Posted on 10/13/2014 5:35:08 PM PDT by RaceBannon
The Tyndale New Testament of 1525 was the first English translation based on the Greek and the first English Bible to be printed. (The Wycliffe Bible was based on Latin and published only in hand-written manuscripts.) The King James Bible is an edition of Tyndale’s masterly translation.
William Tyndale is therefore the most important one name in the history of the English Bible and one of most important names in history of the English people.
TYNDALE’S TIMES
Tyndale was born to a time of great change and turmoil. It was a time of international travel and discovery. When he was eight years old, Columbus discovered America. When Tyndale was fourteen, Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to India, and the great era of world exploration had begun.
It was also a time of great persecution. Just three years before Tyndale was born, the Spanish Inquisition was established, and by the time Tyndale was fifteen years old, 8,800 had been burned to death and 90,000 imprisoned under the pope’s Inquisitor General in Spain, Thomas de Torquemada. As Tyndale grew to manhood, terrible persecutions were being poured out upon the Christians in Bohemia and Moravia and against the Waldensians in Italy and France. For example, when Tyndale was four, an army of 18,000 Catholics made war against the Waldensian Christians of Piedmont in Northern Italy, destroying entire towns and villages.
It was also a time for printing. In 1453, just 41 years before Tyndale was born, Constantinople was overrun by the Muslims and the Greek scholars had fled to Western Europe with their valuable manuscripts, including the Byzantine Greek New Testament, which had been preserved for 1,000 years through the Dark Ages.
The first book on movable type, a Latin Bible, had been printed in 1456, less than 40 years before Tyndale’s birth. Only eight years before Tyndale’s birth, a printing press had been set up in England by William Caxton, and by the time he was born printing presses had been set up in more than 120 cities of Europe.
Bibles in the common languages had begun to be printed in 1488 with the publication of the Bohemian Bible, just a few years before Tyndale was born.
Thank God for so many men, some willing to pay the ultimate price, to get God’s Word into the hands of the people.
In the Middle Ages, nominally Christian kings in poorly evangelized lands claimed that the Christian faith entitled them to do horrible, wicked things, such as torture their political opponents while accusing them as heresy. Correctly perceiving that this discredited Christianity and slandered Christ, the Catholic Church created the separation of Church and State by demanding that the State had no right to try and punish heresy.
Instead, the Church itself would conduct any trial of heresy through the establishment of the papal inquisition. As a revolution in jurisprudence, Torture was prohibited by the Papal Inquisition (defined as any form of interrogation that causes permanent injury or disfigurement, or inflicts pain for greater than 15 minutes, or inflicts pain more than once)
The Spanish reconquistas (who liberated Spain from the Muslims), however, complained that the Islamic practice of subersion through taqiyya made separation of Church and State impossible. THerefore, the Church granted a unique privilege to Spain to allow the blending of civil and ecclesiastical (church) trials. This was allowed only in this one instance, because the Church recognized the inherently corrupting effect.
Therefore, I join the Catholic Church in condemning the excesses of Torquemada and his inquisitors. I also condemn the vigilantes who led the King of Spain to drive the Jews from Spain in an unjust attempt to maintain civil order, but I emphasize that these vigilantes operated outside the law as imposed by the Church, and were condemned even in their day by every ecclesiastical authority. But I found it irrelevant to reaffirm the condemnations of the Catholic Church, since those people are no longer alive. I find it only relevant to defend the Catholic Church against the absurd slanders it so frequently faces, including the legitimate purpose of the Inquisition, because, unlike the sinners of the 15th and 16th centuries, these slanderers, liars and frauds are still all around us.
Amazing post that goes to great lengths to make the Inquisition look better by pointing out the faults of a different group.
You can’t seem to get to the foot of the Cross on this - where every Christian should be.
... but is between you and Him - not me. I don’t need to hear rationalizations, diversions, justifications.
I wish you well.
You mean the Catholics like Gutenberg, who made the inexpensive distribution of the bible possible? Or Johanned Mentelin, who published the bible in German just a few short years later? His bible was published throughout Germany for nearly a century, until Luther had it prohibited. Or the translators of the Douay-Rheims Catholic English bible, published 25 years before the King James bible? You know, the ones who hid in France because the Protestants would have them killed for publishing a bible OTHER than the Bishops’ bible?
God’a mercy to all who seek him.
>> Amazing post that goes to great lengths to make the Inquisition look better by pointing out the faults of a different group. You can’t seem to get to the foot of the Cross on this - where every Christian should be.... but is between you and Him - not me. I don’t need to hear rationalizations, diversions, justifications. <<
So, of course, you’ll also condemn the original post that claimed to be a history of the English bible, and was in fact nothing but a sleazy, deceitful, slanderous attack on the Catholic Church. Is that crickets I hear? You were saying something about rationalizations, diversions and justifications? Your false piety is duly noted.
Wow, I thought Catholics posted long articles? Lol
I’ll not get into sectarian arguments, but your last sentence is, to put in Catholic parlance, “reductio ad absurdum”.
It’s amazing that Shakespeare could compose a sonnet!
I’ll retreat back to neutral territory, now. Y’all enjoy your vitriolic counseling.
No it wasn't.
Please, I am for good scholarship. It serves everyone well.
The cross waits...
I just finished watching “The Tudors” series.
I had no idea at how bloody both sides of the Catholic vs Protestant battle was in England.
No wonder the tension still exists in the UK.
King Henry VIII tried to destroy the Catholic Church in England by stealing Church riches and putting them in his pocket.
His Daughter, Mary sent 250 innocent Protestants to be burned alive to try and reestablish the Catholic Church in England.
Only a fool refuses to look at the past with an open mind.
bookmark
I think we know them by their deeds.
Your point goes to the core of what we are supposed to be. The Apostles did not teach that we are supposed to destroy those who don't know Jesus Christ as their LORD and Savior. We are supposed to be a light that shines because of the Holy Spirit in us. We are supposed to share The Gospel.
Don't get me wrong; As a source of prayers and inspiration, the Middle English bible could be wonderful. AS I already noted, English-language Breviaries abounded A breviary contained all the mass readings, which included just about every unique line in the New Testament, plus all the Old Testament prayers, hymns and psalms. Medieval life was awash in the bible. Even all those stained glass windows which the English iconoclasts destroyed were covered in symbolic references to remind a reader of every verse of the bible scene they depicted (or of the lives of the saints)
But the Protestant allegation is that the Catholics attempted to keep the population from knowing the true wording of scripture, so that they could refute allegedly false doctrine from being proclaimed. Thus, an English bible would have to have grammar which was unambiguous, clear, and precise enough to stand independently of any historical or ecclesiastical scholarship. And this simply doesn't:
Sufir the lytle childes to cum to me.
That's not simply understand because it's practically foreign langauge; it's unclear whether the children coming to Jesus is a good, or something which should be simply put up with, since "sufir," as use here, means "to put up with especially as inevitable or unavoidable; to allow especially by reason of indifference." The Greek word means, "to send forth." That's a pretty horrible translation: in English, it suggests being resigned to something unstoppable, while in Greek it suggests to actively promote something. Or consider:
And delyver them beastes, that they maye sett Paul on, and brynge hym safe unto Felix the hye debyte
That the beasts may set Paul on? Fortunately, with the publication of the bible in English, a standardized grammar began to come forth. The Douay-Rheims was also very influential, inasmuch as it relied on Latin for the most difficult concepts, it brought those concepts into the English usage. Shakespeare's singular popularity also made his works a standard of grammar, so that by the 1700s, the English language was quite clear.
And the English was translated from the Latin Vulgate with some parts removed and some words added.....big no, nos when it coms to the Bible.
For bi grace ye ben sauyd bi feith, and this not of you; for it is the yifte of God, not of werkis, that no man haue glorie, for we ben the makyng of hym, maad of nouyt in Crist Jhesu, in good werkis, whiche God hath ordeyned, that we go in tho werkis.
**The cross waits...**
But death doesn’t.
Bump
I said I didn’t want to argue. I try to stay out of the religious debates—politics is enough heat for me. ;)
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