Special Edition
Special Issue September 2007

Contents

Editorial
Justice for England March
Wall to Wall Propaganda
The Census + Charities
Nationality & Ethnicity
The Legacy of William Tyndale
Ethnic English Trust & Wycliffe Trust
The Steadfast Trust

The Legacy of William Tyndale
Don Briggs

WELLINGTON once remarked that it was the Church of England which had made us into an honest nation. Whatever the truth of that assertion, English men and women had long been regarded as the salt of the earth, and it was the qualities of honest dealing, courage, loyalty and an ability to endure hardship that served Puritan men and women when they sailed to the shores of Virginia and played a part in founding the great United States of America. Those same characteristics were evident in many others who played a part in founding and building the British Empire, which flourished and influenced the development of a quarter of the world.

As it grew, that empire spread a system of justice based on English Common Law and its pragmatic application of principles of fairness and natural justice. It also planted the seeds of stable democracies, created wealth and prosperity, forced the abolition of slavery worldwide, and three times waged war to save European civilisation from destroying itself. The first of these wars was against Napoleon who said in 1805 he wanted to make Europe into one state and Paris the capital of the world.

But how was it that ordinary English people discovered a justification for a strong conscience and a belief in fair dealing? These qualities have been associated with the English from very early times but they were harnessed by and flourished under the growth of Protestant religious conviction. They also helped spawn a growth in England’s intellectual and artistic life, without which we would not have had William Shakespeare.

The cause of the growth of that Protestant conviction is what concerns us in this article. The roots of it lay in Germany. In 1517 at Wittenberg, after fifteen centuries under the tyranny of a now hopelessly corrupt Roman Catholic church, Augustinian monk Martin Luther nailed to a chapel door a protest at the cynical practice of selling pardons for sin in exchange for cash. Four years later he was excommunicated and outlawed. The protests spread rapidly beyond Germany’s borders, giving birth to the Protestant movement and the dawn of the Reformation. In England, attempts were also made to suppress Luther’s vigorous Protestant ideas and to confiscate his writings.

What triggered the transformation in the religious thinking of the English, and changed the course of world history, also had its roots in Germany. It was the printing at Worms in 1526 of an illegal first translation of the original Greek and Hebrew texts of the New Testament into simple, everyday English. The author of that Bible was William Tyndale, a priest from Gloucestershire, who when a bishop denied him permission to make the translation, had fled to the Continent to fulfil his life’s ambition. Ringing in the bishop’s ears as he left was Tyndale’s warning: “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost!”

Professor Daniell believes that Tyndale’s English Bible has been the most influential book in the history of the world, and there are many who think that no exaggeration. That New Testament is still in print today, nearly five centuries later, in all its original spelling.

Tyndale provided the primary means by which written English was spread around the world. With the people and their Bibles went the principles of democratic parliamentary rule. David Daniell argues that today Tyndale’s translation is as relevant and powerful a guide and example for humanity as it ever has been. Tyndale’s struggle, and his achievement in revealing in beautiful and powerful English the truths contained in the original Greek and Hebrew texts, is an astonishing and moving story. That work of translation was to cost Tyndale his life. He was led into a trap, imprisoned, strangled and burned at the stake at Vilvorde near Brussels, in 1536. In those days popes and bishops sometimes resorted to violence to suppress the truth. The original Scriptures revealed that there was nothing to exclude even the simplest layman from the upper reaches of spiritual life. All that was needed was a change of heart, and faith.
Tyndale’s translations undermined the enormous thousand-year-old secondary construction of the late medieval practices of the Church - priests, penances, confessions and charity. They exposed as pointless a religion which was based only on outward observances. For fifteen centuries, the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible had been the basis of Roman Catholic teaching. However, Greek text does not easily translate into Latin; it prefers verbs to nouns. Thus the Latin text contained many inaccuracies. For example, in the original texts there was no mention of what the Church was teaching about Purgatory, the need for celibacy, or confession to a priest. They were shown to be fictions.

In a lecture given in St Paul’s on 9 May 2003, David Daniell recalled that five centuries earlier the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, had burned piles of Tyndale’s New Testaments outside the cathedral, condemning them for containing 2,000 errors. Those ‘errors’ in fact were accurate transcriptions from the original texts, whereas the Church’s Vulgate version, as Daniell so eloquently put it, had been “bent out of shape” by being first translated into Latin. Another problem was that some of the clergy in England were abysmally ignorant, many had a less than adequate knowledge of Latin but relied entirely on Latin texts to know what the Scriptures contained. It perhaps explains why so many priests led corrupt and adulterous lives.

Daniell recounts that in 1551, thirty years after Tyndale fled from England to continue his work in Germany, a reforming Bishop Hooper found in Gloucestershire nine clergy who did not know how many Commandments there were. 33 did not know where in the Bible they appeared (St Matthew was a favourite guess), and 168 could not repeat them. 10 could not say the Creed; 216 were unable to prove it, being “satisfied that it was right because the King and Mother Church said so.” But most astonishing of his findings was that 39 priests did not know where the Lord’s Prayer appeared in the Bible, 34 did not know who was its author, and 10 were unable to recite it.
Among those who defended such ignorance, using lies, torture and murder to maintain it, was a man who became Speaker of the House of Commons, and is still revered today as a saint - Sir Thomas More, who “ever since his death has been a popular favourite, beloved of all for his sweetness and nobility of character,” as one hagiographer put it. This view is difficult to reconcile with the fact that as Chancellor to Henry VIII, More imprisoned and tortured those who opposed him. He not only burned books by the hundred, he burned devout Christian men and women too. More had a consuming hatred of Tyndale who was an honest God-fearing man and a formidable opponent, being a multilingual scholar who was deeply knowledgeable of Greek and Hebrew and the Scriptures.

Because of the gloss applied to the legacy of Sir Thomas More it is difficult for most English people to come to terms with the crudity of the words used by him when attacking Tyndale. More left us three-quarters of a million words of venom and what can only be described as lavatory language against “Tyndale, the arch-heretic”. His devious and malevolent mind was guilty of great and malicious distortions of the truth, to which both men’s writings in response to each other, reproduced in Daniell’s excellent book, bear vivid testimony.

Tyndale’s legacy of a New Testament in simple, everyday English was one of England’s greatest contribution to the world. Much of the first half of the Old Testament is Tyndale’s too, a work of poetry and beauty which ended with his murder. One can understand why David Daniell cried out aloud in pain when he made that distressing discovery.

Tyndale, Henry VIII & Elizabeth I
As a young man, Tyndale had been influenced by studying Isocrates, who taught that rhetoric was the basis of moral education. Isocrates asserted that a study of rhetoric would produce virtue, enlarge the mind, and create wise philosophers and statesmen. By contrast, More’s lies and distortions against Tyndale and Luther made it seem that the “heretics” were plotting rebellion, when in fact the reverse was true.

One man who discovered the truth of this was Henry VIII’s trusted factor in the Netherlands, Stephen Vaughan, who had been despatched to track down Tyndale. They met, warily, in an open field outside Antwerp. Vaughan later wrote to the King, enclosing a copy of Tyndale’s The Practice of Prelates. It was written to warn the King about how his clergy were damaging him and his realm. Vaughan found Tyndale to be widely respected for his learning, and with a knowledge of Christian theology greater even than that of the King’s own advisers including Cardinal Wolsey. Tyndale's anguish as he was strangled and burned at the stake, is plain. His dying words were: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!”

During the eighteen months he spent in prison before his death, Tyndale’s honesty, integrity, sincerity and devotion were said to have converted his jailer and his daughter and other members of his household. Meanwhile his New Testaments were being smuggled into England in thousands with the help of prosperous merchants in the cloth trade. They were sold to a population hungry for the truths denied them by the Church. Henry VIII's eyes were indeed opened. Within a year, the King had authorised the printing of 1,500 Bibles in Tyndale’s words. And within ten years of the first illegal translation appearing, Henry broke the power of the Pope, bishops, priests and monks in England with his Dissolution of the Monasteries.

On Henry’s death, his daughter Mary disastrously attempted to restore Catholicism as England’s faith. In her brief five-year reign Mary burned more than 300 “heretics” at the stake for possessing, reading, or listening to the Protestant Bible. The victims included 50 women, bishops Latimer and Ridley, and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer who had led the split with Rome and brought in the Book of Common Prayer. This was an age of treachery and violence which gave rise to three centuries of conflict between Rome and England.

After Mary came the young Elizabeth I. Fluent in six languages including Latin and Greek, she was widely read, and a devout Protestant. When Elizabeth gained the throne England was a weak half-island facing “steadfast enmity but no steadfast friendship abroad”. Her courage inspired her people, and none more so than the seamen of the West Country whose dangerous voyages of discovery and piracy in far-flung oceans resulted in trade and the first stirrings of the British Empire.

Clarity of word and meaning
The impact of Bibles in English continued to reverberate throughout the reign of Charles I. Idleness was condemned by the Puritans: Let him that will not work, let him not eat. Scrupulous honesty was their creed.

All of these developments arose out of one principal lesson which Tyndale’s accurate translations taught England. It was that Holy Scripture, not the Church, was the fountainhead of Christianity. As Daniell puts it, “the ‘bomb’ hiding in the notes” to his text was his development of Luther’s observation that Peter means ‘rock’ and that all Christians are Peters. Faith was the rock, not the Church, Scripture revealed. In those original Holy Scriptures, Tyndale had found no Pope. The reason that the Church in England would not allow printing of a Bible in English from the original texts was because in that New Testament one could find neither the Seven Sacraments nor the doctrine of Purgatory, the chief sources of the Church’s power.

The Tyndale Bible clearly revealed that the Bible preceded the Church, and gave it all its authority. It showed that repentance and belief was all. Good works alone counted for nothing. This undermined the enormous, secondary construction of late medieval practices of the Church - priests, penance, confession and charitable good works. Undermined too was the entire sacramental structure of the thousand-year-old Church throughout Europe, Asia and North Africa. More and the English prelates knew they had to destroy Tyndale and his works because his translation showed that there was “nothing to exclude the simplest layman from the upper reaches of spiritual life” . . . and that “anti-Christ is a spiritual thing and cannot be seen but in the light of God’s word.”

Tyndale’s translation detonated an explosion of myths which, as the smoke cleared, revealed a landscape richer in spiritual knowledge. In that new soil of truth, nourished by fresh, glorious, unfiltered sunlight, the dormant seeds of England’s artistic and intellectual life flourished.

English the tool of wordsmiths
In Europe, an educational revolution was already under way in the 16th century. It had been launched by the greatest scholar on the Continent, Erasmus. His school book, De Copia, written in 1512 for John Colet, the Dean of St Paul’s, revolutionised English education. Erasmus’s methods controlled John Colet’s school, St Paul’s, the prototype of most Elizabethan grammar schools. That development led Emrys Jones of New College Oxford to write as recently as 2005:
The number of good writers to appear in the second half of Elizabeth’s reign is more than surprising: it astonishes. Without the intensive new study of language and literature which the grammar schools provided, the major writers at the turn of the century would not have been equipped to do their work. Without humanism, in short, there could have been no Elizabethan literature: without Erasmus, no Shakespeare.

The English used by Tyndale in his translations was that of the common people rather than the adulterated language of the governing elite, which was a mix of English, Norman-French and Latin. What Tyndale did was similar to Chaucer in that he wrote in a pure form of English which had evolved from the English written and spoken in the 11th century. While the small governing elite spoke in French and wrote in Latin, the English people had continued to use their own language. Eventually, due to political considerations, the ruling class had to acknowledge the existence of a thriving English language which had for over four hundred years been treated as low status. Tyndale deserves great credit for his brilliant translations but the glory of the language belongs to the English people who spoke it. Tyndale wanted a Bible for the English so he wisely used their language.

Tyndale’s Bibles in English were printed in huge numbers. They saturated life and literature throughout the reign of Elizabeth: half a million were printed for a population of under 5million. The influence of those Bibles can be found in everyday documents, as a young scholar of early modern history, Alec Ryrie of Birmingham, discovered when investigating the use of the Bible at that time.

The King James Authorised Version . . 83 percent pure Tyndale
MUCH praise down the years has been lavished on the beautiful prose of what is known as the King James I Authorised Version of the Bible. We are able to compare that Authorised Version with Tyndale’s translation, thanks to the British Library’s reprint of his 1526 Worms edition, with its original spellings.
The Authorised Version Bible, published in 1611, became the chief educational influence on the life of the nation for three centuries. Incredibly the Hampton Court divines who drew it up credited James I as “the principal Mover and Author” of it. Computer analysis shows its New Testament to be 83 per cent pure Tyndale.

The spellings are more modern, but even a random examination of a few differences makes one wonder if that 17 per cent was either justified, or improved on, Tyndale’s language. Many of the changes involve the introduction of foreign words, i.e. those with Latin roots. For example, charge is English, adjure is Latin. Other Latin additions include tumult and multitude. A comparison can be made between the Tyndale and Authorised Version by using a few lines from Matthew, chapter 26, starting at verse 63. If you struggle with Tyndale’s words, try reading them aloud.

T: . . . the chefe preste sayde to hym: I charge thee in the name of the living god.
AV: . . . I adjure thee by the living God.
T: They answered and sayd: he is worthy to die.
AV: He is guilty of death.
T: And Peter remembred the words of Jesu, which he sayde to hym: before the cocke crowe, thou shalt deny me thryce. And went out at the dores and wepte bitterly.
AV: And Peter remembered the word of Jesus . . . And he went out, and wept bitterly.
In ch 27, v24 we find minor improvements, followed immediately by tinkering which possibly changes the meaning (my italics):
T: When Pilate sawe that he prevayled nothing, butt that moaare busenes was made, he toke water and washed his hondes before the people sayinge: I am innocent of the bloud of this iuste person, and that ye shall se [statement of fact].
AV: When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it [surely open to interpretation as: You go and kill him]

Tyndale’s use of plain English and the popularity of his Bibles encouraged others to also write in English. Thus Tyndale helped English regain its position as the dominant language in England. This revival amongst the ruling class opened up new possibilities and triggered an avalanche of high art which flourished under Elizabeth and James I. In 1579 Sir Thomas North helped to open it up dramatically with a brilliant first translation in English of Plutarch’s Lives of the Most Noble Greeks and Romans. Its marvellous simple language has been likened to that of the 1611 King James (Authorised Version) of the Bible.

One of the grammar school boys who would have been exposed to that rich new stream of classic works in powerful English was young William Shakespeare. His 1560 Geneva Bible contained Oxford’s 1576 revision of the New Testament - which was largely Tyndale. Daniell has shown, in a paper given at the Tyndale Society’s meeting at Kirtling in Suffolk on 16 April 2005, that the dramatic heart of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the emperor’s progress across Rome to his death, is pure Plutarch dramatised by the playwright.

In creating his plays, Shakespeare used North’s republican, moral, freshness and minute detail about many ordinary people to write vivid drama. Like Tyndale, he gave infinite resonances to the simplest words used in high moments - for example, Jesus’ command Rise, take up thy bed, and walk, or Let not your hearts be troubled, to King Lear’s Prithee, undo this button or Antony’s I am dying, Egypt, dying.
John Wycliffe, who died in 1384, is rightly hailed as the morning star of the English Protestant Reformation for demanding that the Bible, as the one sure basis of belief, should be freely available to laymen. If so, then Tyndale must be hailed as the dawn which brilliantly illuminated English spiritual, intellectual and artistic life.

In 1526, the penalty for anyone caught listening to his New Testament being read aloud was burning at the stake. It speaks volumes for the integrity of those who produced, smuggled, sold, read, treasured, and shared, those books with their fellow men and women. They sold in their hundreds of thousands, for as little as ls.6d. For those too poor to pay that, books were given away free.

William Tyndale and all those who supported his God-given desire to bring the truths of Scripture to everyman, played an important part in reviving English as a written language and helping to make English the world’s foremost language, spoken by two billion people. One can only hope that those whose chosen calling is to offer spiritual leadership today might reflect on this man William Tyndale, on the sacrifice he made for his love of Christ and his message, the impact he had, and then consider the crime-ridden, lawless, self-seeking England we live in today.

Politicians cry out for abstract things like Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Human Rights and Social Justice. Meanwhile, those intent on implementing yet more damaging social engineering maintain their grip on our society. Were William Tyndale alive today, it is my belief the cry on his lips would be: “Lord, open the people of England’s eyes!”

Words that are still on everyone’s lips

FEW people realise just how many words and phrases they use in everyday language today were first committed to paper nearly five centuries ago by Tyndale as he worked, often by candlelight, to create a Bible written in the English of the time.
He used a language that has the power to change people, governments and laws. Think of the references taken from the English Bible which American presidents have frequently included in their inaugural addresses on taking office. Think of US wartime journalist Ed Murrow’s comment that Winston Churchill ‘mobilised the English language and sent it into battle’.

Newspapers daily contain commonplace phrases which Tyndale used. We say that a man washed his hands of something. We describe someone as the salt of the earth. An idea which failed was a seed that fell on stony ground. The media column of The Daily Telegraph recently carried the phrase, if it comes to pass. Not so many years ago that was a phrase commonly heard in the conversation of Clive Thornton, when he was chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers.

In trying to reassure someone, give them confidence in their ability, and strengthen them, we say that faith can move mountains, and that all things are possible to one who believes.

We say they laughed him to scorn. We shake the dust off our feet, or were like sheep. We say something is white as snow, and that a prophet is not despised except in his own country. We fear to enter a den of thieves, are exhorted to love our neighbour as ourselves, though that may be as difficult as passing through the eye of a needle.

It is a truism still that all who lay hand on the sword will perish by the sword.
It is sobering to think that the right to silence, the right not to incriminate oneself when accused which our current government of authoritarians is steadily sweeping away, dates from the time 2,000 years ago when Christ was hauled before Pontius Pilate: Christ held his peace when confronted with false witnesses.

[A copy of the Worms Edition is on public display at the British Library – near to King’s Cross and St Pancras Stations. A large number of other famous documents are also displayed – usually including the Lindisfarne Gospels, Captain Scott’s diary, and music scores by famous composers. It’s worth a visit if you are in the area and especially if you have a long wait for a train. Admission is free. T.L.]

Note. A response to the religious content of this article will appear in the next edition of Steadfast.