The revolutionary power of heresy
by Brendan O’Neill, spiked:
Freedom of speech has toppled tyrants and propelled humanity forward. We lose it at our peril.
[…] Consider William Tyndale (1494-1536), one of the great heretics in the history of England. Tyndale was a 16th-century religious scholar who would become a leading light in the Protestant Reformation. His crime, his utterance of words that hurt, was to translate the Bible into English. That was forbidden at the time. Biblical knowledge was for priests only, for men versed in Latin, for men of learning and insight, not for the English-speaking throng. As FL Clarke put it in his great 19th-century biography, The Life of William Tyndale, ‘good and noble’ men thought that ‘for the Bible to be placed in the hands of the common people was a dangerous thing – the poor and ignorant should be content to hear only those portions that the priests might think fit to read in the churches; they were the shepherds who were appointed to feed the sheep’.
Tyndale disagreed. And he was willing to risk life and limb for this disagreement. He made it his life’s work to translate, print and distribute the Bible. Forbidden from doing so in England, he travelled to Germany, where Luther’s translation of the New Testament into German had appeared in 1522. Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament went to print in Cologne in 1525. But his continual hunting by agents of the English Crown and the Catholic Church – he was ‘hunted like an outlaw’, always ‘working clandestinely’ – forced him on to the run. He moved further south in Germany, to work with another printer, where he published a pocket edition of the Bible. This is how that thing we take for granted today – a carriable, readable version of the Bible in one’s own tongue – was created. Tyndale’s Bibles were smuggled on ships to England, hidden in cargos of grain and among other merchandise, ready to be spirited among the people by his sympathisers. The Bibles were ‘copied in secret and read in terror’, says Clarke.
It is difficult to overstate Tyndale’s contribution to freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. In translating and printing and spreading the Bible, Tyndale was doing more than challenging the stranglehold that the Catholic Church had over religious ideas, over the Word of God itself. He was also, in turn, expressing a great faith in ordinary people’s ability to understand things for themselves. To no longer require ‘shepherds’ to instruct them and guide their thoughts. His trust was not only in God, but also in the capacity, as Clarke had it, of ‘the ignorant and the unlearned’ to enlighten themselves. It was a searingly radical idea. It remains a radical idea, still unfulfilled in so many ways.
No, we are no longer deprived of English-language Bibles. But we are discouraged from reading certain texts, lest they unsettle or inflame our small minds.
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