We are immensely grateful for your willingness to host this meeting, which is the third of the commemorative meetings to commemorate the publication, 400 years ago, in 1611, of the authorised version of the Scriptures of Truth. And we are grateful for you for hosting this meeting. Other meetings will take place in June, Stein in Liverpool, and then, God willing, in March in Northern Ireland, and so on. Those meetings are advertised in our quarterly label. Let me say first of all that though this talk this afternoon is entitled The Authorised Version of the History of the English Bible before 1611, it follows that I will say very, very little regarding the authorised version. But what I want you to see this afternoon is the open, arching providence of God. in providing for the English-speaking peoples of the world the most accurate and the most reliable translation in our mother tongue. And may it be at the end that each and every one of us appreciate the Word of God more and treasure it and cherish it and seek to hide it in our hearts. So the title is The History of the English Bible before 1611. The authorised version, published in 1611, known also as the King James Bible, it has been described by many as the noblest monument of English prose. Some would contend that it is the finest literary achievement in the English language, a religious and a literary classic. Some men praised it for its pure English and for its forceful style. Others praised it for its beauty and majesty, and still others for its masterful translation. And it is all of that, and much more, The authorised version gave the English peoples a national binding, and linguistically it consolidated English at the very forefront of living European languages. Without question, the printing of the King James Bible in 1611 marked an epoch-breaking landmark in the history of the English language itself. It shaped the English language for over 350 years. without the authorised version, Milton could never have written his Paradise Post, and John Bunyan would have been at a loss to write Tilbury's Proverbs, and Handel's Messiah would never have been heard without the authorised version. The Bible expanded the horizons of our culture, and with its incalculable influence, the English-speaking world would have been irredeemably impoverished. This Bible united monarch and subject, church and laity, and was the cornerstone of every aspect of English English culture. The King James Bible is an iridescent jewel. It is a requirement of a century of translating, and in my opinion it marks the climax of the English Reformation. We begin our study of the English Bible some 36 miles to the north of Britain, just to the north of the A66 that goes from Scotch Corner to Penrhyn, near Barnard Castle, in the little hamlet of Wycliffe on Tees. For it was there in 1320 that John de Wycliffe was born, Knight, in a chronicler of the 14th century, writes somewhat scathingly of John Wycliffe. He says, this Master John Wycliffe has translated into English the Gospel which Christ gained from his clergy and doctors of the Church to be by then communicated to the weak of sort and the laity according to their need, and yet made it more accessible to the laity and even to women who are able to read. And then again, Archbishop Arundel, in a letter to Pope John XXIII, asking him to condemn the heresy of Wycliffe and his followers with severe white inspiration, he writes, he has completely denied it by devising a translation of the scripture into the mother tongue. John Wycliffe was born in 1320 at Wycliffe-on-Thames in Richmondshire, He died at Lutterworth on 31st December 1384. His life was closely connected with Oxford, where he was, in succession, Farrer of Merton, Master of Valeville and Warden of Canterbury Hall. In 1372 he was presented by the King to the rectory of Lutterworth. And it was from Lutterworth in Leicestershire that he directed his four preachers, who became known as the Lord's. He directed them to appeal to Holy Scripture in all their exhortations and in all their instructions. In fact, he considered the Word of God of divine and therefore of absolute authority in all matters of faith and practice. he had gradually come to that conclusion. In his work Trailoes, John W. Fitzroy spoke, we do not sincerely believe the Lord Jesus Christ, or we should abide by the authority of his word, especially that of the Evangelists. Inasmuch as it is the will of the Holy Spirit that our attention should not be dispersed over a large number of objects, but concerned on one sufficient source of instruction, it is his pleasure that the books of the Old and New Law should be read and studied, and that men should not be taken up with other books which, true as they may be, and containing scripture true as they may, by implication are not to be compiled in without portion or limitation. What a warning that is to we who are preachers. We should be men of one book, not taken up with other books. Good as they may well be, conscience, good as they may well be, we should be taken up with this one book. Again, Wycliffe writes, it is impossible that any word or any deed of the Christian should be of equal authority with the Holy Scripture. When therefore the Pope asserts that his decrees in matters of faith have the same authority as the gospel, he is, in Wycliffe's opinion, guilty of blasphemy, because he is arrogating to himself the attributes and the prerogatives of the earth. Because Wycliffe knew of the authority and the sufficiency of the Holy Scripture, he was called the evangelical, or the gospel doctor. He had an amazing knowledge of He took the different parts of the Word of God in close connection, and he made Scripture his own interpreter, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. Wycliffe dug deep into the vast mind of scriptural truth, being fully assured that if he laboured prayerfully in this work, its treasure would be more unfolded to his astonished and to his delighted view. This deep veneration which he held for the Holy Scriptures and the supreme importance which attached to the Word of God led him naturally to the conclusion that the people ought to be allowed to read the Scriptures in their own tongue. And he expressed that view in another work of his called The Widget. He says this, those who call it heresy to read the Holy Scriptures in English must be prepared to condemn the Holy Ghost himself, who gave it in tongues to the apostles of Christ to speak the word of God in all languages that were ordained under heaven. For which, then, the Bible, the whole Bible, unutilized, should be distributed in a tongue being uncorrupted by the false glosses pasted upon it by the Church of Rome. My friends, this was a sublime conception for the age in which we could live. Difficulties apparently insurmountable storage in the way of his design, which embraced not only the literal translation of the Bible into English, but also its circulation amongst all ranks and orders of its elixir. Many would have shrunk back, terrified by the prospect of formidable opposition and persecution. Bishops, priests, men of the liturgy might have been expected to band together in a dark confederacy against them. He therefore stood in a position of comparative isolation. The translators are wrapped in obscurity As we read through the writings of John Wycliffe, we hardly ever find any reference to the progress of this work of Bible translation. You see, the fact was that he and those who helped him were afraid that if they blazed the matter abroad, the powerful hand of authority would prevent them from continuing the translation and would inflict severe persecution upon them. The consequence is that we are ignorant of the different stages of the work which prepared the way for the Reformation and was to affect the spiritual destinies of the believers. Wycliffe's Bible was completed by the end of the year 1382. In all probability, it was John from Wycliffe who had translated the New Testament, and Nicholas of Heraklion translated the Old Testament. And when Nicholas of Heraklion was forced to flee in 1382, the Old Testament was revised in a freestyle by John Purvey, who had been Wycliffe's faithful assistant at Gosworth and known as the librarian of the law office. In addition to those, Nicholas and Purvey, Wycliffe was no doubt also helped by other Oxford scholars in and out of Highbury. The translation itself was a literal translation of the Latin Vulgate and therefore was a translation of a translation. But so great was the eagerness to possess the volume that those who could not obtain the volume of the book, they would give a load of carton A in order to obtain one leaf of Wycliffe's Bible. They would hide the forbidden treasure under the floors of their houses and they would expose their lives to danger rather than surrender them. They would stay up all night, their doors locked, for fear of surprise, reading or hearing others read the Word of God. They would bury themselves in the woods and forests and there converse with it in silence and in solitude. they would while tending their flocks in the field still, still still an hour, while drinking in the good tidings of the grace of God and salvation from the word of God. Wycliffe's final marks and epoch in the development of the English language was Mr. Chaucer was laboring to fix the English tongue among the higher classes of society, here is John Wycliffe, establishing the English language more permanently in simple, beautiful language for his fellow countrymen, and it was this great work which hastened on the Reformation in our land. And the hierarchy, the clergy of the Roman Church, they were filled with terror and with indignation. They knew that their occupation was over. If all might, without the intervention of the priesthood, consult the sacred oracles for themselves. Hence the fury of the persecutor awoke against the followers of John Whitley. Archbishop Areville, and convocationist to the following stringent prohibition in 1408, that no unauthorised person should fear of to translate any portion of Holy Scripture into English, and that no such book should be read either in whole or part, publicly or privately, that was composed in the time of John Wycliffe or since, under the penalty of a greater excommunication, till the said translation be approved by the Bishop of the Diocese. John Wycliffe had fully guaranteed the cost. He had weighed the consequences of his actions. He knew that his life would be endangered. He says, for example, in his work Trilogus, he says this, we have no need to go on the heathen in order to die a martyr's death. We only have to preach persistently the law of Christ in the hearing of Caesar's prelates, and instantly we shall have a flourishing martyr if we hold our own faith and patience to the end. Through the efforts of Wycliffe's poor preachers, the scriptures were circulated, and their pages opened to the delighted view of many thousands of Wycliffe's fellow countrymen. These poor creatures, or lords, live in poverty and they preach the Gospel to the people. They carry the torch of the English Bible from the 14th century through the 15th century and on into the 16th century. And through all their incessant labours, the people were led to see that the Church of Rome had corrupted the faith once delivered unto the saints. And they were led to cast off the superstitions of their forefathers. John Wycliffe spent his last days at Ludworth in much weakness. His indivisible energy, a distinct feature of his character, had gradually worn out the material tabernacle of his earthly body. His personal character was unimpeded, for even his enemies had not uttered a syllable against his personal character. had forsaken him. At the last he stood alone, with the sword of persecution suspended by a thread hanging over him, but still with voice and with head he laboured incessantly to effect a reform of the church. He unflinchingly had denounced the arrogance of the priests and their corruptions of the truth of God's Word. On December 28th, he suffered a stroke in his church at Ludwig whilst conducting the Lord's Supper. He was carried to his house where he breathed his last on the 31st of December 1384. Wickliffe is one of the greatest men that this country and our country have ever produced. He had a burning love for Christ, an ardent desire for the salvation of the souls of his hell-men. He truly was the morning star of the Reformation. At the Council of Constance, the Church of determined to wreak her impotent fury upon his bones. And so it was, in 1415, a decree was passed, branding John Wycliffe as a heretic, and directing that his body and his bones should be taken from the ground and thrown away from the burial of the church. That decree was carried out in 1428, some 44 years after his death. Come with me. Let us find a picture of a scene in Loveworth Church. Let us wander back to that distant age. Around the grave, in the chancel, we see titularly of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Bishop Fleming of Lincoln, once a devotee of and many other dignitaries and clergy, all anxious to display their enmity and their fury to one who had denounced the corruptions of their church. A church like this crowded, with officials and townspeople attracted by the novelty of a spectacle. The sound of the pickaxe falls on the ear, and slowly rising through the opening, thus made, is seen the coughing of John the It is emplaced on the shoulders of men, and carried through the door in the trance, still standing, and down that winding road to the River Swift, which glides along thankfully at the foot of the hill. The fire is dimpled on that bridge. The bones of John Wycliffe are taken out of the coffin, and they are plunged into the flames. And the bones of John Wycliffe are refuged to ashes, which afterwards are cast into the Many in that crowd would doubtless behold with tears the indignities they had offered to the remains of one to whom they had listened in their youth, as he had spoken to them of the love of the Saviour, or had warned them to prepare for death and for judgment and for eternity. of one who had visited them in their homes and spoken to them in time of sickness and sorrow, pouring the oil wide of heavenly consolation to their wounded spirits. The brook did convey the ashes into the haven, the haven into the seven, the seven into the narrow seas, and they into the main ocean, and thus The actions of Wycliffe are the emblem of his doctrine which is now dispersed over the whole world. Thank God for John Wycliffe. We continue our study of the English bylaw. Some 48 miles north-northwest of Britain, just north of the village of Middleton-on-Teague, The first printed English edition of the New Testament from the Greek was that of Tim Dale, one of England's first Protestant martyrs. There was a persistent family tradition described in a letter written by one Tim Dale to another Tim Dale in the year 1663, claiming that a certain man called Tyndale came out from Northumberland during the Wars of the Roses round about 1482 and he fled the county of North Yorkshire and Northumberland and he fled to Gloucestershire where he changed his name to Heathens and only on his deathbed did he reveal his true name to his children. It is thought the location was in the valley of the South Tyne, Tyne Dale, somewhere on Ulster Moor to the north-west of Milton on Thames. Tyne Dale described himself in the opening lines of his work, The Obedience to the Christian Man, he described himself as William Hitchens unto the And only upon the death of his father did he change his name back to Tyndale, the rightful and proper name. It was on the 6th of October, 1536, that William Tyndale, having spent a very uncomfortable year in Ilwar Castle near Antwerp, Belgium, was escorted to the stake. And there they tied him to the stake and strangled him to death. And then, in that very public place, they burned his body. And if you like the authorised Russian, well, under God, humanly speaking, 90% and some would argue 92% of this wonderful and majestic translation of the New Testament comes directly from the pen of William Tybee. He was a great and a mighty scholar. He says, For I call God to record against the day which will appear before our Lord Jesus, to give a reckoning of our doings, that I never altered one syllable of God's word against my conscience, nor would this day, if all that it whether it be pleasure, honour, or riches might be given me. Moreover, I take God to be called to my conscience that I desire to have got to myself in this world no more than that without which I cannot keep His laws." What a saint! Here is a man who would not alter one syllable of God's Word, a man captive to the Word of Tindale, like Calvin and Luther, had been brought up in the Roman Catholic system, brought up in a country in which the Church was at its lowest ebb of spiritual vitality, and the county of Gloucestershire where Tindale lived, it was a hive of hope. The clergy and the people were shrouded in a mist of superstition. The Bible was an unknown book. But there enveloped within the heart of Tenale a burning and a compulsive burden to translate the Word of God into our mother tongue, and that against the prohibition imposed by the Convocation of Canterbury. He entered Magdalene Hall, now Hartford College, Oxford, in 1505. But even there the study of Scripture was discouraged. For we find William Tyndale writing this, he says, they have ordained that no man shall look on the Scripture until he knows all that it is known to them, in even learning eight or nine years at arm and false principles, with which he is cleaved shut out of the understanding of Scripture. But the ten years he spent in Oxford before his graduation in 1515, they were years of transition from medieval Romanism to the doctrines of the Reformation. Tyndale grew and increased in the knowledge of scriptures in spite of the College, so much so that he began to expound the scriptures to the fellows of Morgan Hall. Everything was brought by Zinno to the touchstone of Holy Scriptures, and it was this attitude to the authority, to the sufficiency, to the supremacy of the inspired Word which characterized the strength and the vigor of this man's intellect. John Fox in his book of Martyrs tells us, his mind was singularly addicted to the knowledge of Holy Scripture. He left Oxford and moved to Cambridge, where Erasmus had taught from 1511 to 1514. And the influence of that learned Dutchman was still palpable at Queen's College. And Tyndale came under the influence of Erasmus, and according to John Fox again, he was further ripened in the knowledge of God. He left Cambridge in the year 1521. What a glorious year that was. 1521. In that year, 1521, Martin Luther was summoned to Bern. And on that wonderful occasion, Martin Luther, as he stood before the Diet of Bern and all the hierarchy of Rome, he made that wonderful stand against the tyranny and the might of Rome. Let me quote Luther. He stands before I am bowing by the Scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God, and I cannot and I will not retract anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot do otherwise. Here I stand. May God help me. Amen. 1521. and that cry was heard throughout Europe. Here I stand, I have come to give to the Word of God, and in that same year William Tyndale left Cambridge, and God in his province led him to a little solitary manor not too far from Bristol. It was the manor house of Sir John Walsh, and William Tyndale was asked to be the chaplain to Sir John Walsh's children. Gloucestershire was the stronghold of the Roman Church in England, having six mighty alleys within its borders and possessing the most famous bread in the whole of Britain, the blood of to be the blood of Christ, contained in a fire, preserved in the area of Hades, near Winchester, the very site of which was guaranteed to ensure the salvation of the beholder, provided the beholder had sufficient funds to pay for a site. Don Box, in his book of martyrs, says, that Sir John Walsh kept a good, orderly house, and there resorted unto him some of the abbots, deans, archdeacons, with divers, others, doctors, and there together with Master Tyndale, sitting at the table, did many times enter into communication and talk of learned men such as Luther and Erasmus, and questioned upon the scriptures. William Tyndale never hesitated to express his opinions, which often differed from those of his master's guests. And oft times he ought to precute their errors, he would confront them with the appropriate, open and manifest scripture. Now imagine this gender if she is a young man, fresh out of college, chubby on the hands, sitting around the table with all sorts of dignitaries, others, doctors, Tindale had many a conversation with these men. I want to quote you part of one conversation which took place in 1521. A priest across the table turned upon William Chin and said, your scriptures only serve to make heretics. Tindale very graciously turned to the priest and said, yes, on the contrary, the source of heresy is pride. And the Word of God strips a man of everything and leaves him as bare as jowl. Then the priest heard William Tyndale and said, The Word of God? Why, even we can't understand it. How can the common people understand it? To which Tyndale replied, You know who taught the evils to spy out their prey? That same God teaches His hungry children to spy out their father in His Word. Christ elects, spies out their Lord, and strays out the paths of His feet, and follows Him from the world. On one occasion in 1521, A priest turned upon him rather angrily, a very high-ranking priest indeed, and this high-ranking priest said to Chindo that the Pope's word is more important than the word of God. By, I did it. I did it. In the same year that Luther stood before the diocese of Bern, and uttered those glorious words, so Chindo responded to that ignorant priest, I defy the Pope and all his laws. God spare my life, e'er that he lives, I will cause a void that driveth a cloud to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost." Thereafter, the priest raged and raged on against him then, and brought a charge of heresy against him, and he was brought before the chancellor. He touched me grievously and revived and raised me as though I had been a dog. Tyndale was now a man of one book, and he gave his life because of his love for the Word of God, and because of his love for the Lord Jesus Christ. Tyndale was a remarkable scholar, but a scholar with a warm and sanctified heart. and with a concern for the ordinary people. He once said this, I have foreseen my experience, how it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth, except the scriptures are plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue. That was Tyndale's great desire. And it soon became evident to Tyndale that a little sodomy would no longer serve as a safe retreat for one who had given utterance to his lifelong ambition. And therefore, in July 1523, he left the manor house of a little sodomy for London. He became a guest of a godly, wealthy merchant, Humphrey Monmouth, in whose home he began to translate the Word of God into English. And there, in Monmouth's huge library, he read through the works of Martin Luther. Humphrey Monmouth had a wall underneath the present town's Queen's Station on the outback. which God was going to use later on. Tybalt stayed for a short time in the home of Humphrey Monmouth, but eventually he turned to his house and said this, it is no good, sir. My being in your house is putting your life in jeopardy. I understand at last, not only that there was no room in my Lord of London's palace to translate the New Testament, but also that there was no place to do it in the whole of England. There was only one thing he could do. This greatest of all Englishmen, in May 1524, left the country and the people he loved, and he never saw either again. He went to Europe. He arrived at Hamden, and uniquely began the work of translating a scripture from Erasmus's Greek translation of 1522. Having completed the translation of the New Testament, Tyndale found his way to Cologne towards the end of 1525, where he entered into an arrangement with one of the town's infamous printers, Peter Quenter, to print the New Testament. But he was there at Coplius, Iwan Dobnek, one of the bitterest opponents of the Reformation, sought to persuade the world. One day, Dobnek overheard the printers boasting confidently over their wine that England would soon be Lutheran. Dobnek plied him more wine and learned that there were already in the press 3,000 copies of the Lutheran New Testament translated into English. This latter-day Judas then revealed the plot to an old man of Cologne, Herman Peake, a man well known to King Henry VIII and to the younger Charles V, and he obtained an interdict to stop the work. But news of the seditious action reached the ears of Tyndale, who in the dead of night rushed to the printers, seized the precious manuscripts, and in September of 1525, led by ship up the Rhine to Burgos. Wordless, but alluring and strong. And here the work would be commenced at the press of Peter Schaefer. And by the end of 1525, some 6,000 copies of the New Testament printed at Berth were ready for distribution in England. those New Testaments came into England, smuggled through the customs in bales of cloth, in sacks of flour, in barrels and cases, and every time they crossed the North Sea and they came up the Thames to hungry, mindless war. Tyndale made the Bible speak for God straight to the hearts of the people. and was widely circulated to the joy and comfort of many who had long walked in darkness. Considered as a literary undertaking, Tyndale's work, like Nicholas, marks an epoch in the literary history of the English-speaking world. As the master of English prose, Tyndale stands unrivalled as he expressed the glorious truths of the Bible in the clearest manner, and thus exercised a permanent influence on the literary tastes of the English tongue. He was still in seven languages, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, French, and whichever language he spoke, what he had said of him, he would think it was in his language. As a pioneer of English translation, Tyndale's task was a lonely one. He said, I have no man to count it, neither has help with English by any of it exerted the same or such likely scripture before time. He was aware of God's sake. I count it as a thing not having its full shape, as begun rather than finished. No sooner had the New Testament ended in England and Cardinal Wolsey took steps to suppress the seditious book, a search was made that all copies of Tyndale's New Testament were ordered to be given up. At the same time, the Bishop of Rochester, Fisher, he was charged to preach at St Paul's Cross in London on the 1st of February 1526, as replete with dangerous heresies, and at the conclusion of his sermon, at which, pardon the words, he was present, surrounded by a great company of mighty labourers, prior bishops, great masses of Tyndale's New Testament were brought and they were publicly burned. And then, then again, in October of the same year, Tunstall, the Bishop of London, was the preacher and Tyndale's New Testament was denounced and publicly burned. Cardinal Campeño on the 21st of November, 1526, related to Cardinal Wolsey, praising him for his diligency in protecting the Christian Church from the mistranslation of the Holy Bible into common tongue by the followers of Luther's abominable sect. But these public denunciations and blurbings served only to increasingly man-walk in their own infestation. Woolsey had determined to buy up all the copies of the Testament, the New Testament, and so he commissioned a London merchant, unknown to Woolsey, the merchant he commissioned was a friend of his. To go and find them, and to buy up all the existing copies of the New Testament, to bring them out to London, that they might be learned. The man in question was Blackington. Ham Pagan went to Mansworth and found Tyndale, and he said to Tyndale, William, I know that thou art a poor man, and hast a heap of New Testaments and books by thee, for the witch thou hast both engaged with thy friends, and beggared thyself to see Tyndale what he meant. And I have now gotten thee a merchant which, with money ready, shall dispatch thee of all that thou hast, if you think it profitable for yourself. Who is this mercantilist, Timbuktu? Why, it's the Vishnu, not the Satyagraha. Ah, that's because he will burn the Satyagraha. True Satyagraha. Where am I in that Satyagraha? for these two benefits shall thereof come. First, I shall get money to bring myself out of debt, and at the same time the whole world will cry out for me for burning and rotting earth. Secondly, the overplus of the money that shall be paid to me shall be more suited to correct the second testament, and so imprint the same again, and I trust the second will be better than the first. And so forward went the barn, the bishop had the books to burn, Haggerton received thanks from the bishop, and Tyndale had his money to get out of debt and to go ahead with the next week. Now I've just been praised as Tyndale's intestinal watcher. Very few acknowledge the scholarship and his contribution to the English notice. You see, when he left England in 1523, Hebrew was not taught in either Oxford or Cambridge. It is thought that he deleted his knowledge of Hebrew from the many Jewish merchants in the German towns of the Rhine. In 1529, having completed a translation of Deuteronomy, and desiring to get it printed, he took ship to Hamburg, but was shipwrecked from the coast of Holland, and he lost everything. Finding another ship he arrived in Hamburg and then he rewrote that translation. By 1530 he had started upon the Old Testament from the Hebrew, and had gone through the whole of the Pentateuch, that is Genesis through to Deuteronomy. By 1531 he had translated the whole of Jonah, and by 1534 he had revised Genesis. And then the following year, he produced a publication entitled The New Testament, yet once again corrected by William Tinley. When Joan was printed in 1531, he still had 5 more years of exile in which to use his pen for it all. The extent of his work is described concisely in a chronicle of 1548. After listing the various parts in print translated by Kinnell, the rest were recorded as judges. The books of Kings, 2 to Nehemiah, that is the whole of the book from Joshua to Nehemiah, 11 in all, and the Prophet Jonah, and no more of the Holy Scripture. So they're putting that together. The published part, the unpublished part. Tinder's contribution to the whole Bible is 47%. And that unpublished part was not lost because it was reproduced by John Rogers in a manuscript. The character of the man matched his work. Steadfast as a rock, yet tender as a wood. He utterly refused all royal invitation from Henry VIII to return home and to use his pen in service of the Crown, but he exercised most valiantly to encourage John Frith to face the flames of Martin. Bitter opposition rapidly ensued, and Tyndale took up his pen to answer his critics. or Talibus the kind. Thomas More, he called the proctor of poetry. And the bishops, in Tyndale's words, were blind, buzzards and shameless hypocrites. He may as well be his biographer, Tyndale rightly says that the one word which fits the life and work of William Tyndale is the word His was the first voice raised in accents clear enough and loud enough to reach the ear and touch the heart of his people. His was, in fact, one of those great lines which form a kind of landmark in our national history. Demeer said, no mere scholar would have lived as he did, toiled as he toiled, daring churchmen and statesmen, braving peril and exile for the sake of God's good news in him. one grand aim of his life was to give to England a verse of the Scriptures in the language of the people, and for that high purpose he had been quite content to bear the pains of privation and to run the risk of martyrdom. From 1531, Tyndale's wife was in He quitted the Low Countries and for many months he busted up and down the line like a fugitive, hoping in that way to baffle the ingenuity of his hostile pursuers. Eventually he settled at Hansworth, but there he returned with all his energy to the great work of translation. The work of revision, the work of translation occupied Tyndale to the very last, to the very moment in which he was marred with poverty. While engaged in his daily routine of translation and correction, he was caught in a spire's web of guile and treachery by a man called Henry Phillips. The Low Countries had become a dangerous place. The Inquisition was armed with unrestricted authority to seize all suspected persons and to try and to confiscate and to execute without any right of appeal. Whilst President in Antwerp, he was the guest of an influential citizen named Thomas Hoyle, a warm and true friend of the Reformation, and he was able to offer protection to Jindal by reason of the privilege which exempted citizens and their guests from being arrested in their houses. Whatever Tyndale remained in Poyntz's house, he was safe. But in May 1535, plans were laid to lure Tyndale away from that same wreckage. Phillips had wormed his way to the conference and elections of Tyndale, pretending that he had been converted to Christ for the reading of Tyndale's New Testament. He invited Tyndale out to dinner. And as he now left the shelter of his friend's house, he was seized by two officers stationed either side of the narrow entrance to that house. He was arrested and taken to Wilborn, a castle in Belfast, where he spent his final years. In that cell, he wrote his final letter. It was discovered about a hundred years ago. It gives us a real understanding of how these Reformers behaved. It also gives us a clue to Tyndale's own manner of life and his faith, even though he knew that death awaited him. Let me quote that letter. William Tyndale from the British Cell writes, I believe, Right Worshipful, that you are not unaware of what may have been determined concerning Wherefore I beg your Lordship, and that by the Lord Jesus Christ, that if I am to remain here throughout the winter, you will request me permissibly to have the kindness to send me from the goods of mine which he has, a warmer cap. For I suffer greatly from the cold in the head, and am afflicted with a perpetual catarrh which is much increased in this cell. A warmer coat also for this, which I have, is very thin. A piece of clothing to patch my leggings. My overcoat is worn out. My shirt also is worn out. He has a woolen shirt, if he will be good enough to spend it. I have also with him leggings of a thicker cloth to put on above. He has also warmer nightgowns. And I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening. It is indeed weirder than sitting alone in the dark. But most of all, I beg and beseech your mercy to be urgent with a commission that will kindly permit me to have a Hebrew Bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew dictionary that I may pass the time in that study. How beautifully reminiscent that is of the great Apostle Paul. Do thy willingness to come shortly unto The cloak that I left with Petroas with Pontus went out on the spring with me, and the books, but especially the pot. There is no pane of glass in the window of that cell, and the rain and the snow blow here. There is no central heating, and there is no fire in the corner of that cell. and no doubt over your feet there would run a rat or two. His coat was thin, he had a dreadful catarrh, he was cold, but uppermost in his mind. Remember the words of Paul, this one thing I do. He was a man who was treason. Here is a man who was This one thing I do, there is work to do to the end, and in that cell. He translated from those Hebrew manuscripts, the book of Joshua, through to the book of 2 Chronicles, while awaiting martyrdom. My friends, that's the measure of the man. At the end of July 1536, Tindale was condemned as a heretic, degraded from the priesthood and handed over to the secular power for punishment. On the 6th of October 1536, he was brought forth to the place of execution, there tied to the stake, with an iron chain around his waist and a piece of hemp in a noose round his neck, a pile of straw and faggots all around his feet. It was there that Tyndale lifted up his eyes towards heaven and cried to the God of heaven, Lord, open thou the king of England's eyes. The rope was wrenched tight from behind, the faggots were lifted with a torch to blaze around his spangled body. A martyr's crown made a fitting end. to such a life as his had been. Meanwhile, back in England, an extraordinary development had taken place. King Henry VIII had divorced his wife, Catherine I, made himself head of the English Church, broken with Rome, married under him and fathered a daughter, Elizabeth, Under Branko, Convocation itself had petitions for an English Bible, and in the same year that Tyndale was martyred, Henry VIII issued a Royal Warrant for placing one Bible in every parish church throughout the land. Tyndale's prayer was answered. Thank God for William Tyndale. Let me hasten on. Having considered Wycliffe and Tyndale, we now move 18 miles northwest of Britain. To my surprise, today I've been in Wycliffe, I've been in the middle of the 1990s, and I've been at the middle of the divergence of Covid, the great Myles Coverdale was born in 1488, a few years before William Tyndale. He was brought up an Austrian prior, ordained a priest in Norwich in 1524. He studied philosophy and theology at Cambridge in the Augustine Priory under Robert Barnes, and it was Barnes who was the means of Coverdale's conversion. He drank in good learning, with a burning thirst, and was a young man of friendly and upright nature, with a gentle spirit. When the church was revised, he was one of the first to make a pure confession of Christ. And Myles Covey, who gave himself wholly to the propagating of Christ's true gospel, Six years after his conversion, Coverdale helped Barnes to prepare his defence against angry target brought by Carnarvon Woolsey. A year later, 1527, he was briefed by Thomas Cromwell about future plans for Bible translation. A year later, he left Cambridge, abandoned the cowl, adopted the dress of a secular priest and preached law on hills throughout Suffolk, until in 1529 he had to flee to Hampden. There, he joined up with Tyndale and helped Tyndale with the pension. The months of 1535, when Coverdale was 47 years of age, were among the happiest and the busiest of his long life. He was approached by Thomas Cromwell and asked to work to produce, by the turn of the year, an English Bible based upon secondary sources. Not for Coverdale, the slow and painstaking task of grappling with Greek and with Hebrew and Aramaic, but rather the gathering and the gleaning of the wine-fruits of other scholars. He was fluently German. He had to hand two marvelous German Bibles, Luther's German Bible and the Syriac Bible. He also had two lucky Bibles at his elbow, the old Vulgate and the new version of Paganinus. Above everything was the massive contribution of red equinx which Tyndale had printed piecemeal over the previous decade and which now was to find its rightful place in the libel of his trend. By the middle of August, much of the work was done, including the dedication to the king. The original dedication was addressed to the king as defender of the faith. incidentally a time in which the Pope bestowed upon Henry VIII for writing against Luther. But in that dedication, Kogel said, I thought it my duty when I had translated this Bible to dedicate it unto your highness, humbly submitting my poor translation unto the Spirit and truth in your grace, having God to my witness that I had not altered one word. but are purely and faithfully translated out of five sun-grave interpreters. It is Cavanagh's greatest achievement, though some in the Church of England would argue that the parable, which contains much of his work, is also a great achievement. Elegant, lucid, musical, vigorous, pungent, but we find lively and dignified, and still, to this day, we eat well. And much of it must be incorporated into future translations. Let me just give you a few examples of Coverdell's homely style. For example, in Isaiah, Coverdell describes the Lord sitting on a high and glorious seat, And his train filled the palace. From above flakered the seraphim. All other versions have, from above, stood the seraphims, but Coquereldo has flakered the seraphim, which, yes, the seraphims were hobbling like bricks of stone. And then again, In Isaiah 18, he says, where the Lord is presented as thinking of his purpose on a hot day in summer. Coverdale's translation reads like this, I laid me down and pondered the matter in my house at noonday, and there fell a misling shower like a dew as it happened in the harvest. And that word, misling, an awful ignorant term. This rides something between a mist and a drizzle, a picture of a damp, deep haze over the cornfield at time of light. And then in Jeremiah, there is no more treacle in Gilead, from which this vine of cobails has been dug, a treacle vine. So we have considered Wycliffe, and Tyndale, and Cumberland. I think my time has gone, but so let me quickly hasten through the rest. John Rodgers was to produce the Matthews Bible. Rodgers had embraced the doctrines of the Reformation. He was born in 1500 at Perryton in the parish of Aston near Birmingham. He held a purity there and then became chaplain to the Merchant Adventurers at Antwerp in 1584. According to Fox, he fell in with Tyndale and Coverdale And whatsoever he hath cast off the heavy load of poetry, perceiving it to be a pure and filthy idolatry, and joining himself with them to titillate and curtail, is a painful and most profitable labour of translating the Bible into the English tongue. After Coker began his self-translation of the Bible in 1535, and following Tyndale's arrest in May of that same year, it was left to Reuters to complete Tyndale's task. His work was a compendium of Tyndale's Pentateuch of 1531, the historical books Joshua through Nehemiah from manuscripts left in his possession by Tyndale, and Tyndale's Revising Testament text of 1535, amounting some 600 reads out of 1,100 reads for the whole volume. For the rest, he had adopted Coverdale's version, editing and conforming it more to the theme which Rodgers knew and Coverdale did not. And that was presented to the King, but it met with great, great opposition. And so it was that the King, ordered there be one book of the Bible of the largest volume in English to be set up in some convenient place in every church where parishioners may most commodiously resort to the same and read it. And that gave rise to the work on the Great Bible of 1539. The printer, philosopher Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch, And by and large, Cobrail used Tyndale's translation of the New Testament and those Old Testament passages which he had completed before his martyrdom. And then Cobrail lifted the work from Matthew's Bible, that despised the Bible, but owed by the Jews. And he had that printed. It must be printed in Paris. But the Inquisition broke out on the 13th of December, 1538. The Parisian printer was arrested. The two Englishmen, Grafton and Winchurch, fled back to England. Two thousand unbound copies of the Great Bible were destroyed by the University of Paris. Cromwell, Thomas Cromwell, gave £400 to Whig Church to return to Paris to obtain a block from the printers and return to England where it was eventually printed. The price? 10 shillings and 4 pence. For those born after 1971, 52p. The chief fault of the Great Bible was that it was still not a direct translation from the Hebrew and Greek. It was at best a patchwork court, a compendium of previous constellations, including the Latin Vulgate. Pressure was mounted by the bishops to restore the Latin Vulgate in first place, and therefore they obtained the king's permission in 1542 to revise the Great Find according to the Latin Vulgate. Bishop Gardiner submitted a list of ninety Latin words which, for their majesty, were to be retained unaltered, and Cranmer, shortly before his execution, was able to persuade the king to transfer the revision to the two universities where the whole matter was. Why have you not? By the time Covill's final revision was published, he was in exile in Tunisia. 20 years were to pass between the Great Bible of 1540 and the Geneva Bible of 1560. In those 20 years there had been five months and four changes of the national religion. During Elizabeth's reign, there were two versions produced. The first was the Geneva Bible, or the Preacher's Bible, produced in the republican city of Calvary and Pisa in 1560. Its translators were all exiles who had fled England and Scotland because of persecution for their reformed doctrines during the reign of Mary. Initially, Mary had settled in But eventually they formed the English Church in Geneva from 1555 to 1559. The chief editors of the Geneva Bible were William Whittingham, Anthony Gilbey, Christian Goodman, William Cole, William Peck of the glorious 100th day, Thomas Wood, and Miles Goodman. and laboured for two years, night and day. In 1559 many returned back to England because Mary had died and Elizabeth was now on the throne, and so in Geneva there was a little company of a dozen men, eight wives, six children, twenty-six in total, who lived on in Geneva. with that colony in Geneva came to an end. They had been small in number, resident for a few short years, but that with the company of Ericssonians has had such a profound effect. It led to the establishment of Esotericism in Scotland, Furifism in England, and it changed the destiny of the British Isles and North America. even scholars resolve that their versions should be issued in a cheap and handy form, that it should be adorned with such immodern notes as the common man required for understanding the Scriptures. These helpful annotations amount to 300,000 words, a third the length of the whole Bible itself. But they are marvellous aims, comments by men like Beezer and Calvin integrated into the The Geneva Bible once became popular. It was portable and moderate in price. It became very quickly the people's Bible, and for upwards of 50 years it was the first in demand. Between 1560 and 1614, no less than 150 editions of the Geneva Bible appeared. It was the Bible of John Knox and Andrew Melville in Scotland. It was read in all places of worship. The popularity of the Geneva Bible caused widespread consternation amongst the authorities of the ritualistic wing of the Church of England. They were alarmed that an unauthorised translation of the Scripture was referred to the one which had been ordered to be read in the churches. And so it was that they pressurised for another And Archbishop Parker, a cousin to Prantley, was the man involved in producing what became known as the business bible. Parker had been born in Norwich in 1504. He was educated at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship to the age of 22. He was a friend of Little Milne, in Thomas Milne, the man instrumental in the conversion It was Parker who comforted Bilby in his last hours before his martyrdom night. As Marshal of Corpus Christi, Parker had welcomed Martin Luther to Cambridge and weeped his funeral sermon. Upon the accession of Nair to the throne, he resigned his clothes and went into hiding in his native East Hampton. but when he missed a page in the Stone in 1558, he called upon him to accept the Archbishopric, which he was somewhat reluctant to accept. Most of those who took part in the revision were members of the Episcopal wedding, hence the name, the Bishop's Final. It was a remarkable effort by sixteen high-ranking clerics, half of whom had been in exile during the years of Mary. Unlike the King James Bible, it is the work of a committee. But unlike the King James translators, each translator of the bishop's version worked independently of the other. Park himself contributed the largest portion. He translated Paul's epistles from 2 Corinthians to Hebrews, together with Matthew and Mark, and he translated Genesis and Exodus, some 150 pages of the whole. everything was done to make it look attractive. Is she in a magnificent style, profuse illustrations with woodcuts, embellished with copper-plated portraits of Queen Elizabeth? In 1571, an order was issued by Convocation of Canterbury that every archbishop and bishop should have in his house a copy of the Holy Bible, the largest volume as lately published at London, and that it should be placed in the Hall of Glory as guidance that it might be useful to their servants or strangers. But the Bishop's Library was a failure from the start, never accepted by a third of your people, and was, I conclude, We have traced the development of the English Bible through the 16th century, rather quickly over the last two or three. There were six Protestant translations of the Scripture – Tyndale, Coatdale, Matthew, the Great Bible, Geneva, and Bishops, and of course Wycliffe's of the 14th century. And then in addition, because of the strength of the English Reformation, The Roman and Catholic Church, against their own will, were forced to produce their own version of the scriptures from the Latin holy, known as the Duairines Bible. Tyndale's supreme merit lay in his clinging to the syntax of the original text of scripture. The Geneva Bible, with its verse divisions and extensive notes of explanation and application, revealed an intense desire to interpret the text for the common people, and for that reason it very quickly became a people's Bible. The Bishop's Bible was so backward-looking and so uneven that its greatest merit was it made the King James Bible necessary. And King James I, when he came to the throne in 1613, he inherited a divided church with two bibles. On the one hand the high churchmen had the bishop's bibles, on the other hand the puritans had the legal bibles. And the motion of Dr. John Reynolds on the second day of the Hampton Court Conference in January 1604 that there be a new translation of the Bible was seized upon by King James, not for religious reasons but for political reasons. And it was overruled in the providence of Almighty God to bring to a climax a century of endeavours by godly and by scholarly men to give to the English-speaking peoples of the world the greatest treasure of the English Reformation, the authorised version of the Word of God. I end with a quotation from a bishop, a godly bishop, Bishop J. C. Royal of Liverpool. He says this, we owe to the Reformation and English Bible and liberty for every man, woman, and child in the land to read, with an English Bible being a right and duty of private judgment, and the assertion of the great Prince of Ossetia's article that Holy Scripture contains all things needful to salvation and the only rule of faith and practice. He goes on, of all the agencies which brought about the overthrow of Popery in this country, the translation of the Bible was the earliest and most powerful. It struck a blow at the root of the whole Romish system. Before every Bible, and fair play for all who used it, the Pope's champions could not The huge fabric of popery cracked, shivered, and came to the ground like a pack of cards. With a bind in every parish church, every thoughtful man soon saw that the religion of the priest had no warrant in Holy Scripture. He goes on, it is a striking and instructive that of all agencies which combined to win the English Reformation hardly any called forth such bitter opposition as the translation and circulation of the Scriptures. Nothing seemed to have alarmed and enraged the Romish priesthood so much as the spread of English Bibles. The priests even felt that their game was up if people once saw inside of the Bible You might as well have tried to stop the tide riding a jet stone, or prevent Jupiter's satellites revolving round him, and stop the progress of the present cause when the laity once began to read the scriptures. Its meaning, contents and principles ran through the land like fire, and from that period, the Pope's quality of England was shaken to the centre. You that read the Bible daily, and delight in the law of the Lord. Never forget, you owe the Bible to the English Reformation. Amen. We are deeply grateful to David Almond for that most inspiring and instructive lecture. We do thank God for that. We're going to close now by singing the Doxology together. That's 899 if you have it in book. And then we'll have a prayer. Praise the Lord, full of blessings, O! Praise Him, O Jesus, dearly loved! Praise Him, our loving Heavenly Lord! Now unto Him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy. To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen. Our Heavenly Father, we do thank you too now for the fellowship and refreshments that we shall enjoy together. And we pray that you would write on our hearts what we have heard. For Jesus' sake. Amen.