Fire in the Bones by S. Michael Wilcox

Author:S. Michael Wilcox [Wilcox, S. Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
Publisher: Deseret Book Company
Published: 2004-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

1529—1530

Antwerp and Hamburg

Shipwreck

and Jehovah

This is a book worthy to be read in day and night and never to be out of hands. . . . Herein also thou mayest learn right meditation or contemplation, which is nothing else save the calling to mind and a repeating in the heart of the wonderful deeds of God.

—William Tyndale, “Prologue to Deuteronomy”

Lost Labors

Part of the fury directed at the English reformers in 1530 lay in Tyndale’s newest publication. As if the New Testament was not serious enough, Tyndale’s Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, began to make its way through the wharves and warehouses of English ports and into the hands of eager purchasers. The stories of the New Testament were somewhat familiar to the people, but here was the drama of God’s first dealings with men unveiled in gripping English. It was new and exciting, and the scripture-hungry population took to it with a vigor that could still be heard in the pulpit-pounding sermons of American evangelicals centuries later.

Tyndale, who could not have had even the most elementary knowledge of Hebrew when he fled England, somehow found time in the midst of all his other endeavors to vanquish the language of the Old Testament. Hebrew teachers lived in Wittenberg, Hamburg, Marburg, and Worms—cities associated with Tyndale’s movements. Once he learned Hebrew’s basic elements, his own natural gifts took over, and he honed his skill with private study.

The Pentateuch was printed in January 1530 in Antwerp. It was the first scriptural translation directly from Hebrew into English. Tyndale’s accomplishment generates even greater appreciation when we realize that he lost his original translation of the Old Testament’s first five books in a shipwreck and had to start over. The experience was perhaps not quite as agonizing as Joseph Smith’s loss of the first 116 pages of his Book of Mormon translation, but it was certainly painful to Tyndale, who had labored long and hard.

By 1529, with English authorities closing in, it was time to move and let the hounds bay in an empty city for a while. Edicts had been issued that could quickly end Tyndale’s work as well as his life, even in Antwerp. Though the city fathers generally looked the other way, foreign pressure from England was growing. For Tyndale, movement was effective and necessary, but his move from Antwerp cost him dearly.

“Satan, the prince of darkness, maligning the happy course and success of the gospel, set to his might also, how to impeach and hinder the blessed travails of that man; as by this, and also by sundry other ways may appear,” Foxe writes. “For at what time Tyndale had translated the fifth book of Moses called Deuteronomy, minding to print the same at Hamburgh, he sailed thitherward [from Antwerp]; where by the way, upon the coast of Holland, he suffered shipwreck, by which he lost all his books, writings and copies, and so was compelled to begin all again anew, to his hindrance, and doubling of his labours.

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