Sixteenth-century biblical translation was a site of extensive and closely reasoned argument about vernacular language and literature. These arguments emerged out of Reformation debates about biblical authority and canon. In general, Roman Catholics interpreted the Bible within a broader canon of received doctrine, while Reformers described scriptural language as intrinsically meaningful, independent of interpretive traditions. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Thomas More and William Tyndale translate these opposite notions of biblical authority into a debate about English semantics: More argues that biblical English derives meaning from the usage current in the English Church; Tyndale counters that biblical English should be dissociated from the senses given it in customary usage and assigned new meanings derived from etymology. Another genre of Reformation exegesis, biblical paraphrase, further complicates the question of equivalence: paraphrase radically revises the original's verbal form, in order to recover aspects of the original obscured by historical and cultural distance. Miles Coverdale's first English Psalter, translated from the Latin of Jan Campensis, focuses the historical and cultural recovery of paraphrase on connotations thought to be implicit in the original text but effaced by changes in linguistic usage. On the model of the French Psalter of Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze, Philip Sidney, in a consummate demonstration of the resources available to English lyric, turned the restorative operation of paraphrase on the lost metrical features of the Psalms. The publication of a Roman Catholic version of the New Testament in 1582 provoked a round of Elizabethan polemics that rehearse and refine the issues of biblical semantics debated between More and Tyndale. These Elizabethan debates illuminate a contemporary literary genre perennially concerned with the pressures of precedent, the Elizabethan sonnet sequence. The Sonnets of William Shakespeare, for example, portray the involvement of poetic language in time and tradition as an obstruction to faithful representation, a dynamic that recalls Protestant objections to the mediation of Scripture through the historical reception of the Roman Church. Shakespeare's Sonnets respond to this obstruction with a notion of bare, transparent equivalence that echoes Protestant advocacy of sola scriptura, the unmediated text of Scripture.