact, leaders of the English Church were in the forefront of the long struggle to translate Holy Scripture into languages understood by the people. For hundreds of years, the Roman Catholic Church allowed the Bible to be printed only in Latin, forcing the laity to look to the clergy to tell them what it said. The King James Bible, sometimes called the “Authorized Version,” published in 1611, is one of the great gifts of the English Church to the Christian world. It is probable that William Shakespeare participated in its preparation. Since then, Anglican Churches and their Biblical scholars have participated in numerous ecumenical translations of the Bible. The Episcopal Church, with the rest of the Anglican Communion, teaches explicitly that the Bible contains God’s truth. However, we teach that there are three sources of Christian Authority: Holy Scripture, Christian Tradition and Reason. Of these sources, the Bible, Holy Scripture, is primary. We have described aut
