The Work
The Companion Bible was published in six parts between 1909 and 1922 by the Oxford University Press (the final parts appearing posthumously after Bullinger's death in 1913). It provides the complete text of the King James Version surrounded by extensive marginal notes - Bullinger called them 'companion' notes because they accompanied the reader through the text rather than interrupting it in a conventional commentary format. The notes focus on the original Hebrew and Greek meanings of significant words, on the identification of figures of speech (drawing on Bullinger's 1898 Figures of Speech Used in the Bible, a 1,100-page catalog of 217 figures), on structural analysis of the biblical books, and on the parallel and chiastic arrangements Bullinger identified throughout both Testaments.
The 198 appendices that accompany the notes cover an extraordinary range of topics: the structure of the book of Genesis, the chronology of the book of Acts, the Hebrew divine names, the significance of numbers in Scripture, the textual variants in the New Testament, the chronology of Revelation. Together the text and appendices constitute one of the most ambitious individual scholarly projects in the history of English Bible study.
Biblical Engagement
Genesis 1:1 - 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth' - is the verse from which the entire structure of Bullinger's biblical world begins. One of his most influential contributions was the 'Gap Theory' interpretation of Genesis 1:1-2: the argument (not original to Bullinger but given prominent advocacy by him) that an indefinite period of time elapsed between the original creation of verse 1 and the restoration described in verses 2-31, during which a primordial catastrophe occurred that accounts for the geological evidence of an ancient earth. This interpretation, whatever its exegetical merits, provided a framework for many readers to accept modern geology without abandoning biblical inerrancy.
John 1:1 - 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God' - receives from Bullinger the close philological attention he brings to all theologically central texts. His notes on John 1 address the Greek syntax of theos ēn ho logos ('the Word was God') in the context of his general approach: getting behind the English translation to the specific meaning of the Greek and Hebrew originals. This philological commitment, however limited by the standards of modern scholarship, gave many readers their first exposure to the difference between translating from and understanding the original languages.
Revelation 22:18 - 'For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book' - is the verse that grounds Bullinger's conviction of the supreme importance of textual accuracy. His dispensationalist approach to the New Testament - particularly his 'ultra-dispensationalism,' which distinguished between the Gospel of the Kingdom preached to Israel and the Gospel of the Grace of God addressed to the Church - required careful attention to which passages were addressed to which audience, and this carefulness was grounded in his conviction that the biblical text was precisely calibrated.
2 Timothy 2:15 - 'Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth' - is Bullinger's programmatic text for his entire approach to scripture. 'Rightly dividing' (Greek orthotomounta, 'cutting straight') was for Bullinger the fundamental hermeneutical obligation: the interpreter must correctly identify which portions of scripture apply to which people, covenants, and dispensations, and must read each portion with the philological precision that its divine authorship demands.
Ethelbert William Bullinger: Life and Context
Ethelbert William Bullinger (1837-1913) was ordained as a Church of England clergyman and served curacies in rural England before devoting himself primarily to scholarly biblical work and editing. He served as editor of the magazine Things to Come from its founding in 1894 until his death, making it the primary vehicle for dispensationalist scholarship in Britain. His Companion Bible and his Figures of Speech together represent an extraordinary output of detailed biblical scholarship by a single scholar working without institutional support or collaborative research assistance.
Bullinger's dispensationalism - particularly his ultra-dispensationalism - separated him from the mainstream of evangelical biblical scholarship. He argued that the Pauline epistles alone (specifically those from Ephesians onward) were addressed to the 'body of Christ' (the Church in the strict dispensationalist sense), and that the earlier Pauline letters, the Synoptic Gospels, the Acts narrative, and the General Epistles were addressed to Israel under a different dispensational framework. This position was controversial among dispensationalists as well as among non-dispensationalists.
The Figures of Speech Volume
Bullinger's Figures of Speech Used in the Bible (1898) is a scholarly work of genuine distinction, even for readers who do not share his dispensationalist commitments. It catalogs 217 figures of speech with extensive biblical examples, drawing on classical rhetoric and providing the English reader with tools for identifying and interpreting the rhetorical devices that the biblical authors employed. The identification of chiasmus (the ABBA pattern of parallel structure), inclusio (the framing of a passage by its opening and closing elements), anaphora (repeated opening words), and dozens of other figures has proved useful to biblical interpreters across the theological spectrum.
Reception and Legacy
The Companion Bible had its greatest influence in fundamentalist and dispensationalist circles, where its combination of textual seriousness and conservative theological commitments made it the standard reference work for self-study. Many of the lay Bible study movements of the twentieth century - particularly in the Pentecostal and charismatic traditions - were shaped by Bullinger's approach to biblical structure and his identification of numerical and chiastic patterns. His influence can be traced through figures like Clarence Larkin, Dake's Annotated Reference Bible, and later dispensationalist study Bible traditions.