This did not sit well with one German friar and theologian. Indulgences, simony (selling church offices), and an unholy obsession with holy relics were at the top of Martin Luther’s complaint list. This last one had been reaching plainly absurd levels for hundreds of years. The famous Dutch humanist Erasmus pointed out that there were enough wood splinters from Christ’s True Cross to fill a ship. One ballsy bishop from Lincolnshire traveled to Fécamp Abbey in France, and when he was shown its holy relic, purportedly the arm of Mary Magdalene, he promptly bit off a couple of fingers. This wasn’t a quick job, either. The bishop found it too difficult to snap the cadaveric digits with his front teeth, so he gnawed his way through them with his molars, much to the shock and indignation of his theretofore gracious hosts. For this act of cannibalistic theft, the bishop was showered with praise back in Lincolnshire, where he returned with two severed bits of St. Mary’s fingers. He was consequently canonized as a saint himself in 1220.
Relatively benign practices pushed to their extreme, corrupt, and often ridiculous ends prompted Martin Luther to write a ninety-five-point protest to his bishop and, according to then-current tradition, nail it to a church door. This list of objections in Latin was originally intended for a narrow audience—“a few of my neighbors.” Church doors were a bit like local bulletin boards for priests, circulating news or information such as the announcement of a lost kitten or objections to the supreme authority of the Catholic Church. Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses was a first draft of his complaints, submitted to a close circle of academics. “My purpose was not to publish them,” he wrote to one printer. “Thus I [thought to] either destroy them if condemned or edit them with the approbation of others. But now that they are printed and circulated far beyond my expectation, I feel anxious about what they may bring forth.”
Feeling anxious was right. The insatiable machinations of the printing press were about to spread Martin Luther’s words throughout all of Europe and launch a religious revolution in his name. Luther himself thought the presses a difficult beast to control. “This method is not the best adapted to instruct the public,” he mused, “[I] should have spoken far differently and more distinctly had I known what was going to happen.” So he sensed in 1518 what most reality show stars in the twenty-first century learn only after they’ve humiliated themselves on national television: I should have been more careful about the shit I was saying.
Once Luther learned to embrace the printing press, his ideas spread farther and faster than he ever imagined. Luther expected a rational and scholarly discourse to follow, but Church authorities saw his move as inescapably treacherous. Publishing his first treatise in German (instead of Latin) was a major turning point in that dispute. Some historians believe the true beginning of the Reformation happened the moment Luther started printing in the common German tongue. His campaign enabled the average citizen to read (or at least hear) arguments about religion in a way he or she could easily understand.
To the Church authorities, already reeling from accusations of corruption and extortion, Luther’s printing campaign exploded onto the scene like a flurry of multinational body blows. The criticisms became so widespread, in fact, that these popular Reformation pamphlets were later dubbed Flugschriften (“flying writings”). There was no turning back. As print historian Elizabeth Eisenstein famously said, “Heralded on all sides as a ‘peaceful art,’ Gutenberg’s invention probably contributed more to destroying Christian concord and inflaming religious warfare than any of the so-called arts of war ever did.”
FIVE YEARS before Luther wrote his Ninety-Five Theses, a man named William Tyndale graduated from Oxford University. He was a gifted linguist, but when he went to school, he found it stifling and, at times, ludicrous. Rather than enlightening the common man on the finer points of the Bible, theologians were spending their time debating issues such as how many angels could fit on the head of a pin, or if Christ had turned himself into a mule, could that mule have been crucified for the sins of the world. All cogent points, but Tyndale cared nothing for acrobatic angels or mulish sacrifices. He cared about one thing: an English-language Bible. In early sixteenth-century England, however, that was heresy.
Up to this point, the Bible had been largely protected from the gaze of working-class yokels by that most nefarious of locks: Latin. Literacy itself would have been a huge barrier, but double padlock that sucker with a dead language and you’ve virtually guaranteed that peons won’t read it. Most Christians in the Middle Ages had no way of knowing for themselves what was actually written in the Bible.
Unfortunately, this same lock guaranteed that some of the clergy wouldn’t read the Bible, either. One survey from 1551 found that out of 311 clergy members questioned, “9 did not know how many Commandments there were, 33 did not know where they could be found in the Bible, and 168 could not repeat them.” If this seems impossibly absurd now, thank William Tyndale, who made it his life’s work to open the contents of the Bible to everyone. Tyndale reportedly told one priest, “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more scripture than thou dost.”
The last thing the Catholic Church wanted was an “Arthur Cobbler” or “Hans Hoe” (both actual “Joe the Plumber” names for common folk) poking around in the founding documents of its religion. After all, the Hoes and Cobblers and Plumbers of the world were either too stupid or too wrapped up in their farms and shoes and online cat videos to really be able to comprehend the words of God. They were bound to misinterpret the Bible, and those erroneous views would lead to chaos. So if literacy and Latin weren’t big enough barriers, the Catholic Church in England went ahead and made it a crime punishable by death to translate, distribute, or even possess an English translation of the Bible.
“It was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth,” Tyndale wrote, “except the scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue, and they might see the process, order, and the meaning of the text.” But by making it morally and legally forbidden to translate the Bible into English, Tyndale accused the Church of making Christ “not the light of the world, but its darkness.”
After a brief stint as a family chaplain in Gloucestershire, William Tyndale decided to follow in the footsteps of revolutionaries such as Martin Luther and translate the Bible into his mother tongue. One Catholic supporter saw the danger of this and would later comment, “Even the tailors and shoemakers, and indeed women and simple idiots [now] read it.”
Yet, for laypeople, reading the Scripture in their own language was important enough that “it was said that a man would give a cartload of hay for a few sheets of St. Paul.” Robert Benet, a wool racker and water carrier, sold his looms and shears to purchase a copy of the English New Testament. Considering that the possession of said looms and shears is pretty much what qualifies you as a wool racker, that was huge. Thankfully Benet had carrying water around in buckets as a fallback career. It didn’t even matter that he wasn’t literate enough to read his English New Testament. He just carried it around with him in his belt, a symbol of his faith and the importance of the Word of God.
Because a theology degree doesn’t pay the bills (unless you’re open to kickbacks on infant funerals), Tyndale needed to find a wealthy patron to fund his Bible translation. This brilliant linguist surveyed England and homed in on a single name: Cuthbert Tunstall. Sound familiar? It should. He’s the guy who ordered Richard Hunne to give up his dead son’s sheet. Yet this is something important to note about Tyndale from the start: he was a moron. No, no, that’s a bit harsh. Tyndale was an ingenious translator—in addition to English, he could fluently translate Latin, German, Italian, French, Greek, and Hebrew—a cunning and slippery fugitive, and a master of rogue printing and international smuggling. Politically speaking, though, he struggled to rub two brain cells together. This will be an ongoing theme with him, and it started with his terribly dim idea to petition Cuthbert Tunstall, now the Bishop of London, to sponsor
him while he committed the felony of translating the Bible into English.
Fortunately for Tyndale, Tunstall replied with a curt but polite no, thanks. As Tyndale recalled, “My lord answered me his house was full . . . and advised me to seek in London.” That’s nice. This seems like one of the few times you’re glad the guy in charge doesn’t take your ideas seriously. Especially considering that three years later, this bishop would preach a public sermon against Tyndale at St. Paul’s Cathedral and then oversee a mass burning of his New Testaments. (Ironically, the book burnings didn’t have the effect Tunstall had hoped for. Orthodox agents began buying up copies to be burnt, which only upped the demand and encouraged printers to issue more pirated editions.) Two years after the burning, Tunstall would launch a heretic witch hunt and interrogate people caught with Tyndale’s translation in the very chapel where Tyndale had petitioned for help.
In other countries (notably Italy and Germany), vernacular translations of the Bible were widely available within a generation of the printing press. But England had an unfortunate run-in with Bible translations in the fourteenth century, and the country wasn’t about to legalize a book that had fomented religious revolution.
While partial translations date back to the seventh century, some nine hundred years before, the version that ruined it for the Brits was produced in the late 1300s under the direction of theologian and university professor John Wycliffe. This professor started a reformation movement that would be nicknamed the Lollards. It is believed that Lollard comes from the Dutch word, lollen, which means “to mumble,” and was “used for any kind of vagabond or religious eccentric.” As with the Shakers, Quakers, and Mormons, the nickname was originally meant as derogatory, but people eventually forgot the joke, and adopted it.
What were Wycliffe’s followers all mumbling about? The English Bible, translated and painstakingly hand-copied for the use of the common man. The Lollards were known to value English-language Scripture so much that any translation automatically became associated with Lollard heresy. Common-tongue translations were officially outlawed at the 1407–9 synod at Oxford led by Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Arundel. (This archbishop, incidentally, made it onto BBC History Magazine’s “Ten Worst Britons” list of 2005, a group that includes Jack the Ripper.) As long as threats to the Church were viewed synonymously as threats to the State, the Crown would legally enforce these spiritual rulings. Despite the fierce opposition by the two most powerful organizations of the time, Wycliffite Bibles were so widely distributed and cherished that around two hundred fifty still exist today, even after a lengthy purge to burn them out of England. In comparison, only about sixty manuscript copies of Chaucer’s masterpiece of English literature from the same century, The Canterbury Tales, survive.
Of course, it wasn’t just the Bibles that the Catholic Church was interested in burning. As keepers of Christ’s flame, they felt a duty—nay, an imperative responsibility—to use that flame to melt people who did not agree with them. The idea that “simple folk” should be able to read the Scripture in their own tongue was just such a point of disagreement.
MODERN READERS have a hard time understanding the danger in allowing everyday folk to read books, especially the foundational texts of their own religion. But, for the strictly orthodox, widespread scriptural literacy was inextricably intertwined with chaos. The Wycliffite movement was gaining steam at the same time as the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, a shocking and bloody uprising in which rebels marched on the English capital and slew a number of royal officials. Wycliffe and his followers were not the cause of the uprising; London had the Black Death and taxes to thank for that. Religious fights over books, however, were really fights over foundational structures of power—and this right at the time when rebels were storming the Tower of London. Amid these struggles, many defenders of orthodoxy came to believe that heresy was inevitably intertwined with sedition.
Some of these reformers would be gathered up and required to cast their heretical English Bibles into great bonfires. Others were given closer ringside seats: in 1496, five resurgent followers of Wycliffe’s Lollards were burned at the stake in London with their beloved English New Testaments tied around their necks. At the time, a heretic hadn’t been burned in England for two hundred years—the last was a deacon who’d converted to Judaism—but the threat of an English Bible was enough to dust off the pyres and reopen that chapter of human barbarism. Let’s be clear: there is no such thing as a “good death” when it comes to immolation. John Foxe, the most famous of martyrologists, recorded the passing of one “heretic” who took forty-five minutes to expire in the flames. Seeing that his “left arm was on fire and burned, he rubbed it with his right hand, and it fell from his body, and he continued in prayer to the end without moving.”
Despite facing a horrendous death, courageous men and women refused to budge on issues that seem trivial to many modern observers. For example, does the wafer in Communion literally turn into the flesh of a man who lived fifteen hundred years ago when it touches your tongue? If you marked ❏No, ❏Probably Not, or ❏ Undecided, congratulations, you would have been burned at the stake. While tied to just such a stake, John Badby used his last words to affirm that “he knew well it was hallowed bread, and not God’s body.”
What separated the times of William Tyndale most markedly from those of John Wycliffe was not the burning of heretics—there was plenty more of that to come—but, rather, the reach that the printing press provided. While presses were being tightly watched in England, printed contraband was making its way from mainland Europe into the realm of King Henry VIII by means of robust smuggling networks.
In the spring of 1524, Tyndale realized that England was about the worst place he could be if he wanted to create an English Bible. He made his way to Europe and, using illegal shipping routes forged by capitalist innovators and Lollard heretics alike, spent the next decade sending a stream of inflammatory words right back into the heart of England.
TYNDALE’S FIRST target on this crusade was his most dangerous. Nothing else that he printed would cause more suffering, result in more torture, or send more Englishmen to the flames than the life and words of Jesus of Nazareth.
Because he was soon to be branded an international fugitive, it’s unclear where Tyndale was located while he translated the first edition of his English New Testament. We do know where he printed it, though. Well, at least where he attempted to print it. In 1525, Tyndale negotiated with a printer in Cologne for three thousand magnificent copies of his newly translated New Testament. Using a Greek edition (the original language of the New Testament writings) created by the internationally renowned scholar Erasmus nine years before, along with Martin Luther’s German translation and the Latin Vulgate, Tyndale’s version was to be the most complete, the most accurate, and the most beautiful rendering of God’s word into the English language ever smuggled into the country in bales of cloth.
Technically it was illegal to print the Bible in English, even in Europe. But Tyndale managed to secure a verbal contract for a hefty run of finely crafted New Testaments. Printed on decadently large quarto pages with comments and glosses to guide the reader, a detailed prologue, and woodcut illustrations, this would be the kind of Bible that any God-fearing Christian would be proud to display at home. From an “aesthetic” perspective, that’s great. From an “evidence used to burn you alive” perspective, it’s a bit impractical.
Tyndale didn’t make it very far with this first printing before a friend and correspondent of Bishop Tunstall’s showed up at the print shop. Johannes Cochlaeus was a hard-line Catholic and known English Bible hunter. With exceptionally terrible timing, Cochlaeus traveled to Cologne in 1525 looking for someone to print the works of a conservative monk and ended up on the doorstep of the man who was at that very moment printing Tyndale’s English New Testament.
But hey, just because a printer is playing both sides of the fence doesn’t necessarily mean his polemically opposed clients will come
in contact with each other. As it turns out, however, sixteenth-century printing house employees were the stereotypical construction workers of their day. They worked long and dangerous hours, and treated that stress with lots and lots of alcohol. Inebriation has been known to produce the following effects in human beings: speaking in a raised voice, laughing too hard at things that aren’t funny, being sleepy and uncoordinated, and telling people in taverns that no matter how much kings or cardinals rage, “all England would in short time be Lutheran.”
Cochlaeus was most interested in that last one. So he invited the printers back to his place for another round of drinks, on him. Hurrah! In gratitude, they let slip that they were working on an English New Testament, that there would be three thousand copies, that those copies would be smuggled into England, and that they were about eighty pages into the project. Cochlaeus was “inwardly astonished and horrified,” and soon began making arrangements to seize the contraband Bibles.
Luckily, Tyndale was tipped off, so he was able to scoop up his Bible (most of the Book of Matthew, anyway) and flee Cologne. Eventually he arrived in Worms, a German city originally named after the Norse hero Siegfried, who was said to have slain a lindworm (a wingless dragon) near its borders. More recently for Tyndale, Worms was the site of Martin Luther’s trial in front of an imperial diet in 1521. At its conclusion, Luther was officially discredited, declared a “devil in the habit of a monk,” and watched as his books were officially banned. Three years later, however, the tide turned in Worms and it became a safe haven for Lutheran printing.
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