I would have been burnt at the stake!
Let me explain...
In my little study at home, my top bookshelf is full of Bibles... literally. We have so many Bibles that we can't fit them all on one shelf. My cup runneth over! Over the years, my wife and I have collected all kinds of Bibles: King James, Revised Standard, New English, Children's... You name it, we probably have it! Not that we're rich, of course. Most of them we've picked up for next to nothing at the Goodwill or the "Sally Anne" stores.
But if we were living in England, in the so-called "good old days" of the sixteenth century, and if a church priest was to visit our home and was to see these English language Bibles, he would angrily declare us to be heretics, he would send for whatever kind of police officers they had in those days, and I would have been put on trial, convicted, and executed by being burnt at the stake.
Yes. I would have been burnt at the stake as a heretic for the "crime" of owning an English language Bible!
In this article I would like to show you what a true blessing it really is for us to have the Bible freely available in our own languages, and to urge you not take this blessing for granted. I would like to do this by describing to you a period in history when the written Word of God certainly was not freely available to the common man.
God obviously did and does intend us to have free access to His Word, and in our own language.
In Acts 17:11, Luke says:
Now these Jews [at Berea] were more noble than those in Thessalonica, for they received the Word with all eagerness, examining the scriptures daily to see if these things were so.
The Berean Church members were commended for searching the scriptures daily in order to prove all things. They must have had free access to those scriptures, and the scriptures must have been in a language that the Bereans clearly understood.
Strong's Concordance lists the proper uses of God's Word in the Bible, and backs each use up with a supporting scripture. These uses include:
But how could we use the scriptures in these proper ways if we didn't have free access to them, and were not able to understand them? How we do take our Bibles for granted!
With scriptural authority, Strong also lists some positive attitudes Christians should have toward God's written Word. These positive attitudes include exhortations for us to:
Again, how would we be able to do any of these things if the only Bible we had was in the hands of our local minister, and that copy was in Hebrew, Chaldean, Greek, or (worse still) Latin?
I'm not saying that we don't need the guidance of God's ministry in our Bible study. Of course we do! Neither am I saying that any of our English versions are one hundred percent perfectly translated. As far as I know, not one of them is. Nor am I saying that we don't sometimes have to go back, as accurately as we can, to the original Hebrew, Chaldean and Greek in order to determine the original intent of both the writer and the Inspirer.
Some passages of the Bible had been translated from Latin into Anglo-Saxon or Old-English as early as the seventh century.
After the Norman conquest of England in 1066, most scriptural manuscripts were in French or Anglo-Norman, both of which were unintelligible to the majority of the people!
Three hundred years later, in the fourteenth century, the only complete Bibles in England were in Latin, and were for the exclusive use of the ordained (Roman Catholic) clergy who were trained in Latin.
The first, full English translation of the Bible was by John Wycliffe, and it was completed about 1385. Wycliffe was severely persecuted by the corrupt church of his day, whose false doctrines were being exposed by the written Word of God which was now understandable to the people. If it wasn't for the support of the English royalty, Wycliffe would no doubt have been tried by the powerful, ecclesiastical courts, and sent for execution.
All copies of Wycliffe's Bible were handwritten. It was the Germans, the pioneers in printing, who were the first to print a Bible in their own language. That was in the year 1450. Of course, they too raised the ire of the established church.
The first printed English scriptures did not appear until seventy-five years later in 1525, in the form of the New Testament which had been translated from the Greek to English by a man by the name of William Tyndale. Let us pause at this point to focus on this man:
From a very early age, Tyndale determined:
As mentioned earlier, the church at that time had the power to have a person executed for merely being in possession of a non-Latin Bible. Many ordinary, well-meaning people were burnt at the stake for the "crime" of searching for the truth of God.
It almost goes without saying that the English ecclesiastical authorities vigorously opposed Tyndale's Bible translations. Because of the constant persecution from the Roman church in England, Tyndale arranged to have his printing done in Germany. He began printing his English New Testament in the German city of Cologne in 1525, and completed it at another German city called Worms.
Eighteen thousand copies of Tyndale's New Testament were printed and smuggled into England, concealed in flour barrels and the like. Of these eighteen thousand, only two complete volumes and a few fragments remain today. Some of Tyndale's brave and committed colleagues who were caught aiding him in the import and distribution of these English New Testaments were put to the flame.
From his exile in Germany and Belgium, Tyndale translated and printed the Pentateuch in 1530, and other books of the Old Testament later. Along with Wycliffe's work, Tyndale's translations formed the basis of the 1611 Authorized (or King James) Version of the Bible.
He was betrayed and arrested in Antwerp (now Belgium) in mid-1535. Later that year, while Tyndale was languishing in prison, the first complete printed English language Bible containing both Old and New Testaments was published by one Miles Coverdale. After spending sixteen months in prison under dreadful conditions, the courageous William Tyndale was tried and, on October 6th 1536, he was publicly strangled and burnt at the stake!
Poor Coverdale was to spend the rest of his life running backwards and forwards between England and the exile and comparative safety of continental Europe, depending on whether there was a Protestant or Catholic monarch sitting on the English throne.
The Bible was first divided into chapter and verse in 1560 by some English Protestants who had been exiled to Switzerland. Coverdale is thought to have been among them. This translation was called the "Geneva Bible" and was popular among the Puritans.
In 1582, less than fifty years after they had burnt Tyndale at the stake for publishing and circulating a non-Latin Bible, the Roman Catholic Church issued their own, official English language version (called the "Douay Version") of the New Testament. Their Old Testament followed in 1610.
And, when the blood of your martyr Stephen was shed, I myself was standing by and approving, and I watched over the clothes of those who killed him. (Acts 22:20)
Why was Stephen Martyred?
Stephen was martyred for the same reason as Jesus was murdered... for boldly preaching true Christianity, for clarifying God's Word, wishes and priorities for the common man, and for attempting to remove the veils of secrecy and mystery which had been artificially set up for the benefit of the powers that were then extant... the Jewish priesthood of the first century.
Who had Stephen killed?
He was killed by the corrupt Jewish priesthood who were more concerned about maintaining their influence, prominence, importance and power than in changing themselves to do what God wanted them to do. How similar to the persecution and execution of Tyndale and his colleagues by the English church of the sixteenth century.
Revelation 17:6 comes to mind:
And I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. And when I saw her, I marvelled with great amazement.
Also, Hebrews 11:35-38:
Women received their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and scourging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, ill-treated; of whom the world was not worthy, wandering over deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.
Perhaps the brave Bible translators of the Middle Ages were not baptized members of God's true church. That, of course, is for God Himself to judge. But they, like those listed in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, willingly gave up their comforts, their freedoms, their precious home country and, in some cases, their very lives for God's Word and Truth. They were not willing to sit by and allow the corrupt priesthood of their day to hold the veil of the Latin language over the eyes and the understanding of the common man, bending and perverting the Word of God to make it appear to say what it was in the priests' interests for it to say.
Like these early Christians listed in Hebrews chapter 11, Wycliffe, Tyndale, Coverdale, and their associates, supporters and counterparts stepped out in faith, and gave themselves as sacrifices so that the truth may be made freely available to the common man. Unfortunately, in this "enlightened" age, the average common man no longer has any use for the jewel that these martyrs gave to us. But we members of God's true church owe these fourteenth and sixteenth century heroes a debt of gratitude.
When we meet them in whichever resurrection they come up in, we should look forward to giving them a very sincere "Thank you!"
Return to the Church of the Great God - Canada home-page
This page updated 2004-05-14