William Tyndale (Reformation Day 2013)

"I defy the pope and all his laws; and, if God spares me, I will one day make the boy that drives the plow in England to know more of the Scriptures than the pope does!" So said translation pioneer William Tyndale.

Born near Dursley, Gloucestershire, UK, between 1484 and 1496, Tyndale developed a zeal to get the Bible into the hands of the common man—a passion for which he ultimately gave his life.

Educated at Oxford and Cambridge, Tyndale became fluent in at least seven languages. In 1522, the same year Luther translated the New Testament into German, Tyndale was an ordained Catholic priest serving John Walsh of Gloucestershire. It was during this time, when Tyndale was 28 years of age, that he began pouring over Erasmus’ Greek New Testament. The more he studied the more the doctrines of the Reformation became clear. And like a great fire kindled by a lighting strike, so Tyndale’s heart was set ablaze by the doctrines of grace:

Nearly 200 years earlier, starting in 1382, John Wycliff and his followers (known as Lollards) distributed hand-written English translations of Scripture. The Archbishop of Canterbury responded by having Wycliffe and his writings condemned.

But Rome was not finished. In 1401, Parliament passed a law making heresy a capital offence. Seven years later, the Archbishop of Canterbury made it a crime to “translate any text of the Scripture into English or any other tongue . . . and that no man can read any such book . . . in part or in whole." The sentence was burning. Across Europe, the flames were ignited and the Lollards were all but destroyed. Rome was determined to keep God’s Word out of the people’s hands.

Rome was not finished with Wycliffe either: 44 years after his death, the pope ordered Wycliffe’s bones exhumed, burned, and his ashes scattered.

Fearing for his life, Tyndale fled London for Brussels in 1524 where he continued his translation work for the next 12 years. Tyndale’s time in exile was dreadful, as he describes in a 1531 letter:

On the evening of May 21, 1535, Tyndale was betrayed to the authorities by a man he trusted, Henry Philips. For the next 18 months, Tyndale lived a prisoner in Vilvorde Castle, six miles outside of Brussles. The charge was heresy.

The verdict came in August, 1536. He was condemned as a heretic and defrocked as a priest. On or about October 6, 1536, Tyndale was tied to a stake, strangled by an executioner, and then his body burned. He was 42 years old. His last words were, “Lord! Open the King of England’s Eyes!”

Tyndale’s translations were the foundations for Miles Coverdale’s Great Bible (1539) and later for the Geneva Bible (1557). As a matter of fact, about 90% of the Geneva Bible’s New Testement was Tyndale’s work. In addition, the 54 scholars who produced the 1611 Authorized Version (King James) bible relied heavily upon Tyndale’s translations, although they did not give him credit.

Tyndale is also known as a pioneer in the biblical languages. He introduced several words into the English language, such as Jehovah, Passover, scapegoat, and atonement.

One more thing, on literacy rates in England in the 16th century:

“Before the PROTESTANT REFORMATION, education was very closely controlled by the Catholic Church, and was limited to elite groups–men in holy orders. Further, literacy in Latin rather than in vernacular languages was the goal of these elites. However, by the middle of the sixteenth century, while many schools and teachers still maintained links to organized religion, a number of new schools arose due to the efforts of private individuals, parishes, guilds, and the like. This secularization of education meant that literacy was less and less the preserve of elite social groups; the deliberate spread of (first Latin, and then vernacular) literacy throughout the social body played an important role in the maintenance of religious orthodoxy, both Catholic and Protestant, but it also came to be seen as a political tool for state building, for the maintenance of morality, and for equipping the population with valuable skills. DESIDERIUS ERASMUS (c. 1469–1536) and Martin Luther (1483–1546) were especially important in drawing attention to such political and governmental possibilities. James Bowen, in A History of Western Education, estimates early sixteenth-century literacy rates in England to have been less than 1 percent; yet by the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) he suggests it was getting close to 50 percent. The Reformation, then, was a major spur to education and to literacy”

http://www.faqs.org/childhood/Ke-Me/Literacy.html

Another reason to thank the Reformers.

“So are you going to conk out from the logical inconsistency of your posts and therefore leave us alone?”

I have never been logically inconsistent. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t have a Protestant/government school education so it is a completely foreign thing to me. I have seen it - after all I have read your posts - but I like simply getting things right repeatedly. Life is just simpler and easier that way. Maybe you should try that.

“Probably not. Would that you were one of those androids from that one episode of Star Trek, then you would not be able to trouble us further!”

So the truth troubles you? Well, no real surprise there.

“as Bishop John Hooper recorded in 1551”

I recently encountered a young Protestant couple. They’re really nice young people. He is interested in joining the Catholic Church. She’s more hesitant. He is Lutheran. She is Baptist. He knew something about the Bible. She really didn’t. He talked about how he is trying to keep up with all of the “new” things he is learning: terms, Church teachings, learning about the Bible in a way he never had before, etc. There are plenty of ignorant Protestants STILL out there just like there are plenty of ignorant Catholics. And? Now, I say all of that before I say this: in 1551 - that’s almost 20 years after Henry seized control of the Catholic Church in England - there were few educated Catholic priests left in England because most of them were murdered or forced to flee by then. St. John Fisher - considered one of the greatest scholars of his day as well as a model bishop - was martyred in the 1530s.

By the way, three of the priests Hooper interviewed said it was the King of England who wrote the Lord’s Prayer. They had assimilated the import of the Protestant royal supremacy over the Church in England even as they did not learn the faith. These men were products of their Protestant times as much as anything else. See Powell’s 1971 article called “The Beginnings of Protestantism in Gloucester”. Do I even need to bring up how Rosemary O’Day has put together a good case about how the Protestant clergy from that point on took on the shape of a separate caste from the people, in other words, a “profession”? What I always found so ironic about that is how much Protestants rail against a hierarchical separation between clergy and laity among Catholics and yet completely ignore their own.

“You can thank the Reformation for that, since, otherwise, the Church would have the authority to take those scriptures away, if they deemed you a danger to yourself or others, and then burn them in a bonfire like in the good old days.”

Actually the Church still has that authority - just as the Apostles did - and I do not begrudge it in the least. What gets me is that no Christian - if he is in fact a Christian - would doubt the Apostles’ right to order a Christian to give up a heretical translation or not be in good standing in the Church. Yet, for some reason, a reason that cannot be logical, Protestants deny that authority to the later Church.

“I’m asking you to give evidence for your assertion, about Papist Bibles being freely available in England after 1408.”

First, I suggest you start calling them Catholic Bibles - since that’s what they were. Also, they must have been rather freely available or else they would not have been commented on.

“How many there were,”

Don’t know. Many were destroyed by Protestants, burned in monasteries, chapels, Catholic homes, lost in priest holes, etc. Some simply fell apart from use and old age.

“who had them,”

I don’t know who. I just know they existed because that’s what the historical record tells us. Who knows how much information has been destroyed by the depredations of Protestantism over the last 500 years? Entire libraries were raided, pillaged, sold off or destroyed by the English Protestants. Protestants were such prodigious destroyers and liars that we could end up with a situation like Andrew Gow describes with German Bibles:

“The wide distribution and availability of German and other vernacular Bible translations in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with 22 printed full Bible translations into German/Low German/Netherlandish appearing before Luther’s famous Bible translation, has been known to scholars since at least the early eighteenth century, when various works on German Bibles before the Reformation began to appear. However, the existence of such translations did not guarantee that scholars, especially church historians and historians of the Reformation took such Bible translations seriously. Luther himself had claimed (polemically) that the Bible had been entirely unknown and unavailable when he was a young man. The rather dispassionate scholarship of the eighteenth century, which included important works on pre-Reformation German Bibles by orthodox Lutheran divines, gave way in the second half of the nineteenth century to a rather bitter polemical discourse in the context of the Kulturkampf in Germany. Luther the linguistic genius and Luther the theological hero were the protagonists on one side; the late medieval Bible, on which Luther drew heavily for his own translation, was on the other.”

Basically Luther and his followers created a myth about there being no Bibles when in fact they existed and were known to exist. Protestants today, poorly educated and believing the myths of their lying forefathers, actually believe there were no Bibles in the vernacular before Luther. Incredible.

As Gow goes on to point out:

“One of the most persistent inaccuracies regarding the European Middle Ages—both among the general public and even among scholars—is the notion that the Roman church forbade or banned the reading of the Bible in the vernacular.2 A corollary of this popular conception is the idea that there were no vernacular Bible translations before Luther’s 1522 ‘September Testament’. Greatsite.com, which sells individual leaves from a 1523 Luther Pentateuch, advertised (at least until recently) “A leaf from the earliest printing of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) in the German language. These leaves are over 480 years old. They come with beautiful Certificates of Authenticity. If you are looking for the oldest printed scripture in any language other than Latin or Greek … this is it. It doesn’t get any older than this. A great gift for friends of German or Lutheran heritage, or anyone who appreciates Christian history.”3

“This innocent mistake (“the earliest printing of the Pentateuch […] in the German language”; “the oldest printed scripture in any language other than Latin or Greek”; “It doesn’t get any older than this”) is still widespread among the general public.” http://www.jhsonline.org/cocoon/JHS/a115.html

Yep. It sure is.

“who authorized them, etc.”

Before 1408 no one needed to. After 1408, the ordinary would do so. And if he believed the people involved to be faithful Catholics, permission was routinely granted.

“That would explain their interest in joining Catholicism.”

Yes - in that they are hoping to be relieved of their profound Protestant ignorance. The young wife, for instance, said she was learning more about the Bible in her Catholic Bible class than she ever did as a Protestant. That’s a good thing, of course.

“Though, how this excuses the ignorance of your Priests and Bishops in those days even of the very basics, I know not.”

It doesn’t. I just think that ignorance then is simply more forgivable than ignorance now in an age of mass literacy, free libraries, and the internet - and I believe that in regard to both Catholics and Protestants. I have encountered plenty of ignorant Catholics these days. What I have noticed about those ignorant Catholics though is that they don’t spend their time on the internet pretending to know about the faith. That seems to be an exclusively Protestant anti-Catholic activity in that regard.

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