"Battle for the Bible"

Tonight, I watched a show on PBS called "Battle for the Bible." It was a great show... for the first 30 minutes. The second half was a bit too much commentary and too little history, but that's PBS for ya. The topic of the show was the difficulty that English people went through to get a translation of the Bible in their own language.

Even as a church planter, I often forget just how much struggle, sacrifice, and even martyrdom precluded our modern English Bible translations. We have so many Bibles available to us today, from the Bibles for sale at Christian bookstores, to the Gideon Bible you can find in a hotel room, to the Bibles (dusty, maybe?) that most of us have in our homes.

But the truth is that for hundreds of years the Catholic Church (the only one in Europe until the 1500's) prohibited the common folk (like you and me) to possess a Bible. On top of that, the only Bible available to the priests in the Catholic churches was written in Latin. The Catholic worship service, called Mass, was recited in Latin. Only Catholic priests and a very few other elite, educated people were able to read Latin or understand spoken Latin. So, knowledge of what the Bible said was pretty much out of reach for almost all people who called themselves Christians.

In the 1380's, Englishman John Wycliffe took it upon himself to translate the Bible into English, so his countrymen could finally read it. He believed that only good things could come out of people having access to God's Word. The Catholic Church condemned Wycliffe and other Bible translators who attempted to render the Scriptures in English and other vernacular languages. The new translations threatened the power of the Catholic Church, because they called its leadership out on many teachings that were not found in Scripture.

Wycliffe and his assistants had to translate the Bible painstakingly by hand, since Gutenberg had yet to invent the printing press! Wycliffe died of natural causes, but for the next couple hundred years, the Catholic Church labeled those who attempted to translate the Bible into English as false teachers. They chased them around Europe and repeatedly burned them at the stake when they caught them.

Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation in 1517, when he nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, Germany. During the struggles that followed this event, many men rose up to translate the Bible into the languages of the various people of Europe.

In 1525, William Tyndale was the first man to have his English New Testament translation mechanically printed. He was burned at the stake by Catholic authorities in 1536.

Myles Coverdale and John “Thomas Matthew” Rogers had worked with Tyndale on his New Testament. On October 4, 1535, they published the first complete Bible in English. This translation is known as the Coverdale Bible. In 1537, Rogers published the second complete English Bible, and the first to be translated from the original languages (Hebrew for the Old Testament and Greek for the New Testament).

In 1539, the King of England finally allowed the Bible to be legally printed in English and read on English soil. Thus began the era of widely-available English Bible translations, although there were still periods of persecution of those who cherished the English Bible. For instance, during the reign of Catholic Queen "Bloody" Mary, hundreds of people (including John Rogers) were burned at the stake for being Protestants.

These days, hundreds of years after Wycliffe, we take our English Bibles for granted. Today, why not think about all that went into giving you the Bible you read today, and thank God for courageous men who would not give up until they made it possible for you to hold that priceless Word of God in English.