Lesson 05 The Bible Is God’s Message to Us

[Click for Transcript]|[They Valued the Bible. William Tyndale
[In the dark a flaming torch burns, it sets a large wood pile ablaze. The wood pile burns furiously, bright orange flames and embers soar into the night sky. The narrator, in a dress shirt and dark sports jacket saunters in front of the roaring inferno]
Presenter: In the autumn of 1536, William Tyndale was led from his prison cell, in the castle of Vilvoorde, to the site of his impending execution. There a post had been prepared for him. Tyndale was chained to the post, strangled to death, and then his body burned before the onlooking crowd. His crime? Tyndale struggled to reconcile the teachings of the church with his own studies of the Bible. William Tyndale died with his faith intact that the Bible is the Word of God.
[Text: England. Dr Peter J. Williams, Director of Tyndale House, Centre for Biblical Research]
Peter: William Tyndale was the first person to seek to translate the Bible from the original languages into English.
[Prof. Guido Latré. Catholic University of Louvain]]
Guido: Tyndale was born in the late 15th century. He was born in the area of Gloucestershire but had a chance to go to Oxford and became a priest.
Peter: In the 15th century, there was a lot of resistance, the idea that the Word of God could just simply be accessible by the general people.
[Dr. Karen Limper-Herz. Lead Curator, 16th Century Printed Books. British Library]
Karen: People knew the Latin Bible from church, which was interpreted by the priest for them. They never had direct access to the Bible themselves.
Guido: Tyndale was not allowed to do this translation in England. He went to the Bishop of London asking for his permission to translate the New Testament from the Greek, the original text, into English but was not given that permission.
[The entrance to the British Library, London, England]
Presenter: Such was the opposition to Bible translation that Tyndale later wrote that there was no place to do it in all England. And so, with the help of merchants sympathetic to his cause, Tyndale fled to Germany where he could more easily work on his English translation of the New Testament. By 1525, his translation was complete and ready to be printed. The British Library in London holds the answer to what happened next. Dr. Karen Limper-Herz, a lead curator at the library, is going to help us find out.
Karen: So, we are looking at a unique copy of the first edition of Tyndale’s New Testament, printed in Cologne in 1525. The Cologne Fragment is the only known copy of what exists of Tyndale’s first edition of the New Testament. The fact that it is a fragment shows that it was a dangerous thing to do. The printer had too much to drink and mentioned that he was printing this pro-Lutheran English New Testament for somebody called William Tyndale. The authorities found out about it, and the print shop was raided. Tyndale and his partners ran, and this is all that survives today, and they went down the Rhine a bit further to Worms. So, the fact that they didn’t get much further than part way through Matthew is quite indicative of how dangerous it was.
Presenter: The first complete copies of Tyndale’s translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures were finally printed in the city of Worms in Germany in 1526. Around 3,000 or more of these books were produced.
[Antwerp, Belgium. A shipping port with massive cranes]
After leaving Germany, Tyndale moved to Antwerp. This bustling city was ideal for Tyndale. It had a thriving printing industry, and its busy port made it easy for his books to reach readers in England. Professor Guido Latré has kindly offered to show me around the very streets that Tyndale would have walked himself some 500 years ago.
Guido: What he saw around him here were ordinary people having access to the Bible in Dutch. He wanted the same for his own folk in England. If you wanted to smuggle Bibles on a large scale into England, this was Northern Europe’s biggest seaport. You can’t easily smuggle a big volume and a big format. So tiny loose leaves that were taken to places like this, these underground cellars, the warehouses, and between the leaves of larger books that were not forbidden, the tiny leaves of Tyndale’s translation would have been hidden. In London, someone would have recognized: ‘Aha! These are the stacks that are marked. ‘I must have a look at these and find the loose leaves of Tyndale’s Bible.’ There were about 30,000 copies of Tyndale’s Bible available by the end of his life. This was a brave man and a big man in terms of courage and in terms of investment of time. And the risks he took are not to be underestimated.
(Text: Vilvoorde, Belgium)
[A sketch of William Tyndale]
Presenter: William Tyndale was imprisoned here in Vilvoorde, just north of Brussels. As he languished in prison for over a year, he no doubt contemplated the cruel death that inevitably awaited him. Tyndale is often renowned for his influence on the English language, but his work was more than that of just scholarly ambition. Tyndale loved the Bible. Maybe it can be said of him that he shared the feelings of the psalmist who spoke of God’s Word and said: How I do love your law!
[A carved portrait of Tyndale affixed to a tall stone monument]
Despite intense opposition, the Bible and the wisdom in it survives to this day, a faithful transmission of the original writers’ words. No wonder so many have placed such value on the Bible.
[Back to the blazing fire. The embers disappear into the night sky]
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