This spring is the 500th anniversary of William Tyndale’s bible. Working in and around language I often heard that Tyndale published the first vernacular English bible, but I never bothered to look up the whole story. The latest print edition of History Today tells the story with appropriate drama.
He studied and wrote for ten years, then spent two years in Germany trying to find a printer. Along the way he picked up some collaborators.
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He made contact with like-minded expatriates with the will, if not the skill, to collaborate as translators. Among them was William Roy, a former Franciscan friar. When they finally went their separate ways, Tyndale recalled, “I bade him farewell for our two lives, and a day longer.”
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Now there’s a man who knows how to write!!!!!
After Tyndale paid one of Gutenberg’s former employees to print 3000 copies of the New Testament, he smuggled them back into England, hiding the books in bales of cloth from Holland. The English church acted with the same zealous dispatch as its descendants in our modern FBI and TSA. Bishops and royal agents burned every copy they could find, and finally executed Tyndale in 1536.
Those bishops would have LOVED Amazon e-books. When a book fails to satisfy one of the Thousand Mandates, no need to search or burn, just push a button and all copies magically disappear. We’ve Rectified Gutenberg.
Polistra's Mill 