John Knox and the Scottish Reformation

John Knox is remembered in Scotland as a founder of the nation's church and in much of the world as a stern preacher who scolded a queen. Both pictures hold some truth. He was a priest who became a Protestant, a galley slave who became a royal chaplain, an exile who wrote a notorious pamphlet against women rulers, and the main author of the confession that made Scotland Protestant in 1560.

This article tells his story from the burning of his teacher George Wishart to his death in Edinburgh in 1572, without hiding the violence on either side. It then looks at the form of church government that grew out of his work, Presbyterianism, and gives the Orthodox answer to it. A companion article on Huldrych Zwingli covers the Swiss beginnings of the Reformed tradition that Knox brought home.

In brief

John Knox (about 1514-1572) was a Scottish priest and notary who joined the preacher George Wishart, burned for heresy at St Andrews on 1 March 1546. After Cardinal David Beaton was murdered in revenge, Knox joined the Protestants holding St Andrews Castle, was called to preach there, and on its surrender in July 1547 was sent to the French galleys for nineteen months. He then served in England, refused an English bishopric, and fled to the Continent under Mary Tudor, ministering to the English congregation at Geneva. His First Blast of the Trumpet (1558) argued that rule by a woman is "repugnant to nature." Back in Scotland from May 1559, he helped lead the revolt that brought the Reformation Parliament of August 1560, which ratified the Scots Confession he largely wrote. He clashed openly with Mary, Queen of Scots. Knox's own church still had superintendents; full Presbyterian government came later under Andrew Melville and was settled by law only in 1690. The Orthodox Church judges the Presbyterian rejection of bishops in apostolic succession to be an error.

Thesis: Knox was a brave and sincere preacher who opposed real corruption, but the church he helped build cut itself off from the episcopal order that the apostles handed on, which the Orthodox Church has kept without a break.

A priest from Haddington

Knox was probably born near Haddington, east of Edinburgh. The old date of 1505 rests on a late statement; Andrew Lang (1905) followed Dr Hay Fleming in placing his birth around 1513-15, and recent scholarship gives 1514 or 1515.¹ By 1540 he appears in legal documents as "Sir John Knox," a priest working as a notary.²

He grew up in a Scotland where Protestant preaching was punished by fire. Knox's own History of the Reformation opens its account of the martyrs with Patrick Hamilton, burned at St Andrews on "the last day of February in the year of God 1527," which is February 1528 by modern reckoning, since Scotland then began the year in March.³ Knox's History is partisan throughout, but it is also the main eyewitness source for much of what follows.

Wishart, the sword and the cardinal

From 1545 Knox attached himself to George Wishart, a preacher who travelled through Lothian, and he carried the two-handed sword that usually went with the preacher. On the night Wishart was arrested, Knox wanted to go with him. According to the History, Wishart sent him back to his pupils: "One is sufficient for one sacrifice."⁴ Wishart was tried before Cardinal David Beaton and burned at St Andrews on 1 March 1546.⁵

On 29 May 1546 a band of conspirators, among them Norman and John Leslie and William Kirkaldy of Grange, forced their way into St Andrews Castle and killed Beaton in his chamber. One of them, James Melvin, told the cardinal to repent "especially of the shedding of the blood of that notable instrument of God, Master George Wishart" before running him through.⁶ Knox was not among the killers, but his History tells the story with grim approval and adds, in the original Scots, "These thingis we wreat mearelie," that is, we write these things merrily.⁷ Lang, a critical biographer, concluded that Knox "approved of and applauded" the murder, and even Knox's admiring biographer Thomas M'Crie granted that Knox held that notorious murderers and tyrants "may warrantably be put to death by private individuals" when ordinary justice is impossible.⁸ An honest account has to set the burning of Wishart and the murder of Beaton side by side. Neither was the way of Christ.

The castle and the galleys

Knox entered the castle with his pupils in April 1547. There the preacher John Rough, before the whole company, charged him "that ye refuse not this holy vocation" of preaching. Knox, his History says, "burst forth in most abundant tears, and withdrew himself to his chamber."⁹ Knox had been ordained a priest years before, but he now took up the ministry at the call of a congregation and its preacher, and that pattern shaped the church he later built.

A French fleet besieged the castle, which surrendered on 30 July 1547. Against the terms of surrender the leading men were sent to the French galleys. Knox was held for nineteen months, much of it on a galley, and was released in February 1549.¹⁰ His History tells how a "painted Lady," an image of the Virgin, was thrust at a Scottish prisoner to kiss at Nantes; he threw it into the river, saying, "Let our Lady now save herself: she is light enough; let her learn to swim." Knox does not name the man.¹¹ To Orthodox Christians the story is painful. The Seventh Ecumenical Council taught that honour given to a holy image passes to the person it shows, and that such veneration is not the worship due to God alone (see Iconoclasm and the Triumph of Orthodoxy). Contempt for an icon of the Mother of God is not a protest against idolatry. It is a failure of love toward her and toward her Son.

England, Geneva and the First Blast

Released, Knox served as a preacher in Berwick and Newcastle and in December 1551 was made one of six chaplains to Edward VI. In October 1552, according to David Laing's chronology, he declined the bishopric of Rochester.¹² When the Catholic Mary Tudor came to the throne in 1553 he fled abroad. At Frankfurt he left the English exile congregation after a quarrel over the Book of Common Prayer, and from 1556 he was one of the ministers of the English congregation in Geneva, the city of John Calvin. He married Marjory Bowes in these years.¹³

In 1558 he published, anonymously, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. "Regiment" meant rule. Its opening proposition reads: "To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire aboue any realme, nation, or citie, is repugnant to nature, contumelie to God."¹⁴ It was provoked by the persecutions under Mary Tudor in England and the regent Mary of Guise in Scotland, but Mary Tudor died on 17 November 1558, and her Protestant successor Elizabeth regarded the authors of such works "with the utmost dislike."¹⁵ The Orthodox Church, for its part, has never taught that a woman may not hold civil power. It honours among its saints the Empress St Theodora, who as regent restored the holy icons in 843, and St Olga, who governed Kiev for her young son and was the grandmother of St Vladimir.¹⁶

Revolution, 1559-1560

Knox reached Edinburgh on 2 May 1559, into a country close to civil war between the Protestant "Lords of the Congregation" and the regent Mary of Guise.¹⁷ At Perth on 11 May, after a sermon "vehement against idolatry," a boy threw a stone at a tabernacle on the altar and a crowd destroyed the church furnishings. Then what Knox calls "the rascal multitude" sacked the houses of the Grey and Black Friars.¹⁸ Lang points out that Knox described the same events differently in a private letter and in his History, and that Calvin disapproved of such outbreaks.¹⁹ With English help the Protestant lords prevailed, and the regent died in June 1560.

On 1 August 1560 Parliament met and asked the Protestant ministers for a confession of faith. Knox and five colleagues, all named John, drew it up in four days. It was ratified on 17 August "as a doctrine grounded upon the infallible Word of God." Of the temporal lords only three dissented, giving as their reason: "We will beleve as our fathers belevet."²⁰ {{very-strong: The Scottish Parliament ratified the Scots Confession in August 1560, with Knox as its chief author.}}

The Scots Confession and the Book of Discipline

The Scots Confession is a vigorous Reformed creed. On the Supper it is higher than Zwingli: it condemns those "that affirme Sacramentes to be nathing ellis bot naked and baire signes," while also rejecting transubstantiation.²¹ On the Church it is decisive for our question. Article 18 declares that the marks of the true Church are "nouther Antiquitie, Title usurpit, lineal Descence, Place appointed, nor multitude of men approving ane error," but the true preaching of the Word, the right administration of the sacraments, and church discipline.²² In other words, descent from the apostles through bishops is set aside as a sign of the Church.

The First Book of Discipline, drafted by the same six men, set out the new church's order. It dropped the laying on of hands at a minister's admission: "albeit the Apostles used the imposition of hands, yet, seeing the miracle is ceased, the using of the ceremony we judge is not necessary." It proposed ten or twelve superintendents to plant churches across the provinces, a measure it called "most expedient for this time," and it asked that "every several church have a schoolmaster."²³ Many nobles who had taken the old church's lands balked at funding it; Knox complained that they saw their "carnal liberty and worldly commodity somewhat to be impaired," and the book was never ratified by the crown.²⁴

Knox and Mary, Queen of Scots

Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic widowed young in France, returned to Scotland on 19 August 1561 and was allowed a private Mass in her chapel. Knox preached that "one Mass ... was more fearful to him than if ten thousand armed enemies were landed in any part of the realm."²⁵ In an early interview, as Knox records it, the queen asked whether subjects with power may resist their princes. Knox answered: "If their princes exceed their bounds, Madam, no doubt they should be resisted, even by power." When Mary said, "I will defend the Kirk of Rome, for I think it is the true Kirk of God," Knox replied by calling Rome a "harlot."²⁶

Mary's reign collapsed after the murder of her husband Lord Darnley in 1567 and her marriage to Bothwell. She was imprisoned at Lochleven, and Knox preached at the coronation of her infant son James VI on 29 July 1567. She fled to England in 1568 and was beheaded at Fotheringay in February 1587.²⁷ Knox died in Edinburgh on 24 November 1572. The famous graveside tribute, "Here lies he who never feared the face of man," is usually credited to the regent Morton, but Schaff notes that the only authority for the saying, the diarist James Melville, gives it as "He neither feared nor flattered any flesh."²⁸

From Knox to Presbyterianism

Knox is often called the father of Presbyterianism, but the church of 1560 was not yet fully Presbyterian. It had superintendents, and from 1572, under arrangements made at Leith, the reformed church again had bishops. When Andrew Melville returned from Geneva in 1574, he argued that "prelacy was unscriptural" and that parity among ministers should be restored. He helped prepare the Second Book of Discipline, approved by the General Assembly in April 1578, and the Assembly later abolished the episcopal office.²⁹ For more than a century bishops and presbyteries alternated as kings and assemblies contended, until Parliament re-established Presbyterianism permanently in 1690.³⁰ {{strong: Fully Presbyterian government in Scotland dates from Melville's Second Book of Discipline (1578) and was settled by law only in 1690, after Knox's death.}} (For Presbyterian beliefs today, see What Do Presbyterians Believe?)

The Orthodox assessment: bishops and the apostolic succession

The Presbyterian case deserves to be stated at full strength. In the New Testament the words "elder" (presbyteros) and "overseer" (episkopos) are used of the same men: Paul "called for the elders of the church" at Ephesus and told them that the Holy Spirit "has made you overseers" (Acts 20:17, 28); Titus is to "appoint elders in every city," for "a bishop must be blameless" (Titus 1:5, 7, NKJV).³¹ St Jerome, in his letter to Evangelus, used these texts to argue that "presbyters are the same as bishops," and said that at Alexandria the presbyters once chose their bishop from among themselves.³²

The Orthodox answer begins with the same texts. Titus and Timothy, not the local elders, ordain elders and are told not to "lay hands on anyone hastily" (1 Timothy 5:22). There was from the beginning an apostolic ministry over the local presbyters that could ordain, and it was handed on. St Clement of Rome, writing to Corinth probably late in the first century, says the apostles appointed bishops and deacons and "afterwards gave instructions, that when these should fall asleep, other approved men should succeed them in their ministry."³³ St Ignatius of Antioch, early in the second century, describes in every church one bishop with his presbyters and deacons: "Apart from these, there is no Church," and "Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is [administered] either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it."³⁴ St Irenaeus answered the heretics of his day by pointing to the bishops "instituted" by the apostles in the churches and "the succession of these men to our own times."³⁵

Even Jerome, the Presbyterians' favourite Father, gives the decisive point away. In the same letter he asks: "For what function, excepting ordination, belongs to a bishop that does not also belong to a presbyter?"³⁶ Ordination is precisely what was at stake in 1560. Jerome himself was a priest under bishops, and he never imagined presbyters ordaining apart from them.

{{very-strong: By the early second century St Ignatius describes a single bishop with presbyters and deacons in each church, and St Irenaeus appeals to the succession of bishops from the apostles.}}

The Orthodox Church agrees with the Scots Confession on one thing: bare lineage is not enough. Irenaeus joined the succession of bishops to the apostolic faith they kept, and a bishop who teaches heresy is judged by the Church. But the remedy for unworthy bishops is not to abolish the office the apostles handed on. When the Calvinist teaching that "the simple Priest and the High Priest [Bishop] are perhaps the same" reached the East, the Synod of Jerusalem (1672) answered that "the dignity of the Bishop is so necessary in the Church, that without him, neither Church nor Christian could either be or be spoken of."³⁷

The Orthodox verdict is therefore plain. Presbyterian parity, with ministers ordained by presbyters rather than by bishops in apostolic succession, is an error and a break with the order of the apostolic Church. Presbyterians are Christians and brethren in Christ, baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity, and many of them love the Scriptures deeply. But the fullness of the Church, with her bishops, her priesthood and her Mysteries, is found in the Orthodox Church, the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of the Creed (see Did the Early Church Believe in Apostolic Succession? and Which Church Is the One True Church?).

Objections and replies

"The bishops of Knox's Scotland were corrupt. Beaton burned Wishart."

Some were, and the Orthodox Church does not defend them. But St Clement already faced unworthy conduct in Corinth and insisted that those who had served blamelessly could not justly be removed, while the unworthy are judged. The sins of bishops call for repentance and discipline, not for the abolition of the apostolic office.

"Succession is no guarantee of truth. Rome had succession and still erred."

Agreed; that is why the Orthodox Church holds both together: bishops in unbroken succession who confess the faith of the Seven Ecumenical Councils. Knox rejected the papal errors, but he also discarded the apostolic order that the Orthodox Church had kept alongside the faith.

"Presbyterians have oversight too, through presbyteries and assemblies."

They do, and their discipline has often been serious and godly. But a committee of presbyters is not the apostolic episcopate. By Jerome's own test, the power to ordain belongs to the bishop, and the Church has never recognised ordination by presbyters acting without one.

What we can say confidently

• George Wishart was burned at St Andrews on 1 March 1546, and Cardinal Beaton was murdered there on 29 May 1546; Knox's History approves the killing.
• Knox was called to preach in St Andrews Castle in 1547, served nineteen months in the French galleys, and was released in 1549.
• He published The First Blast of the Trumpet anonymously at Geneva in 1558.
• The Scots Confession was ratified by Parliament on 17 August 1560; its article 18 rejects "lineal Descence" as a mark of the true Church.
• Knox's church of 1560 had superintendents; fully Presbyterian government came with Melville and was settled by law in 1690.
• The early Fathers, from St Clement and St Ignatius to St Irenaeus, witness to bishops in succession from the apostles, as the Orthodox Church still has.

What remains disputed

• Knox's birth year: 1505 in older works, about 1514 in most recent scholarship.
• Who preached the Perth sermon of 11 May 1559 and how far Knox approved the destruction that followed; his own accounts differ.
• How "Presbyterian" Knox himself was, given that his church kept superintendents.
• The exact words spoken at Knox's grave.
• Whether the prisoner who threw the image of the Virgin into the river was Knox himself, as some readers assume.

Conclusion

Knox was a man of courage. He wept when he was called to preach, endured the galleys, and spoke to a queen as plainly as to a ploughman. He cared about schools for the poor and about a clergy that would actually preach. Those are not small things, and Orthodox Christians can honour them.

Yet the Scotland he helped make stripped its churches of the icons of Christ and His Mother, set aside the bishops through whom the apostles' ministry had come down, and taught its people to look for the Church in a confession rather than in the apostolic communion. The Orthodox Church has kept what Knox discarded: the bishop at the altar with his presbyters and deacons, as St Ignatius described him, the Body and Blood of Christ, and the faith of the councils. It invites the heirs of Knox, who love the Word as he did, to find that Word at home in the Church that first received it.

Notes

1. Andrew Lang, John Knox and the Reformation (London: Longmans, 1905), ch. 1, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14016; Gervase N. Charmley, review of Jane Dawson, John Knox (Yale University Press, 2015), Banner of Truth, https://banneroftruth.org/uk/?p=20441.
2. Lang, John Knox and the Reformation, ch. 1 (see note 1).
3. John Knox, The History of the Reformation of Religion in Scotland, ed. Cuthbert Lennox (London, 1905), Book I, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48250. On the Scottish year then beginning on 25 March, see Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 1, §90 (note 30).
4. John Knox, History of the Reformation, Book I, in The Works of John Knox, ed. David Laing, vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1846), Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21938.
5. Laing, "Chronological Notices," Works of John Knox, vol. 1 (see note 4), which dates the burning 1 March 1545-6, that is, 1546 by modern reckoning.
6. Knox, History, ed. Lennox, Book I (see note 3).
7. Knox, History, Book I, in Laing, Works, vol. 1 (see note 4).
8. Lang, John Knox and the Reformation, ch. 2 (see note 1), quoting Thomas M'Crie.
9. Knox, History, ed. Lennox, Book I (see note 3).
10. Laing, "Chronological Notices" (see note 5).
11. Knox, History, ed. Lennox, Book I (see note 3).
12. Laing, "Chronological Notices" (see note 5).
13. Laing, "Chronological Notices" (see note 5).
14. John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), ed. Edward Arber (London, 1878), Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9660.
15. Introduction to Arber's edition of The First Blast (see note 14).
16. Orthodox Church in America, "The End of Iconoclasm," https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/church-history/ninth-century/the-end-of-iconoclasm; OCA, life of St Olga (July 11), https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2025/07/11/102003-equal-to-the-apostles-blessed-great-princess-olga-in-holy-baptis.
17. Laing, "Chronological Notices" (see note 5).
18. Knox, History, ed. Lennox, Book II (see note 3).
19. Lang, John Knox and the Reformation, ch. 10 (see note 1).
20. Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 1, §89 "The Scotch Confession of Faith. A.D. 1560," Christian Classics Ethereal Library, https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/creeds1/creeds1.ix.vii.iii.html.
21. Scots Confession (1560), art. 21, in Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3, https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/creeds3/creeds3.iv.ix.html.
22. Scots Confession, art. 18 (see note 21).
23. The First Book of Discipline (1560), heads IV, VI and VII, in Knox, History, ed. Lennox (see note 3).
24. Knox, History, ed. Lennox, Book III (see note 3).
25. Knox, History, ed. Lennox, Book IV (see note 3).
26. Knox, History, ed. Lennox, Book IV (see note 3).
27. Laing, "Chronological Notices" (see note 5).
28. Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 1, §88 "John Knox," https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/creeds1/creeds1.ix.vii.ii.html; Laing, "Chronological Notices" (see note 5).
29. "Melville, Andrew," New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, vol. 7 (1910), Christian Classics Ethereal Library, https://www.ccel.org/s/schaff/encyc07/htm/ii.ix.xcii.htm.
30. Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 1, §90 "The Scotch Covenants and the Scotch Kirk," https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/creeds1/creeds1.ix.vii.iv.html.
31. Acts 20:17, 28; Titus 1:5, 7; 1 Timothy 5:22 (NKJV).
32. Jerome, Letter 146 (to Evangelus), trans. W. H. Fremantle, G. Lewis and W. G. Martley, NPNF2 6, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3001146.htm.
33. Clement of Rome, First Epistle to the Corinthians 42, 44, trans. John Keith, ANF 9, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1010.htm; on the date (estimated range 80-140), see Peter Kirby, Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/1clement.html.
34. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Trallians 3 and To the Smyrnaeans 8, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, ANF 1, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0106.htm and https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0109.htm; compare To the Magnesians 6, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0105.htm.
35. Irenaeus, Against Heresies III.3, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, ANF 1, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103303.htm.
36. Jerome, Letter 146 (see note 32).
37. Synod of Jerusalem (1672), Confession of Dositheus, Decree 10, trans. J. N. W. B. Robertson (1899), http://www.crivoice.org/creeddositheus.html.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Knox, John. The History of the Reformation of Religion in Scotland. Ed. Cuthbert Lennox. London: Andrew Melrose, 1905.
• Knox, John. The Works of John Knox. Ed. David Laing. Vol. 1. Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1846.
• Knox, John. The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Ed. Edward Arber. London, 1878.
• The Scots Confession (1560), in Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3. New York: Harper, 1877.
• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1: Ignatius of Antioch, Epistles; Irenaeus, Against Heresies. Vol. 9: Clement of Rome, First Epistle to the Corinthians, trans. John Keith.
• Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 6: Jerome, Letters, trans. W. H. Fremantle, G. Lewis and W. G. Martley.
• Robertson, J. N. W. B., trans. The Acts and Decrees of the Synod of Jerusalem, 1672. London, 1899.
• Orthodox Church in America. "The End of Iconoclasm" and the life of St Olga (July 11). oca.org.

Other scholarship

• Schaff, Philip. The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 1. New York: Harper, 1877.
• Lang, Andrew. John Knox and the Reformation. London: Longmans, Green, 1905.
• "Melville, Andrew." The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, vol. 7. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1910.
• Kirby, Peter. Early Christian Writings (online reference), entry on 1 Clement.
• Charmley, Gervase N. Review of Jane Dawson, John Knox (Yale University Press, 2015). Banner of Truth.