It is easy to take things for granted. It is easy to forget that
many of the conveniences that we enjoy on a daily basis were not possible even
a few generations ago. We travel quickly by car and by plane, enjoy all kinds
of entertainment, chat with our friends on
computers and mobile phones, and enjoy a variety of activities without a second thought as to the work, trouble, challenges and possible sacrifice that someone faced to make
these activities a possibility. The same holds true regarding the Bible- now the best selling book in
the world found in many stores, churches and homes in a
multitude of languages. There was a time when possessing
a Bible was nearly impossible and if you had the good
fortune of finding one - it was a crime to have it
in the English language... that is, until someone
came along who was willing to sacrifice a lifetime to make
it available for you and me. Tyndale's childhood was spent
in the county to the west of Britian called Gloustershire
which is on the border of Wales. Gloustershire was a
wonderful rich county... very beautiful still, and
through it runs a big river, big by British standards
called the river "Severn" which flows down to a port called Bristol, from which ships went all over
the world in Tyndale's time. Tyndale went to school from a
very young age at a nearby town, a very fine and very famous
school where among other things he would learn very good Latin, the language of scholars throughout Europe, and the language of the church. From there he went to the
University of Oxford... we don't quite know when, but he went to Oxford
something like when he was 1 2, and he stayed there for 1 0 years and his life there would
be listening to lectures and reading books but, of course, the books he'd be reading
had been handwritten because there weren't
many printed books about. The two most important things
about his time in Oxford were first he was passionately
interested in the Scriptures, but the Scriptures were
not studied at Oxford even though he was supposed
to be doing theology. And the second was that
while he was at Oxford, the New Testament, a great Christian book, which was originally in Greek, was printed in Greek for the first time by a wonderful European
scholar called Erasmus. And while Tyndale was
in Oxford as a student, Erasmus's printed New Testament
in Greek flooded Europe and everything more or
less in Tyndale's life came from that event. He realized that now that we had
the printed Greek New Testament, he could translate from the original Greek from the original language in which the New Testament was written, into English even though at that time, even to translate a sentence into English was against the law and
to be severely punished. How would I describe Tyndale, the man. Just from the work I did,
doing the voice for him, you get a sense of a man
who is driven by something, who is driven by what he believes in to the point of death. He's prepared to lay his entire life down. Then you get the impression of somebody who's precociously gifted who has an ability with something who finds fulfillment
by using that ability. He's a brilliant scholar, he's a brilliant translator
but he has a passion, and his passion is that everybody will have access to the
Bible that he has access to, even if you're just a farm laborer, everyone has a right to that access, it has a right to know what
God's Word actually is. For those of us living in this day and age, it may be difficult to
believe that translating text from the Bible into our own language would be considered a
crime, however a quick look into the political and religious atmosphere in the 1 500s gives us a better
understanding of the world in which Tyndale lived and why
having the Bible in English could pose a threat to the
ruling order of his day. Nowadays, when we have many,
many Christian denominations, particularly in America, it may be difficult to realize
that at the time of Tyndale and for the previous 1 200 years, there had been in Europe...
only one church... when Tyndale was a child,
there were circulating in Gloustershire and throughout
that part of England, illegal translations of
the Bible into English. But these were translated
not from the Greek, but from the Latin. The Latin, the Church said at that time was the language of the Bible. This is absolutely untrue. The language of the
New Testament is Greek, the language of the Old
Testament is Hebrew. They had been translated
into Latin 1200 years before and the Church insisted that
that was the only language. One of the reasons for keeping it in Latin, keeping the scriptures
in Latin, was control. So that if the people didn't
know what the scriptures said, they couldn't realize
what the church was doing that was not in the scripture, of which were quite a lot of things. If you tried to translate
the Bible into English, you'd be very severely punished because this was regarded as heresy, which is to say, something the
Church regarded as not true, and in order to make this complete they set the punishment for
doing this extremely severe, the least you would have
is imprisonment for life and most commonly you would be burned. There was the idea which
the Roman church put about very strongly, that the scripture was too difficult for the people to understand and that it had to be interpreted from the Latin by a priest. Now we know, all of us that have
Bibles in our hands these days, know that that's not true. Of course, there are difficulties and hard bits to read but the Gospels, the parables of Jesus,
anybody can understand. During his time at Oxford,
Tyndale studied religion and also acquired knowledge
and proficiency as a linguist. He mastered 8 languages
including Greek and Latin and began to make a name for
himself as a bright scholar. Having finished his studies,
Tyndale could have pursued a comfortable lifestyle as a scholar but his study of the New Testament in its original language was having an effect in
his own life and heart and a longing to share the
treasures of the Word of God with others began to grow. His passion for the Scriptures
was never purely academic, though he was very skilled. No, he had realized while he was at Oxford that the Greek New Testament
had to be in English, that God was calling him to do that. Tyndale sensed a calling from God... to make the Bible accessible
to his countrymen in their own language. He felt this was of great importance but he had no idea how to go about it. It was at this time that the first of many doors opened to him. After Oxford, Tyndale went
back to Gloustershire to a wonderful manor house, quite a long way south where he had been, called Little Sodbury Manor,
where Sir John and Lady Walsh were the family in residence. And they took Tyndale in as
a tutor to their children. Now it's quite clear that since
the children were very small that to have a great Oxford
scholar to tutor your children, would not take him a great
deal of his day and I think it's quite clear that they
were sympathetic to his idea of having a quiet place in which
to translate the New Testament from Greek into English. They would invite a lot
of local people to meals where Tyndale would be present and very often there were
quite interesting discussions. And on one famous occasion, a local, a visiting priest said that "we were better without
God's law than the Pope's". And Tyndale replied "I defy
the pope and all his laws. If God spare my life ere many years I shall cause the boy that driveth the plow to know more of scripture than thou dost."' And of course that's what he did. Tyndale's passion began
to draw the attention of the local clergy. It was clear to those that supported him, such as Sir John and Lady Anne Walsh, that his outspoken convictions
could endanger his life. One possible way of translating the Bible with the official blessing of the church, was to do it under the
guise of a scholarly study. With this in mind, Tyndale
approached Tunstil, the Bishop of London,
who had been known to be sympathetic to the ideas that Tyndale had. Tunstil looked at Tyndale's
Greek translation of Isocrates and was very impressed with
his translating abilities; clearly Tyndale was a capable
and brilliant linguist. However, to Tyndale's
proposal for a translation of the New Testament, the Bishop's response was
"no" and he had his reasons. Tunstil was under the authority
of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, a very powerful man in King
Henry the VIII's court. From the son of a butcher,
Cardinal Wolsey had become a very influential and feared
person within the Church as well as politically. Cardinal Wolsey would not be pleased with an English version of the Bible. For Tyndale this rejection
represented the last possibility in which he could obey what
he felt to be God's calling, within the official and accepted
Church means of operation. However, he had another option left. When Tyndale took his Greek
translation of Isocrates to London to show it to Bishop
Tunstel and was snubbed, he stayed in London for a year. staying with a merchant called
Monmouth, Henry Monmouth, and also preaching in London. We know the church at which he preached and we know a lot of people heard him. But he realized, having
hung about in London trying to get permission, he realized as he said later that there was no place in all England where he could do this work. So, with Monmouth's money helping him, Monmouth was a rich merchant, he went over to Germany which
was a very sensible idea. And, he believes in it so
passionately, he's prepared to, well, completely wreck his life. He becomes a fugitive,
he becomes an outlaw, he has to live a long way away
from people that he loves, he's often working in danger. So he's a bit of an adventurer really. Tyndale, as he left England
with Monmouth's support was breaking the law, and
both of them knew it. Because it was illegal
in England to translate any part of the Bible into English. When Tyndale was crossing
the sea to go to Germany, just at that time we know
of a young man in Norwich, a city north of London, was burned alive for having in his possession
a small piece of paper on which was written the
Lord's prayer in English. Now Tyndale knew that
he was going to Germany and was not out of range
of King Henry or Wolsey, or Bishop Tunstil even. He was taking a risk. He knew that he would probably
never see England again because while Henry was alive
and while Wolsey was powerful and others around him in the court, as soon as he stepped back into England he would be arrested and burned. In 1 500, that is a long time ago, there were in Europe that we know, a thousand printers and
we know them by name. England had two and they were
neither of them any good. So for Tyndale to go abroad to Germany, to a printing house in
Germany was very sensible. One, because it would be good printing. Two, because the resultant book
would be widely circulated. So he settled in Cologne, at
a very famous printing shop with a man called Peter Quentel and began to print the Greek
New Testament in English, the work he'd been doing at Little Sodbury. Printing in the 1 500s was very different from the way we print today. Printers used small pieces of metal on which they had engraved
single letters of the alphabet. These could then be arranged
and rearranged on large wooden blocks to
form words and sentences. The letters were dabbed with
ink and a single sheet of paper was placed over them and clamped down to make the imprint of words. It was a very tedious and slow process, but much quicker than the
way books were duplicated before the invention of the printing press which was to write each page by hand. Printing in Europe could be very good; you could produce a very beautiful book on beautiful paper with beautiful type and beautifully bound. Most of the time the printing
was just ordinary and unbound. If you bought a book you
bought it without a binding, you just bought the loose leaves
and got it bound yourself. Printing could be very
quick and very successful and very accurate. Peter Quentel was printing
powerful Catholic documents and also printing things
like the New Testament and comments on them which
were forbidden in England. But it was a little looser
in Germany and in Belgium and there was more freedom. Peter Quentel was not
quite breaking the law but he would have known that had Tyndale finished
his New Testament it would have been smuggled into England. But on the other hand
printers are not fools, he wouldn't have set up
what was going to be a very beautiful book without knowing it was going to be bought and he was going to make a lot of money off of it. There were thousands upon
thousands of people in England waiting to receive it, to buy it. To be honest with you, I bet Tyndale wasn't even aware
of how rough his life was because he was thrilled on that day when the printing press went down, when he saw it for the first time... or when he saw the first bound edition, when he saw the ship going off, full of those books that
thousands of people would read and have their lives changed. That's what he was aware
of, he wasn't aware of "Oh, flippin' I’m feeling a
bit lonely or hungry today," or, you know, that that
kind of passion forms you, not the inconveniences of your life. Tyndale got as far as nearly
the end of Matthew's gospel, which is about a twentieth part
of the whole New Testament, when the print shop was raided. This was because a rather nasty man, who went under the Latin
name of Cochlaeus was violently, violently
against Martin Luther and wrote enormous amounts
against Martin Luther, discovered that Quentel was printing a New Testament in English. The story goes that he
got the printers drunk and when they were drunk they said 'there's a book being printed that is going to change England'. So, Cochlaeus told Henry's court, Henry's court got back to Cologne and the Cologne authorities were
persuaded to raid the shop. Luckily, he gets warning
that Cochlaeus' raid on Quentel's print shop is coming and he and his helper, a
man called William Roy, manage to take the manuscript and the few leaves they printed with them and sail in a boat up the river Rhine to a city which was safe for
them, a city called Worms. We can only imagine the difficulty in which Tyndale was
working up to this point. Surely it was satisfying work; he was seeing his vision
coming to a reality. At the same time, this
had come with a price. After the raid on Peter
Quentel's print shop, Tyndale was forced to flee
and began to live life as a fugitive. If things were difficult
prior to this incident, they became more so afterwards. Without a doubt, it must
have been difficult to know he was being pursued by the authorities when his only intentions were to
bring God's Word to his people. And 6,000 were printed- which was a lot for a book of that time- smuggled down the Rhine
across to England, to the English seaports and
the Scottish seaports as well, to the north, and eagerly received. They were so eagerly received
that Tunstel heard of this and sent as it were his
police to raid the Christians who were buying these, seize them and to punish the
owners, sometimes with death and he arranged in London a large bonfire of Tyndale's 1 526, which was the date he made the
first English New Testament. Now when we hold our modern
Bibles we have to remember that to have a Bible in
English in your hand, is less than 500 years old. You could only do that
thanks to Tyndale in 1 526. We have to remember that it was
a small book, it was this size, it was a book that you could
not only hold in your hand, but slip into your pocket. So that you could take it into the fields, you could read it around the hearth, you could read it in
the pub, as people did, you could read it in the backs
of churches, as people did. We always have to remember this because we're used to
Bibles to being bigger. But every book that Tyndale ever
printed, and he printed many, were all pocketbooks. The people in England were eager to read God's Word in English. Every book that was secretly
brought into England quickly found its way
into the hands and homes of sincere Christians. There was already a network of Christians who were eagerly awaiting them. Now, these were the people
who had heard that there was a printed New Testament from
the Greek coming into England, and there would be an alert and
the network would be alerted. And within eight years we
know that 20,000 copies of it were printed and bought in England. This was in spite of the fact
that the bishop of London originally collected as
many as he could find, and punished the owners
and made a great bonfire outside St. Paul's cathedral
and burned them all. Now, this is a terrible
thing, to burn God's Word, but he also preached a sermon,
while the burning was going on in which he said that this was heresy, the church refused it, because there were 2000 errors
in Tyndale's translation. Well, of course there were,
from Tunstel's point of view, because Tyndale was
translating from the Greek not from the church's Latin. Tyndale later said that the
church was so determined to make him a heretic that
if he failed to dot an "i", they would call that heresy and burn him. Hearing in Germany of
the burning of his books and the hostility, Tyndale didn't give up
as a lesser man would. What he did was do something
that was completely strange in England, he learned
the Hebrew language. The Old Testament, what we Christians
call the Old Testament, the Jewish scriptures,
are written in Hebrew... But Worms, as it happened, was a
center of rabbinical learning. And Tyndale learned there
Hebrew, very good Hebrew, and he went from Worms
to Antwerp on the coast, the Belgium coast, a very thriving seaport which was full of printers and
there he printed his first, the first ever translations
from Hebrew into English, the first five books of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, Deuteronomy. The first five books of Moses and these were also smuggled
across in larger numbers. Tyndale then went on, as
well as writing other books, he then went on to revise his 1 526. This he published in Antwerp
very well in 1 534 and many, many of these were smuggled into England and were more successful. Fewer of them were destroyed
and one of them actually came to Henry's court and was proudly
owned by the young woman who became Henry's second
queen, Anne Boleyn. This is a remarkable volume which the British library now holds, I've held it in my hands, and around the four edge
is written in Latin 'owned by Anne Boleyn, Queen'. It's a wonderful document and
she was sympathetic to Tyndale and what he was doing... King Henry knowing of Tyndale's books, his New Testament translations, his Old Testament translations and his others books,
realized that this was a man who was going to have more
influence even in England than he was having. He therefore thought it
would be a good idea if Tyndale became part of his own court where he could be controlled. So through various means
he sent a messenger, a man called Steven Vaughn, who went to meet Tyndale
secretly in Antwerp. They met in the corner of a field by night. And we have a record from Steven Vaughn of how the conversation went. While Tyndale was in
Antwerp, that very busy, very thriving port, he was living in what we
call the English House, which was the house of
the English merchants. It was a little bit like an Oxford College in that everybody would live together and Tyndale would be
very comfortable there. But it also allowed him some protection because it being the English House, it was a little bit like a modern embassy which is that when you have
an American embassy in London when you go into it you are
actually going into America. So when he was in the
English House at Antwerp, in a sense he would be
under English law and saved because the Belgian people were aware they couldn't
do anything to him. But at the same time, he
knew that he was in danger and therefore he had to be quiet. The English merchants knew
that he had to be kept secret even though he was free from European law he was under danger. Now Steven Vaughn, who was sent from Henry's
court to interview him, had to spend a long time trying to find him but he would know through rumor that he was somewhere in Antwerp, and he would know that probably somebody in the English House would know, but he didn't want to
compromise the English house by meeting there, so they met secretly in the field by night. The outcome was that Steven
Vaughn said that the King would be ready to bring
him back to the court if he would come. Tyndale said that he
would certainly come back if the King would only authorize the translation of the Bible into English. Tyndale made very clear
to Steven Vaughn that he was a loyal subject of the King, that he was in no way a man of treason, that he wanted to do the best
for King Henry's England and he pointed out that England
was alone in that time, in not having the Scriptures
in the common language. But all the other European countries way down as far as Spain
and to the East, by then, had had the scriptures in their
language for many, many decades, for a long time, England was alone. So that if the King would
authorize a Bible in English, Tyndale would be very happy
to come kneel at his feet. But until then, he was not coming. So Vaughn took that message back. Tyndale's refusal of King Henry's offer infuriated the king and as a result, he ordered a stronger ban on his writings. Tyndale found himself in
greater danger than ever as the authorities were determined to put a stop to his influence. While Tyndale lives in the
English House in Antwerp- and he's just finished a new
manuscript in handwriting, his translation of the second
quarter of the old Testament, the historical books,
Joshua through Chronicles- a horrible, horrible Englishman
called Henry Phillips starts turning up at the English House. He claims to be a great
admirer of William Tyndale and is introduced to him and
Tyndale who is a nice man, befriends him and likes him
and shows him his work. Phillips even offers to help
him but he has no skills. We know two things about Phillips. First, he was an appalling villain. His father who lived in the
west country in England had entrusted Henry Phillips
with all his money, to take into safe keeping in London and Phillips, on the way, had spent it all. And Phillips was desperate for money. So this came to the notice of the church authorities in London, particularly the new Bishop of London, a man called Bishop Stokesly, who decided to give Henry
Phillips some money if he would make sure that
Tyndale was captured and killed. So Phillips turns up smarmily trying to be friends with Tyndale who takes it in completely
and doesn't realize. And presently, Phillips
invites Tyndale out to lunch and Tyndale agrees- though it's a foolish
thing for Tyndale to do because it means stepping
out of the safe house. But when they go out of the door, there waiting for him are soldiers, arranged by Phillips and he is arrested and taken to the Holy Roman
Emperor's court in Brussels, where he is tried for heresy or at least is accused
of heresy at this point, and plunged into a dungeon cell
in a castle called Vilvorde Castle,
outside Brussels, it doesn't exist anymore. That day when Tyndale was in court, he could have compromised. But if he'd had compromised he knew that there couldn't
have been an English translation of the Bible
available for people, that they wouldn't have heard. Another century would go by
with the Bible being chained up in churches and people
wouldn't have access to it. So he was prepared to
cause that much trouble to do what he believed
God had called him to do. He then spends the next sixteen
months of his life in darkness. We know it's in darkness,
we know it's in cold, unable to have his books,
unable to do any work, but visited very frequently,
every day by Catholic scholars from the university of Lervin, nearby, who are trying to convict him of heresy and take him through all
the points of his belief. This is not to save his life, he was going to lose his life anyway. This was to save him in the afterlife so that he would try to confess his heresy, his heresy of having translated
the Bible into English. This, of course, he never did confess because it was what he lived by. But while he was there, in the prison cell, we know he was in bad condition because quite early on he
was arrested in August. And in September, as the
weather's getting colder, he wrote to the authorities
a letter in Latin, as it had to be, everything was in Latin, saying could he please have
his own warm clothing, which had been confiscated. They were allowed to do that, confiscate the prisoners' clothing. A light for the evenings because he said, 'as it's getting dark, it is wearisome sitting
alone in the dark'. This is the greatest scholar in Europe who is sitting alone in
the dark for 1 6 months! He also asks for his Hebrew
dictionary and Hebrew grammar and Hebrew Scriptures so that
he can go on with his work. Obviously, those are not
going to be supplied and we don't think any
of them were supplied. But for 1 6 months he was subject
to interrogation in Latin. While Tyndale was in jail he was looked after not only by the jailer, but by the jailer's
daughter and both of them became very fond of Tyndale,
they found him a wonderful man. And clearly, though in Flemish, the language of the time in Belgium, Tyndale was able to speak to them. So impressed were they
by Tyndale as a man, and the work he had done, and his faith in Jesus Christ that they were converted. This is told to us by a later
historian called John Fox. And then on the morning
of October 6th, 1 536, he was taken out of his cell, stripped, degraded from the priesthood,
a special ceremony, and then tied to a stake in
the courtyard of the prison, in the presence of grand churchmen, who had come to celebrate the occasion, and burned as a heretic. And before he was burned,
because he was a great scholar, they allowed him to be strangled first, so he didn't actually die of burning, he died of strangulation
and then he was burned. His final prayer, "God open the
eyes of the king of England." I think it tells me that
he could see something that most of us choose not to see. I think it says, Paul says
in the New Testament, "that we're supposed to fix
our eyes on what is unseen" and that must imply that what is unseen can be perceived in some way. Tyndale could see that
actually the consequences of the king of England opening his eyes would be the people would get to see the kingdom of God that Jesus taught. The authorities could not have envisioned the influence that Tyndale's final witness would have in their country. As with many martyrs before him, Tyndale's willingness to sacrifice his life for the sake of the Gospel fulfilled a wonderful verse of scripture. Jesus said, "Except a corn of
wheat fall unto the ground and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it will
bring forth much fruit!" With his last breath, Tyndale offered up a
prayer not for himself, but for that of his own country. After that he was more
or less forgotten. His colleague in the English
house, a man called John Rogers, who was chaplain to the English house, made sure that the manuscript of the second quarter of the Old Testament, the historical books, Joshua to
Chronicles, went into print. So that after his death, we have in print two New Testaments and
half of the Old Testament. But whether he went beyond 2 Chronicles into the great, wonderful
poetic and prophetic books of the Old Testament, we shall never know. To think of what Tyndale would
have made of the book of Job, the prophet Jeremiah, the Psalms, we have no knowledge of this. We can gather, we can hint, that he would have made
wonderful things of them. But the really tragic part of the story is that within ten months
of Tyndale's death, King Henry was authorizing
a Bible in English, for the English people. And from that point, everybody could have
access to Tyndale's bible, because half the Bible that was printed was in fact Tyndale's. But it wasn't mentioned. When this first edition in 1 53 7, ten months after Tyndale's death, when this first edition was printed by his colleague John Rogers, there's no mention of Tyndale in it. No mention at all. In fact, it had to be so
secret who was the author that they invented a different name for it and called it Thomas Matthew's Bible. Immensely popular in England, it was bought almost as soon as it arrived. And out of that, King Henry
so struck by the popularity authorized his own, very big revision of the whole bible, which he issued to every parish We call it the Great Bible and an enormous number of copies
of that were made and survived. But, everybody knew that
Thomas Matthew's Bible, the first one was Tyndale because between the Old
Testament and the New there are some ornamental letters, "WT' ', which tell everybody that that
really is the work of Tyndale. Well Jesus commanded
the apostles, he said, "Go and wait in Jerusalem till you get some power from on high. Then go into all the whole world and make disciples of all nations." In other words 'make people My disciples, under My discipline, doing what I do. Teach them what I’ve taught you.' If you're going to do that,
you need the Words of Jesus, you need His teachings,
you can't make disciples unless you've got the stuff
that you need to do the job, those are the tools. It's a bit like saying,
"Go and build some houses. But, by the way, you can't
have any tools or materials to do it with." Well, you can't build the house. You need God's Word. And Jesus said that, 'man doesn't live by bread alone, he lives by every Word that comes out of the mouth of God.' Now people didn't have access to that Word, so you could come to a knowledge of God and you could understand but if you really, really wanted to do the things
that God wanted you to do, and know the things that
God wanted you to know. If you wanted the depth
of that freedom and life, you needed access to those Words. And if you didn't have
access to those Words, you couldn't have that
and Tyndale knew that. It seems to me that, it wasn't a superfluous
thing he was doing by bringing God's Word to
people who did not have it. It seemed to me to be essential,
absolutely essential. And the legacies, you can't
measure the legacy of Tyndale. If Tyndale hadn't had done what he did, you don't know if the King James Bible would have ever been
translated in the first place. You do not know the consequences. Because there are the thousands
and thousands of people who receive God's Word
and change their lives and change other people's lives. If you think the world's in a mess now, imagine how bad it would be if
Tyndale hadn't had got that Word to those people who needed to hear it. Tyndale, we know, gave his life
for translating the Bible. And we must always remember when we hold a modern
English Bible in our hands that the English Bible
was made in blood. It's very important to remember that. At the same time we rejoice
that what Tyndale opened has never been shut up since. It's always there. Tyndale paid a great price to obey God. We must not forget those
who helped him in his task, the friends, supporters
and fellow-workers who also gave of themselves
to make his work possible. Around Tyndale were very
powerful friends who suffered; Henry Monmouth who'd
helped him in England was, under Thomas Moore, raided and imprisoned
and books confiscated and he suffered severely financially. Eventually he was let
free, he wasn't killed. John Frith, a very dear friend, an Oxford friend of Tyndale who was probably the most
brilliant theologian in Europe at the time, he had to be killed, having being imprisoned many months and shackled by his feet and his arms so that he couldn't lie down. The amount of cruelty involved
in pursuing heretics, is beyond belief. But the man who carried a
great deal of responsibility and affection for Tyndale was
Ann Poyntz's brother, Thomas, who was living in Antwerp
in the English House. And Thomas was horrified
by Tyndale's arrest, and tried to get the English merchants to do something about it. And they began to do something about it, but is was all blocked. They couldn't get Tyndale rescued because all the attempts to rescue him were being blocked by Henry Phillips. But Thomas was determined to
rescue Tyndale from prison and so vicious was the attack
on heresy at the time, that Thomas himself suddenly found that because he was a friend of Tyndale, he himself was going to
be arrested and burned. So he escaped from his house
in Antwerp leaving his wife and his family and business behind and went to England. Totally failed to make any
connection with the court. His wife divorced him,
saying I don't want to have anything to do with this man anymore because he's a heretic. He left his family, he left his business, and he died eventually in England, a disgraced courtier in poverty. Tyndale's legacy to us all is not only his witness
as a great Christian man but, above all, the scriptures in English, written with a clarity that is immediately
understandable by anybody. I've spent a long time studying Tyndale and working through his translations, seeing what the original
was and how he made it, and I’ve written books about him and he remains an astonishingly
powerful figure for me; a man who was prepared
to sacrifice everything, including his life for giving
people the Scriptures, so they could read them. So, therefore, I respond
so much more strongly to the Scriptures in
English than I did before, I've always been a Christian, but before I knew Tyndale's work I find that I think here is the original, speaking through Tyndale,
and I love him for it. Well, here's the deal,
you've got the Word of God and it can be on your library,
it can be on a bookshelf, it can be in your parents
leather bound book that's up there. But the deal is, that Word is
supposed to be in your heart. That's why it says, 'Now I have
hidden your Word in my heart that I might not sin against you.' That's where God wants
His Word, in your heart, in your heart where it does stuff. When I read John's gospel for
the first time it did affect me, something happened in me. Something started to happen in me. Because you read those
Words of Jesus and you go, "Why didn't anybody tell me He said this. No one told me He said
this. This is great." And that came for me from
having access to it. If I had never been able to read that, I wouldn't know about Jesus. I wouldn't know what He did, I wouldn't know about what He said. So that when the time came
when I was ready to have that experience with God,
I had that Word in me. What the Word of God does is it kind of makes you
big on the inside. It makes you bigger on the inside so that God can put stuff in there. But you need that Word in you. The Bible continues to outsell any book that has ever been published. Wherever it is read with
an open and hungry heart it brings understanding, joy, satisfaction and an awareness of God's
love for each individual. That we can read it in English
is due in large part to a man whose vision and love for others
far surpassed personal concern for his own well-being. Tyndale, we know, gave his life
for translating the Bible. We must all remember when we
hold a modern English Bible in our hands that the English
Bible was made in blood; very important to remember that. At the same time we rejoice
that what Tyndale opened has never been shut up since. It's always there.
