Lesson 14: The Vulgar Bible and the Big Picture, Part 1

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Lesson 14: The Vulgar Bible and the Big Picture, Part 2

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So we have a lot of material to cover this morning, so we're going to get started. Let's bow our heads. Father, we do ask your blessing upon our time here that you would grant us grace and help us to understand how we have received our

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Bible, how you have worked through history to give us a Bible in our own language. We thank you in advance for what we're going to learn today as we are going to see how so many have suffered and fought and sacrificed to make having a

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Bible in our own language a possibility and a reality. And so we are grateful for those men that you have raised up through church history, and we pray that you would encourage our hearts together today to stand strong in the faith and in the truth and to love you with hearts that are obedient to Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray.

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Amen. So we are in Lesson 14, The Vulgar Bible and the Big Picture. In our study here of God Wrote a

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Book, Lesson 14, The Vulgar Bible and the Big Picture. And I'm going to give you a brief analysis of what is ahead here in the next few weeks.

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So this lesson, if I can get through everything that I want to get through today, which will take us through the history of the

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English Bible all the way up to the Reformation, if we can get through all of that history today, then next week we will finish up this lesson.

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The week after that, I'm going to be gone and Jess Wetzel is going to teach adult Sunday school class.

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The week after that is Easter Sunday, so there's no Sunday school. We have breakfast and then the week after that will be our final lesson in God Wrote a

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Book and we're going to be looking at modern translations and the philosophy of translation, how we get translations and good translations and bad translations.

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We'll be going through all of that in the very last lesson. So that's the schedule ahead this week and next week we'll be looking at the history of the

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English Bible. The Bible has been translated into about a third of the 6 ,000 languages in the world.

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That accounts for about 90 % of the world's population. By some measures or by some counts, there are 350 different English translations of the

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Bible. 350 different English translations and that doesn't mean that you have 350 different versions of who

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Jesus was and what he taught. You understand that a translation is simply a translation from Greek and Hebrew into English and so there are that number of different translations.

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Another one just came out and was published recently, the Legacy Standard Bible, which I'm very excited about and I got to look at it this morning because somebody has it.

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It's kind of an update of the NASB and we'll be talking about that a little bit in a few weeks when we talk about modern translations.

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So I have a huge task ahead of me this morning and that is to take a sweeping look at the history of the English Bible. Since we speak

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English and since the majority of the world speaks English and since English is the predominant language around the world today, what should really concern us is how did history unfold to give us as English speaking people a

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Bible in our own language. And so that's what we're going to be looking at today and there's so much that I have to leave out of this that you're going to feel like you're getting a race car tour of church history and you are.

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There's a lot that I've had to leave out, but I hope that this will help you to think a little bit more clearly about how it is that you got a

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Bible in your own language and also give you an appreciation for those who worked so hard to make that possible.

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So to do that, we're going to divide all of church history from the time of the apostles till today up in, we're going to divide that into three chunks of history, three sections or three sort of divisions.

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First we're going to talk about going from the Greek text to the Latin, from Greek to Latin and that would take us from 90

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AD to 405 AD and these are the three major divisions that you have in your notes. From the

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Greek to the Latin, that's 90 AD to 405 AD, then we're going to look at from the Latin to the

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English, which is 405 to basically the Reformation or we might call that the pre -Reformation era and then that's what

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I'm hoping to cover today is those first two sections and then the last section will be from the Reformation till today, that history of how we got modern translations and that will be,

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Lord willing, next week. So the first is the post -apostolic era from Paul to Jerome, 90

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AD to 405, so we're going from Greek to Latin, that's the period of time that we're talking about, four or five hundred years there, from the time of the apostles to 405, we're really talking about from the time of Paul to the time of a very significant person named

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Jerome. How many of you have heard of Jerome, by the way? And you've heard of Jerome's Latin Vulgate? You're going to learn the history today of Jerome's Latin Vulgate.

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First the age of the apostles and this, we covered this in lesson seven, I'm not going to go over this because we've kind of been back and forth with some of these, but just to recap very quickly, the

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New Testament was authored by apostles and those closely associated with the apostles. Those books were highly, immediately regarded as scripture.

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They were preserved, they were copied, and collections were made of them, they were circulated widely so that by the end of the first century we had books that were gathered into collection and even bound together as collections of books that were

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New Testament text. And we looked at some of the copying processes and we saw the time and attention that went into the translation or the transmission of manuscripts, and then we also looked at some of the ways that copyist mistakes make their way into the text and how those are easily identified and what kind of mistakes were made, we covered all of that.

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After the lifetime of the apostles, so this is post -100 AD, after the lifetime of the apostles,

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Latin became the language of commerce, education, literature, and the church. Latin became the common language, it was really the language of the people.

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And so with the rise of Latin as sort of the international language of commerce, remember that Greek had been the international language of commerce and trade and education up to that point, but Latin soon became the language that everybody spoke and used, there was the need for the scriptures to be put into what they called the language of the people, which was

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Latin. Now today Latin is a language that is deader than Custer's horse, but in 400

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Latin was the language of the day, everybody spoke it. So there was a need for the scriptures to be put into the language of the people, particularly for worshipping and for preaching, something that everybody spoke because very few people spoke or read

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Hebrew and Greek, but almost everybody spoke and read Latin. So that need for a book or the copy of the scriptures to be in the language of the people resulted in various different translation attempts from those

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Greek and Hebrew documents, texts, into the Latin language. And so there were a number of various kinds of Latin translations, so there were multiple

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Latin translations that sort of were making their way around the world. And this set the stage for the need for one sort of standard

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Latin translation that everybody could use and could agree upon, and this is where Jerome comes into it.

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Jerome, his name is Eusebius Eronomous, we call him

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Jerome, he was born in 345 A .D. in Striden in Dalmatia. At the age of 12 he was sent by his parents to Rome to study

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Latin, grammar, Greek and the Latin classics. And he concentrated his education on rhetoric, which is the speaking aspect of education, and he was really intent and designed his education to pursue a career as a lawyer or as a civil servant.

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Originally he was nominally a Christian up until after he got out of college, and then he had a dream in which he saw himself being condemned by God for his lack of devotion, so Jerome devoted the rest of his life to study scripture.

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He became a Syrian hermit, and he lived in the desert, and he studied Hebrew under the guidance of a

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Christian Jew. Jerome was one of the very few, and we talk about very few, I mean very, very few Christians who could speak

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Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and who understood all three of those languages. So as a secretary and assistant to Bishop Damascus of Rome, he began to work on one official translation or edition of the

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Latin Bible. He wanted to translate the Old and the New Testaments into Latin and have sort of a consistent translation that would be widely used, and that became his sort of life's goal.

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He completed the Old Testament in 405 A .D., and it is suspected that he probably completed the

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New Testament as well, though some people suggest that he was probably mostly done with the New Testament when he died and that somebody else finished up the rest of the

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New Testament translation into Latin. Jerome was excoriated for daring to come out with a new translation which sought to be more accurate than those that existed.

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Everybody already had their translations, their Latin translation that they were familiar with, that they had grown up with, right?

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And so then somebody comes in and says, I think I can make a better Latin translation, and what do you say? It is exactly like the

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King James, right? What do you mean better translation? I grew up on this. If my Latin translation was good enough for Jesus and the apostles, it's good enough for us.

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How dare you try and come out with a more accurate, more reliable, more dependable consistent translation? I'm familiar with my

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Latin translation. Don't go changing horses midstream. That was kind of how people responded to him. People thought it was arrogant for him to go changing the

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Bible. And by the way, that's the very same argument, again, as Nathel pointed out, that King James only advocates used today.

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It's the same…whenever a new translation comes along, everybody says, well, what was wrong with the old translations?

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And that's sort of the standard go -to objection. So Jerome produced what was the common or the popular

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Latin Vulgate, and the word Vulgate comes from the Latin Vulgata, which means common or popular.

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Was the common Bible the popular Bible? And so it was the Vulgata or the Vulgate, or you might say the vulgar

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Bible. When you talk about somebody who speaks in vulgar language, you talk about somebody who speaks in the common language, right? That's kind of what the word means there.

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The word Vulgate was officially tied to Jerome's translation by the Roman Catholic Church, but only as late as 1546 at the

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Council of Trent. But by the 6th and 2nd…6th and 7th century, Jerome's version of the

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Latin…Jerome's Latin translation had become more popular than the old Latin. So because it was a consistent and sort of a standard

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Latin translation, because it was widely circulated, people adopted it, and it became the Bible of the day shortly after Jerome's death.

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Jerome's work was unique because Jerome's was the first translation to translate from the

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Hebrew text and not the Septuagint. Remember a couple of weeks ago we talked about what the Septuagint is? It was the Greek translation of the

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Old Testament. So there had been other Latin translations of the Old Testament, but they were Latin translations from the

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Greek Septuagint, which was a translation from the Hebrew Old Testament. So Jerome's was the first Latin translation to translate directly from the

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Hebrew Old Testament into Latin, which means that it was probably easier for him to clean things up. The wording would have been a little bit different, and it might have taken people a little longer to warm up to that translation since it would have been different than the translations into Latin previously.

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There were some later revisions of Jerome's work. As is common with any translation or edition, it went through various improvements and additions because no translation comes right off of the printers, and Jerome's didn't come off the printing press, by the way.

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It all would have been handwritten, you understand that. Printing press doesn't come in for another thousand years. But Jerome's translation, when it's first issued, would have had probably spelling mistakes and language mistakes, etc.

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So there were revisions and cleanups of that translation made. There was a significant revision that was published in 1227 by Stephen Langton, and that name may sound familiar, but it might not to you.

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Stephen Langton is the one who eventually added chapter divisions to the Scriptures, and that, remember, came in 1227.

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So that's the story of Jerome's Latin Vulgate. Here are a few things to understand about the significance of the

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Vulgate. The Latin Vulgate accounts for 10 ,000 of our ancient manuscripts, 10 ,000 of our ancient manuscripts.

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So a large portion of our manuscripts of the New Testament from that time period are in the

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Latin. The most important translation, the Vulgate was the most important translation ever made next to the

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Septuagint. It was the most influential because it put the Bible in the hands of the common man and was the

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Bible of the people for the next 10 centuries. For a thousand years, Jerome's Bible was the Bible of the people in the

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Latin. After a thousand years, it would be translated into other languages of the people eventually.

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Yeah, Rick? Latin comes from the

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Roman language? No, I don't know. It wasn't… I don't know. Does anybody know the answer to that?

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What the origins of Latin language are? No. Good question. A Google will know.

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Google knows everything I don't and some of the things that I do. The Latin Vulgate is also the first book of importance to be printed by movable type in 1456.

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Johann Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany printed the Gutenberg Bible and that was a printed copy of Jerome's Latin Vulgate.

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Yes? According to Google. According to Google. And Peter's going to Google the rest of that and let us know what that stuff means.

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So, the Latin Bible published by Gutenberg was a beautiful edition, a beautiful printed edition of Jerome's Latin Vulgate.

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The Latin Vulgate is the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church even today. Any translation that Rome authorizes must be based on the

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Latin Vulgate. In other words, Rome is not concerned that it be translated from Greek and Hebrew, but it must be translated from the

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Latin Vulgate and based off of that. So, Rome will not authorize any translation that comes from Greek or Hebrew, only the

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Latin Vulgate. And thus, the Roman Catholic authorized Bibles are translations of a translation.

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People charge Protestants with, your Bible you read is just a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation. Actually not.

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We've covered this before. Our Bibles are a translation of the original documents, Greek and Hebrew. Now, the Roman Catholic Bible is a translation of a translation.

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It is a translation into English off of the Latin Vulgate which is a translation from Greek and Hebrew. All right.

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Any questions about that before we move on? Yes, Ken? Yeah, there are still some

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Roman Catholic churches that do the entire service in Latin. Some very strict, strict conservative

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Roman Catholic churches still do all of their service in Latin. So, I don't know when that would have officially changed.

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Okay. Yeah, Greg says Vatican II. All right. Let's talk about the pre -Reformation era from Jerome to Tyndale, and that's 405 to 1525.

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So, this covers the history of our Bible from Latin to English.

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We've gone from Greek to Latin, and now we're talking about the period of time when the Bible started to be translated into English.

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There were a number of incomplete attempts to translate the Bible into English, and many different men tried to translate it and translated parts of the

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Bible into English, but there was never a concerted effort to make Scripture available to the masses for quite a number of years.

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And the masses could not read Scripture. Once Latin started to die out and English started to take its place, and you started to have

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Christians in other languages, if you couldn't read Latin, you were cut off. If you couldn't read Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, you would be cut off from God's Word.

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So the people did not have books in their own possession, and the church, over the course of that thousand years, the church came to be seen and treated as if it were the translator of the

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Bible, so that you had the priest who would take the Scriptures and he would tell you what it meant and he would translate it for you, because people just didn't have the

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Bible in their own language. People didn't have access to those documents. Remember, we're still, when we're talking about between 480 and 1 ,000 or 1 ,400 up to the

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Reformation, you're still talking about a period of time in which anything that you had in your possession, there was no such thing as a photocopier or a printing press.

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All you had was a handwritten document. And so getting a hold of a Bible was a very difficult task, because there just were not a lot of handwritten copies of Scripture available, because every copy had to be hand -transcribed, had to be handwritten.

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There were a number of notable attempts to translate the Bible into English in 676 A .D.

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Caedmon, who was an illiterate monk, retold portions of the Scripture in Anglo -Saxon, which is

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Old English, and he was known for putting Scripture to rhyme and song and teaching it to the masses. There was a band, a

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Christian band some years ago called Caedmon's Call, and that's where they get their name from, Caedmon. That was 676.

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And by the way, how many of you, well, if you went to school before probably 1990, you would have been exposed to Old English, Anglo -Saxon,

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English style, right, it was very unreadable to us in our modern tongue. Yeah, Beowulf, that was another one,

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I was just thinking about that one this morning. In 709, Aldhelm was the first bishop of Shearborn in Dorset.

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He began to translate Scripture into English. He's said to have translated the

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Psalms in 735, Beatty translated portions of Scripture into Old English. He finished the

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Gospel of John on his deathbed in 735. In 871 to 901,

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Alfred the Great, the King of Wessex, translated portions of Exodus, Psalms, and Acts. The Wessex Gospels are the first example of a translation of the

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Gospels into Old English, and those were dated after the death of Alfred in the 10th century. In the 900s,

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Elpharick, an abbot of Eynsham in Oxfordshire, translated seven books of the

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Old Testament, and from the year 676 to 1200, there were select people who translated only parts of the

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Bible, and all were translated from the Latin Vulgate and not the Hebrew and Greek. So, all the efforts up to about 1200 to translate the

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Bible into English were attempts to translate from Jerome's Latin Vulgate into the

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English language and most of those Old English languages. Masses of the people were illiterate and were treated to romanticized versions of Scripture and truth with legend mixed in for popular consumption.

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That was kind of what people had available to them. William Tyndale later complained that the masses knew more about Robin Hood than they did about the

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Bible. So those were the incomplete attempts to translate into English.

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So up until 1200, you basically had portions, various portions, in different styles of English cropping up as people attempted to translate from, again, the

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Latin Vulgate into English. Now there are some successful English translations, and I'm not going to introduce you to these men, but we're going to cover three men,

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John Wycliffe, Desiderius Erasmus, and William Tyndale. Those are the three men we want to look at who made successful English translations.

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John Wycliffe first. He is referred to as the morning star of the Reformation, and he lived from 1324 to 1384.

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Wycliffe was born at a time of almost national and international misery. When Wycliffe was born, there was a plague that killed 200 people a day in London alone.

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That's slightly more than the coronavirus is killing today. 200 people a day in London alone.

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Not worldwide. In London alone, 200 people a day were dying. And there were two rival popes who were competing for power and influence.

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And Wycliffe in his day saw the same abuses of Roman Catholic monks and Roman Catholic priests that Martin Luther would later identify, and Wycliffe attacked and criticized the wandering friars who robbed people of their money and deceived them.

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He wrote against the abuses and the errors of Rome, and he, John Wycliffe, survived every attempt that Rome tried at shutting him down and quieting him.

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He survived all of them because they were trying to silence him. But Wycliffe at one time wrote this, the chief cause beyond doubt of the existing state of things is our lack of faith in Holy Scripture.

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It is God's pleasure that the books of the old and new law should be read and studied. Well for that, you needed an

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English translation of the Bible. If the people were to read and study God's word, they needed an

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English translation of the Bible. So he decided to translate the Bible into English, and his team of translators set out with three goals in producing the

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Bible into English, and these are at the top of page, I don't know what page it is, but their decision to translate the Bible into English.

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The first goal was to test and correct the doctrine of the church. Wycliffe wanted the Bible into the

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English language so that people could read what Scripture said and then compare it to what he saw going on in the church.

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And the result of that, of course, would be not only questioning that authority and questioning the doctrine of the Catholic church, but also an attempt to probably reform that.

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Even though Wycliffe wouldn't have used the term reform in the same way that we would today. So his goal was to test and correct the doctrine of the church, and you can imagine how well received that was by the church.

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The second goal was to anchor men's experience in the truth. Because up to that time, a lot of the people who traveled the countryside telling stories of the

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Bible and relaying what Scripture said would impose upon Scripture all kinds of legends and superstition and traditions and the teachings of the priesthood of the church.

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Well, Wycliffe wanted to produce a translation that would anchor men's experience and their thinking in Scripture and not in what they were told by those who taught them

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Scripture. And the third was to lead men and women to faith in Christ. Wycliffe completed his

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English translation from the Latin Vulgate in 1384. So again, Wycliffe's translation comes from the

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Latin Vulgate into English, not going back to Greek and Hebrew, but from the Latin. Here are a few notes concerning Wycliffe's translation.

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Its first edition was a literal word -for -word translation, and subsequent editions of Wycliffe's translation attempted to make the

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Bible more readable. Sometimes when you translate word -for -word, it's not exactly readable, simply because translating word -for -word from one language into another language is not always easy.

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And we're going to talk about this in a few weeks. There are different ways of translating ideas and words, and you can try and be really literal word -for -word, or you can try and catch the idea, ideas -for -idea, and there's sort of a spectrum of translation philosophies there.

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Well, his attempt at first was to be very word -for -word, which didn't make it real readable when going from Latin into English. So subsequent editions, he tried to smooth that out a little bit and correct some of the language to make it more readable.

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Wycliffe's translation prompted men who were influenced by his translation to preach, and so they would go throughout England and Wales, and they would have a copy of Wycliffe's translation in their hand.

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And these preachers were called Lollards. Have you ever heard of the Lollards? These preachers were called Lollards, which meant mumblers.

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That was sort of the name that people gave to these preachers, they're mumblers. I would prefer, by the way, that none of you ever refer to me as a

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Lollard. For the first time, the English man had a Bible in his own tongue, the entire

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Bible in his own tongue for the first time. This is in 1384, it took that long for that to happen. There were no printing presses at the day, so every copy of Wycliffe's translation had to be copied by hand, again.

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So amazingly, there are 20 copies of Wycliffe's translation, 20 copies of the whole

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Bible that survive until today, only 20, and there are 90 copies of Wycliffe's New Testament that have survived until today.

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We must understand Wycliffe's influence on the Reformation. See, without the Bible in the common language of the people, there could never be popular support for reforming the church.

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So without Wycliffe's influence, this is why he's called the morning star of the Reformation, without Wycliffe's influence in getting the

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Bible into the language of the people so they could read Scripture for themselves, Martin Luther would have had really nothing out of which to launch the

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Protestant Reformation. But when people had Scripture in their own tongue and they could read that, and then they could look at what they were being taught and what was going on in the church, they could say, this is not right, something is wrong here.

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This is steeped in tradition and mysticism and paganism, and we need to correct this. And that was what

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Luther was trying to do with the Protestant Reformation. And without Wycliffe's translation, his job would have been much more difficult.

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People could now, for the first time, see the truth and confront the error in the doctrines and the practices. Well, how did the Roman Catholic Church respond to Wycliffe translating

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Scripture into the language of the people? In 1394, they issued a bill to Parliament forbidding anyone to read the

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Bible in English without a bishop's license. Eventually, in 1408, it became illegal to read or translate into English without the permission from a bishop.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury wrote to the Pope describing Wycliffe as, quote, this pestilent and wretched

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John Wycliffe of cursed memory, that son of the old serpent, close quote. That tells you how the

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Archbishop of Canterbury felt about Wycliffe. Making the Bible available to the people was considered by the leadership of the church as casting pearls before swine because they felt that the

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Bible was not given to the people, it was given to the church to distribute and to interpret. So, the church moved between 1401 and 1409 to burn at the stake those who were guilty of heresy.

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And what was the heresy? Anyone found translating a Bible into English or reading a Bible in English was burned at the stake.

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In fact, Wycliffe was so hated by the Roman Catholic Church that 40 years after his death, they exhumed his bones and burned them for heresy.

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Any questions about Wycliffe? That's all fun stuff, isn't it? Desiderius Erasmus, he was a

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Roman Catholic priest and Greek scholar. And you may remember his name because there is an infamous series of letters written between Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus over the issue of the

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Reformation and the issue of the will of man and its part in salvation and regeneration.

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So Desiderius Erasmus, so he lived at the time of Martin Luther. He was a Roman Catholic priest and a

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Greek scholar. He used five Greek texts and produced an English…sorry, he used five

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Greek texts and produced a Greek edition of the New Testament. Erasmus had one copy of Revelation to use in producing his

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Greek edition of the New Testament, and that one copy that he had of the book of Revelation was missing the last page.

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So Desiderius Erasmus did something interesting. He took the Latin, Jerome's Latin Vulgate of that last page of Revelation, and he translated the

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Vulgate back into Greek. And we had nothing to check it against.

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In the process, Erasmus made up 24 Greek words out of whole cloth, which are still in the

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Textus Receptus to this day. Erasmus ended up publishing a new

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Greek edition of the New Testament, and he dedicated it to Leo X, who eventually excommunicated Martin Luther. And he also published a more accurate

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Latin translation of the New Testament in 1516. Now, providentially, also around the same time as Desiderius Erasmus, in 1476,

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William Caxton set up a printing press by Westminster Abbey. In 1490, a paper mill was established in England.

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In 1511, Erasmus arrived in Cambridge, and at the same time, scholars fled to the west from Byzantine Empire and brought with them priceless

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Greek texts. So just look at how history is unfolding. Before Erasmus lands in Westminster, in that area, there was a printing press established, a paper mill produced, and then because of persecution, a bunch of scholars bring all of their

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Greek manuscripts west from the Byzantine Empire into Erasmus' area so that he would have all of these

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Greek texts, and there would be a printing press and a paper mill nearby. How providential is that?

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So as much as I probably suspect that Erasmus was not a believer, certainly was not favorable to Reformation doctrines like Martin Luther taught, but by the providence of God, God used

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Erasmus to publish a Greek edition of the New Testament and a more accurate translation of the

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Latin Vulgate. In 1516, Erasmus was ready to print his Greek New Testament.

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He produced five different editions, and one found its way to Wittenberg and to Martin Luther. That text, which

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Erasmus produced, became known as the Received Text or the Textus Receptus, and that is the basis of the

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King James Translation. The Textus Receptus was used by Tyndale in his translation and used also by Martin Luther.

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The motive that Erasmus had was to have the original text in the original language available to all men.

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So what was Erasmus' desire? To simply have a really good Greek text available for all scholars to read original

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Greek. So they wouldn't have to search for different various manuscripts, but to publish an entire

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Greek New Testament so that everybody could have access to the New Testament in its original tongue. There were other translations from other languages from the

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Vulgate before 1500, and I bring up Erasmus simply because his work of publishing the Greek New Testament paved the way for Tyndale to do what he did, as well as it paved the way for Martin Luther to have access to those documents so that Luther could produce his translation and also be sort of the driving force of the steam engine behind the

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Protestant Reformation. Now, there were other translations into other languages from the

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Vulgate before the time of Desiderius Erasmus, that is before 1500. In 1466,

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Germany got a translation, 1471 Italy, 1474 France, 1474

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Bohemia, 1477 Holland, and by 1500 Spain. So you can see that in the last part of the 1400s there was this push to translate from the

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Latin Vulgate into all of these various languages, German, French, Italian, Bohemian, Holland, whatever they speak, and Spanish.

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Luther produced his German translation from Erasmus' Greek text in 1522. So any questions about Desiderius Erasmus before we go on to William Tyndale?

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Going to see how God is working through history to put all these pieces in place? Now up until now, we still do not have a single

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English translation of your Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew. They've been translated from Jerome's Latin Vulgate.

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That was the standard at the time. It was very difficult to find men who could read all of those various languages and be fluent enough and have the ability to translate.

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And along comes William Tyndale, born in 1494. Now you can see that Tyndale and Luther and Erasmus, these men are all living around the same period of time, right prior to the

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Reformation. William Tyndale, he is known as the father of the English Bible. He produced the first English translation from Greek and Hebrew.

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This is why he is called the father of the English translation. He produced the first English translation of the

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Bible out of the original Greek and Hebrew, not relying upon Jerome's Vulgate. Tyndale was a graduate of Oxford University.

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He was trained for the priesthood and he came to faith in Christ early in life. He decided that he wanted to give the

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Englishman a Bible in his own language, which was easy to read. He worked to study the Greek text that was published by Erasmus in 1516.

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In 1521, he arrived in Glaucus, Cheshire, which they make a great marinating sauce by the way, to tutor two children of Sir John and Lady Walsh.

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And while he was in Glaucus, Cheshire, he debated a priest who maintained, this priest said, quote, we would be better without God's laws than the

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Pope's, close quote. Well, of course, this just got under Tyndale's skin, to which he replied, quote,

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I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life or any years, I will cause a boy that drives a plow to know more of the scripture than thou dost, close quote.

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And this was Tyndale basically going public with his intention to translate the Bible into the English language and to make it available.

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Besides the English language, Tyndale was a master of six other languages, including

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Greek and Hebrew. So Tyndale was a master of French, Greek, Hebrew, German, Italian, Latin, Spanish, and English.

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What are you doing with your life? I haven't even mastered English. I struggle to come up with Glaucus, Cheshire, and that's a completely

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English word. So, Tyndale set out to translate the

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New Testament into English from the Greek and the Hebrew. And remember how well England received Wycliffe's work? How excited the church was that Wycliffe did what he did?

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So while Tyndale had to move out of England to print his Bible, so he moved to Hamburg, Germany, where he completed his translation.

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In 1525, his Bible came off the press of Peter Quintel in Cologne, Germany, and enemies of the

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Reformation quickly made efforts to kill Tyndale. So remember, the

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Reformation started in 1517. That's Martin Luther nailing the 95 Theses to the door in Wittenberg.

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That started in 1517. 1525 is the publication of Tyndale's first edition of the

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Scriptures. So Tyndale eventually fled to Worms in Germany, a city that was friendly to the

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Reformation, where he finished printing the New Testament. And early in 1526, Bibles were smuggled into England, and they were bought up by people with enthusiasm.

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There was, as you can imagine, a lot of opposition to Tyndale. Officials of the Roman church publicly burned and confiscated copies of his

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Bible, and the church actually collected money to buy up all the incoming copies that he was having shipped across the sea into England.

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Bishop Tungstall of London ordered Tyndale's Bibles to be burned on October 24th, 1526.

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And here's what he said, quote, That's how he felt about Tyndale's book.

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Something else that we can tell from that quotation, that is that a thesaurus was obviously published quite a little bit before that was said.

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Booksellers were warned about receiving and selling English Bibles and Lutheran books, and whether the books were in English or Latin, they were prohibited from buying or selling them.

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One example, an old laborer by the name of Harding was found reading his New Testament out by the woods, and his house was plundered, and under the floorboards more copies of Tyndale's book were discovered.

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Harding was hurried to prison and finally burnt at the stake. Tyndale's Old Testament, a note about that.

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While the church was opposing his New Testament in English, he set out to translate the

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Old Testament. In 1530, he published the Pentateuch. In 1531, he published the book of Jonah.

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In 1534, he revised Genesis. In 1534, he published two more editions of the

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New Testament. So he was busy, the man was busy. Tyndale promised a revision of his

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New Testament, and between 1525 and 1530, he worked on it moving from city to city while he was often hunted by as many as five different government agents.

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The closing years of Tyndale's life were miserable. He was hunted, hated, and pursued. He makes reference to, quote, my pains, my poverty, my exile out of my natural country and bitter absence from my friends, my hunger, my thirst, the great danger wherewith

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I am everywhere encompassed, and innumerable other hard and sharp fightings which I endure, close quote.

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In 1535, Tyndale was betrayed by a Judas -like friend, and he was arrested and imprisoned in Vilvoord Castle near Brussels.

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In 1536, he was strangled and then burned at the stake, and his dying prayer was, Lord, open the

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King of England's eyes. And you can see next week how that ended up being fulfilled.

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Yeah, that was cancel culture at its worst, yes, that's right. Now here's some notes on Tyndale's Bible.

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Tyndale's New Testament was not without its flaws. There was no correct standard of spelling, so even the word it was spelled seven different ways in his original

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New Testament, it, I -T, even the word it was spelled seven different ways.

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I'm not the best speller, but I'm not, nothing near that, yes. Oh, could it be that he knew so many languages and a little bleeding in of the other influences?

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I don't know how that is. I know that prior to, there was no standardized way of spelling

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English words, as you're gonna see here in a moment, there was no standardized way of spelling a number of English words. And so, because the printing press had not, it really took the printing press and the publication and the widespread use of books with certain spellings to standardize the way that words would be spelled.

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You understand phonetically how English doesn't follow a lot of the rules, and even its own rules oftentimes.

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We have rules for the rules that we have of rules in English, and so it would take a while for there to be any kind of a standard like that.

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Yeah, different ways of spelling things, yep. So Tyndale achieved his goal, which was to produce a

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Bible in the English that a boy at the plow could read. That was his goal, it was his life goal, and he ended up doing that.

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It was Tyndale who established the Bible, it was Tyndale who established that the Bible should be in the common tongue of the people so that everybody would have access to it.

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He coined a number of English words, and this just goes to the genius, the brilliance of William Tyndale.

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He coined a number of English words that had never existed before. The word Passover, the word scapegoat, mercy seat, and longsuffering were words that Tyndale coined, created,

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English words he created for his English translation. Some phrases we have, only because Tyndale had an ear for language, a way of, he just had a, you know what an ear for language is?

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It's that ability to put something into words in a certain way that just kind of rolls off the tongue and is easy to understand and easy to hear.

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Tyndale had that ear for language. There are a number of phrases in your New Testament and phrases that we use in English all the time that come out of Scripture that could have been translated otherwise.

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But because of Tyndale's ear for the language, his ability to translate, and his sort of giftedness with the

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English language, we have a number of those phrases today. So let me give you some examples. The phrase salt of the earth from Matthew 5 .13,

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that could have been translated otherwise, salt of the earth. That kind of rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? Kind of, it's in your vernacular.

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The word daily bread, or the words daily bread, the phrase twinkling of an eye from 1 Corinthians 15 .52, the pleasures of sin for a season,

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Hebrews 11, the phrase let there be light, the powers that be, my brother's keeper, a law unto themselves, filthy lucre, it came to pass, gave up the ghost, the signs of the times, the spirit is willing, fight the good fight, knock and it shall be open to you, a moment in time.

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Those were all phrases created by Tyndale and included in his New Testament. You can just hear how those phrases worked their way into our

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English vernacular so that even people who are unfamiliar with Scripture have heard these phrases, right? They're just part of our culture.

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Well, those are the creations of William Tyndale. He heavily influenced the King James Version as 90 % of the 1611

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Authorized Version was copied almost straight from Tyndale's revision of 1534. In the year of Tyndale's death, one writer wrote with little exaggeration, quote, every man hath a testament in his hand, close quote.

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So then you can see there an example of Tyndale's writings of the New Testament as it would read under letter

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G there. The example of Tyndale's Bible, that's 1 Corinthians 13, but you can see how the text reads and looks different, the spellings, the language and everything is a bit different in his

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English from the 1300s, sorry, from the 1500s, 1300s, I'm thinking of Wycliffe.

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So that, on my computer, the spell check just went crazy with that, those three paragraphs there.

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But that's Tyndale's translation. Any questions about William Tyndale? Yes, Nathel.

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Dewey Rhymes, we're going to cover that next week actually. Yep, no, that's okay. Yep, we will cover the history of that next week.

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Yep, any other questions? Well, I actually got done quicker than I thought, I thought it was going to take another seven minutes to go through that.

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But we made it from the time of the apostles up to the time of the Reformation. So to just quickly recap, we have gone from the time of Paul to the time of Jerome, that's our first sort of section of church history, from Paul to Jerome, which is from Greek to the

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Latin Vulgate. Then we went from the time of Jerome up to the time of William Tyndale or Martin Luther and really that covers the going from the

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Latin into English. So now as we end up right just after the beginning of the

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Protestant Reformation, we have the first translation of the English Bible, the first English translation of the

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Bible that is not from the Latin Vulgate, that is from the original Greek and the original Hebrew.

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And that thanks to basically the work of three men, John Wycliffe, Desiderius Erasmus and William Tyndale.

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The morning star of the Reformation is Wycliffe and the father of the English Bible is William Tyndale. Okay? Any further questions?

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All right, let's pray and we'll pick it up next week. Father, we thank You for Your grace and we thank

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You for how You have worked in history. It is truly amazing Your providence and how You have brought so many various moving parts together to give us

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Scripture. And You have worked through history for Your own glory and for the sake of Your people, so we are grateful that we stand today with so many copies of Your Word available to us, so many translations of Your Word available to us, and so many original documents.

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There are copies of original documents that have been made available to us. We are drowning in a sea of wealth in terms of Your Word, and so we are just grateful for that.

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We praise You for doing it and we pray that You would make us lovers of Your Word and lovers of Your truth for the sake of Christ our