Five hundred years ago, in February 1526, a scurrilous and revolutionary book began to appear on the streets of England. Immediately, the religious and secular authorities, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cuthbert Tunstall, and Henry VIII himself, set about suppressing it. Copies were seized and publicly burned at St. Paul’s Cross in London, although enough survived to spread its dangerous message. The book was the New Testament, newly-translated into English for the first time from the original Greek by a scholar and clergyman named William Tyndale.
Although attempts to produce an English New Testament had been made before, they had been English translations of Latin translations of the Greek original. Using the earliest available manuscripts, the Dutch scholar Erasmus had produced a definitive edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516 and it was this that Tyndale had used extensively in his work. For Christians in the West at that time, all under the authority of Rome as they were, the Bible was then, in effect, a closed book – only readable and comprehensible to those proficient in Latin, which wasn’t very many outside the priesthood and the universities.
Tyndale held that the Bible should be available to everyone, however humble, who could read, or at least understand, English. He believed it was the Word of God, and so should be available to everyone in his or her own tongue. And, furthermore, that it should be in the plain and accessible everyday English of the day. Tyndale was already a fugitive from the authorities – living and working precariously on the Continent – but now he was even more of a marked man. The powerful figure of Thomas More – a zealous persecutor and torturer of those he deemed ‘heretics’ – was prominent among Tyndale’s enemies. A network of government agents and informers worked to capture Tyndale and eventually, in 1535, he was arrested in Antwerp. He was imprisoned in Vilvorde, near Brussels, in conditions he described in a letter. He wrote that he “suffered greatly from a cold in the head” and was “afflicted by perpetual catarrh” which was “much increased in this cell.” His clothes were “worn out” and, denied a lamp in the evening, he found it “indeed wearisome sitting alone in the dark.” What he requested, though, was “my Hebrew Bible, Hebrew Grammar and Hebrew Dictionary, that I may pass the time in that study.”
After sixteen months of this, despite the efforts of sympathetic supporters like Thomas Cromwell, Tyndale’s story came to its tragic end. Condemned as a heretic in August 1536, he was led to a place of execution two months later and there burned at the stake.
That he was a martyr for his Protestant faith there can be no doubt. And believing as he did that the Bible, as the Word of God, should be freely and comprehensively available to everyone – which his enemies denied – he was also a martyr for that Word and for the right to read and understand it for oneself. This is why we, as Unitarians, as Free Christians, as Liberal Religionists should remember and honour him as the anniversary of his death, on 6th October 1536, approaches.
We may not believe as Tyndale believed, but he was one of our forbears nonetheless. It was their reading of the New Testament in English that led them to question established doctrines such as the Trinity and Original Sin. Tyndale’s belief that everyone should be free to read the Bible and to understand it for themselves lies directly behind our own affirmation that everyone should be free to seek truth and meaning for themselves according to conscience. And although we may have broadened our understanding since Tyndale’s great work, which also included much of the Old Testament –translated from the Hebrew –as well as the New, that work holds good. It is largely thanks to his initiative that we can still seek out the spiritual riches of the Bible.
All subsequent English translations, notably the ‘Authorized Version’ of 1611, directly and indirectly – owe him an incalculable debt, as does our language and our culture as a civilization. This is something we should neither forget nor neglect, just as we should neither forget nor neglect the scurrilous and revolutionary book which he made available to our forbears.
Cliff Reed (CMR170826)
Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House 