Sacred Scriptures

If God spare my life, ere many years pass, I will cause a boy who driveth the plough to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost.

Caught up in the fervor of the Reformation, William Tyndale quoted those words of Erasmus to a cleric who disputed the wisdom of his plan to translate the Bible into English. Driven from his native England for his audacity. Tyndale succeeded in producing a translation, and a good one. It became the basis for the King James Version, which has arguably influenced more English speakers than any other English work. Tyndale did his work in Germany, whence copies were smuggled back into England, where Church authorities confiscated and burned all they could collect. Betrayed by a fellow Englishman, Tyndale was captured and imprisoned in Belgium, where in 1536 he was strangled and burned at the stake. Three years later, however, King Henry VIII decreed that every parish church in England make available an English Bible to every parishioner. No longer was the Bible available in Latin only, no longer did the Church monopolize the medium of the sacred text. The Quran, the Islamic sacred word of God, is disseminated in Arabic and by law cannot be translated. Arabic is God's chosen tongue. Sacred scripture is sacred scripture. In the state of affairs that develops, much as in late Medieval Europe, many of the clergy (to say nothing of the laity) are poorly educated in the tongue requisite to read and interpret the holiest text. The unifying text, in the unifying language of an ostensibly unified faith, is blocked from many of its own adherents by a polyglot of spoken tongues.

James Clark

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(c) 2001 Millennium Relief & Development Services, vol. 1 no. 6
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