The Word of God: Part One: Is It Worth Your Life?

Let us not take for granted having the Bible to read. Six hundred years ago people like you and me did not have access to the written Word of God. We could not sit in our homes, hold a Bible in our hands, and read it for personal growth. The few words we would have heard from Scripture would have been in Latin, read by a Catholic priest. So around 1500 A.D, people who believed in the importance of the Bible began to risk their lives to make understandable these holy words. William Tyndale was one such man. He was a leading figure in the Protestant reformation. He believed each person should be able to read the Scriptures for himself, in his own language with ease.   But to achieve this goal, he had to translate the Gospels and Apostolic letters, the Canon as it is called, from Greek to English. The Latin Bible was being used by Catholic priests, and the Greek New Testament was being studied by scholars. Yet the common man, people like us, did not have access to the Word of God. While in his twenties, William Tyndale set out to change that fact. Even though people had been burned at the stake when they were caught with an unlicensed possession of Scripture in English, he stepped up to the plate to make his dream a reality. He had to work in secret because what he was doing was illegal. Getting caught meant the death penalty. What was having an English Bible illegal?   A usable Bible was seen as a threat to the Powers that Be. The Catholic Church saw it as undermining the power of the priesthood and the authority of the pope. The king of England, Henry the VIII, saw it as a threaten to the laws of the nation. Nevertheless Tyndale started working on his translation in secret. Crucial to his success were two factors: first, the Gutenberg printing press had just been invented. Second, Martin Luther had just started the reformation process in Germany, influencing people to challenge the views of the Catholic church and to embrace a personal relationship with Jesus on their own. Because Tyndale was in danger of being caught, he exiled himself to Antwerp, Belgium at the age of 28. There he could continue his work.   For 12 years, he smuggled chapter by chapter of the NT out, in boats over the English Channel, hidden between other printed material. His translation of the Greek words of Jesus found their way into the Lord’s prayer, phrases in the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Apostle Paul. Stay tuned to see what happened...