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The word without price ‘Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have: for he has said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” So we can say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?”’ (Hebrews 13, 5-6) These are words from Scripture which bring to mind examples of self-sacrificing lives – lives dedicated to God and unmindful of money and its lure. A shining example is surely William Tyndale (c. 1494 – 1536) who forfeited health, wealth, country and even his life to give the English-speaking world the bible in their mother tongue. The priests at that time in England were in many cases desperately ignorant. An examination conducted by William Warham, then Archbishop of Canterbury, uncovered alarming figures: many priests were found unable to recite the Creed and a number not only ignorant of where to find the Lord’s prayer or who had written it (!) but also completely unable to recite it.
The venom of the local Gloucestershire clergy, who felt threatened by Tyndale’s attack on the errors of the Vulgate (the precious Latin Bible treasured since Jerome had first translated it a thousand years earlier) had Tyndale up before the Chancellor. Only the standing of his employer, Sir John Walsh, together with his own stout defence, helped Tyndale to win that round.
After further attacks upon him, Tyndale fled to the Continent where he laboured in poverty, cold and hunger, flitting between Worms, Cologne and Antwerp to get his New Testament translated into English from the best Greek texts of the day. Back in England, Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, and the sinister John Stokesley, his successor, seized as many of Tyndale’s Testaments as they could, as they were unloaded at the port, and burned the books in a bonfire at St Paul’s.
Eventually Tyndale was tracked down and incarcerated in the fortress of Vilvorde for more than a year. In 1536 he was stripped of his priesthood and burned to death.
Had Tyndale known that less than a year ealier Miles Coverdale’s complete English Bible had been dedicated to Henry VIII and was even then circulating in England, he would have rejoiced. As it was, he could rejoice that the work begun by him would be unstoppable. ‘The Lord is my helper’ had been the strength that sustained him. The Bible today is so readily available to us that we tend to take it for granted and forget the courage of others like William Tyndale who gave us The Word, without price on our part. Are we using their gift to the full? Eric Wallington
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