Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

One distinctive feature of the Bishops’ Book had a major effect on the future of the Church of England: its numbering of one basic building-block of the text, the Ten Commandments. The importance of this requires some explanation. Although all Christians agree on the sacred number ten, they have never agreed on how to divide up the biblical passages which make up the Commandments into that number. The issue is whether to classify a rather long-winded commandment to destroy ‘graven images’ as a separate free-standing commandment, or amalgamate it with the snappy first commandment to ‘have no other Gods but me’. In the latter case, the rationale is to assume that this anomalously wordy piece of text is just a comment on the basic thought (having done that, the total of ten commandments is made up by dividing commands about covetousness towards the end of the commandment material). If on the other hand the graven image commandment stands separately, as Commandment Number Two, rather than Commandment Number 1B, then it forms one of God’s basic priorities. The issue extended in the Reformation beyond graven images as such, since devotion to images shaded into devotion to physical objects and locations generally, in shrines and sacred places. That in turn was the basis of the vast medieval enterprise of pilgrimage.