July 2015
If your
business is illegal and the authorities are breathing down your neck then you
could move abroad, continue to produce what you produce and have it smuggled
back into England. That’s exactly what
William Tyndale did in 1524 when his chosen trade was getting him into hot
water; he wanted to print English Bibles.
Amazingly, apart from a few English Bibles read secretly for fear of
execution, the only Bibles in England at the time were in Latin, which hardly
anyone understood. The pre-Reformation
church and Henry VIII did not want people to know what this dangerous book
actually said – they might realise that the church had been teaching nonsense, and that the king himself
had things to answer for.
So Tyndale fled
England having declared to a hostile clergyman, “If God spare my life, ere many
years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the
Scriptures than thou dost.” Living as a
hunted exile he translated the New Testament from the original Greek texts into
English, had them printed in Antwerp and smuggled back into England where they
were eagerly bought and read. Ordinary people
would pay as much as a load of hay just to get a few pages, and would sit up
all night hearing the Scriptures read.
The authorities did all they could to seize and burn those books.
Tyndale
went on to translate part of the Old Testament too but in 1535 an Englishman
secretly working for the King betrayed Tyndale, he was imprisoned near Brussels
for 18 months and then convicted of heresy.
Tied to a stake, but before he was strangled and his body burnt, he
called out, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” Two years later Henry VIII ordered that an
English Bible be placed in every church in England. These Bibles were revised versions of the
texts that Tyndale had created.
500 years
on, what is left of the hunger for God’s Word that was so characteristic of
England in Tyndale’s day, and how many of us would risk our lives to defy Bible
‘gagging orders’ or to handle smuggled Bibles?
“Lord, open England’s eyes again!”
Sincerely
Graham
Burrows