I refer to Chris McColl's letter (January 30) in which he stated that "John Knox insisted the Bible for the Church of Scotland be printed in English". John Knox died in 1572 and the first Bible to be printed in Scotland was not authorised by the General Assembly until 1575 and was not published until 1579. It was the General Assembly which insisted that this Bible follow the English-language Geneva Bible of 1562.

I refer to Chris McColl's letter (January 30) in which he stated that "John Knox insisted the Bible for the Church of Scotland be printed in English". John Knox died in 1572 and the first Bible to be printed in Scotland was not authorised by the General Assembly until 1575 and was not published until 1579. It was the General Assembly which insisted that this Bible follow the English-language Geneva Bible of 1562.

The Parliament of Scotland had provided as early as 1543 "that it sal be lefull to all our sovirane ladyis leiges to haif the haly writ, bai the new testament and the auld in the vulgar toung in Inglis or Scottis of ane gude and trew translatioun".

However, until 1579 all printed Bibles (and Testaments) had to be imported (illegally until 1543) with the only printed Bibles (and Testaments) available in "Inglis or Scottis" being the English-language series, based on William Tyndale's translations from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek between c.1526 and his martyrdom in 1536 and culminating in the 1560-1562 Genevan revisions (from the Hebrew and Aramaic) of the parts of the Old Testament which Miles Coverdale had translated (c.1535) from German and Latin.

The only significant early translation of any part of the Bible into Scots was the New Testament completed in manuscript by Murdoch Nisbet (Ayrshire) by c.1538 but this remained out of the public domain until "discovered" in 1893 and was not printed and published until 1901-1905.

Further, as Nisbet's text was based on a Vulgate-based Wycliffite manuscript (dating from c.1385) it is unlikely, even if his work had been know about beyond his immediate family, that there would have been interest in reformist circles in his version (a tertiary translation - Greek to Latin to English to Scots) when primary translations (Greek to English), such as Tyndale's were becoming available. Indeed, a direct translation of the complete Greek New Testament into Scots was not to become available until that of William Lorimer's as first published in 1983.

However, in addition to the influence of English-language Bibles on the language(s) of Scotland from the 16th century onwards, almost equally influential were the Church of Scotlands use of other English-language publications such as the Anglo-Genevan Psalter of 1556-1561 and the first Book of Common Order of 1564 as from the English-speaking Protestant Congregations in Frankfurt and Geneva where John Knox ministered in 1554-1555 and 1556-1559, respectively.

Dr Alexander S Waugh, Kincardineshire.