The Word of God. Part Two: Burned for the Word

William Tyndale worked from his age of 28 to 40 finishing the NT, and worked on translating the First Five Books of the OT from Hebrew to English. As he could, he smuggled these illegal sections of the Bible to England, hidden within legal printed material. It is noteworthy that Tyndale had to formulate words such as atonement and passover for his work on the OT, because those Hebrew concepts had never been put into English. He had a small group of supporters. One man, Henry Phillips, came from England to worked with him for a while, befriending him, and gained his trust. But one night Phillips took Tyndale out of his secret house for a “nice dinner on the town”. In a dark alley, Phillips betrayed Tyndale to the authorities the scholar was arrested. In 1534, at the age of 40, Tyndale was jailed in a castle in Belgium, and put into solitary confinement. He was not allowed the Latin Bible to read, nor was he permitted any books or even a light. He languished for 500 days, and then was brought to trial. The authorities convicted him of heresy. He was to be strangulated so he would face a merciful death, and then burned at the stake. Sadly, the strangulation wasn’t successful and he screamed out to the Lord as the flames consumed him. His dying prayer was that the King of England would see the Word of God be placed in the hands of all Englishmen.   Two years after Tyndall’s death this prayer was answered: King Henry did authorize the printing of the Great Bible for the Church of England, largely based on Tyndale’s work, and it no longer was heresy to have an English Bible.