Meaning of the underlined sentence

The passage below is from A History of the Index by Dennis Duncan

In March 1543, Henry VIII’s religious authorities raided the home of John Marbeck, a chorister at St George’s Chapel in Windsor. Marbeck was accused of having copied out a religious tract by the French theologian John Calvin. ... He was taken to Marshalsea prison. It was likely that he would be executed.

In Marshalsea, Marbeck came under interrogation. ...

While ardently religious and industriously literate, Marbeck was also an autodidact. He had not been schooled deeply in Latin, but had learned just enough to navigate a Latin concordance, plundering it for its locators – the instances of each word – then looking these up in an English Bible and thereby building his English concordance. To Marbeck’s interrogators it seemed unthinkable that he could be working between two languages without being fluent in both. Surely a theological project like this could not be undertaken by a single amateur, devoted but untutored. Surely Marbeck was merely the copyist, taking direction from others, an underling in a broader faction. Surely there must be some coded intent in the concordance, some heretical selection or retranslation of its terms, rather than the guileless, procedural conversion Marbeck claimed.

An account of the inquisition, probably taken first hand from Marbeck, appears in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1570). The accuser here is Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester:

What helpers hadest thou in settyng forth thy boke?

Forsoth my lord, quoth he, none.

...

The questioning continues in this vein, with others joining in the attack:

Then said the Bishop of Salisbury, whose help hadst thou in setting forth this booke?

Truly my Lord, quoth he, no helpe at all.

How couldest thou, quoth the bishop, inuent such a booke, or know what a Concordance ment, without an instructer.

Amidst the disbelief there is also a curious type of admiration. When the Bishop of Salisbury produces some sheets from the suspect concordance, one of the other inquisitors examines them and remarks, ‘This man has been better occupied than a great many of our priests.’

I have a question about the last sentence.

This man has been better occupied than a great many of our priests.

For my explanation I adapted this sentence a bit as follows:

This man has been better occupied than a great many of our priests have been.

(Is it OK?)

Then the inquisitor’s comment means that ‘this man’ is more industrious than most of our priests in poring over the Scriptures. (Am I right?)

Thanks in advance.