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Statues of Liberty: Rev Jules Gomes

nominates William Tyndale, great
reformer who translated the Bible and
created modern English
By ‘Rebel Priest’ Rev Jules Gomes October 1, 2017

I had my first history lesson at the age of five. My father was

treating me to a tour of Bombay. He took me to Shivaji Park, the
cradle of Indian cricket. A giant statue of a swordsman on a
prancing horse caught my attention. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked. ‘That is
Shivaji Maharaj, the great Maratha king, who fought the mighty
Mughal and British Empires,’ my dad told me.

On my first tour of Cambridge, where I had arrived from India to

pursue a doctorate, my guide spun charming historical narratives
around a pantheon of statues dotting the university town. He
pointed out ‘the dirty old men of Cambridge’ atop the old Faculty
of Divinity – among them Erasmus, who laid the egg that Luther
hatched; and Cranmer, architect of the Book of Common Prayer.
The white statues set against the backdrop of the redbrick
building were sorely in need of a good wash.

You don’t expect statues to sway your emotions (unless sculpted

by Bernini), but I was deeply moved by the statue of William
Wilberforce, at the entrance to St John’s College Chapel. The
figures of Francis Bacon, father of the scientific method, who
believed that God had revealed himself through two books –
nature and Scripture – surrounded by Isaac Barrow and Isaac
Newton at the entrance to Trinity College Chapel, remain forever
etched on my memory.

I’ve never stopped asking questions about statues or learning

about history from statues. If revisionists doctor history books,
the stones will cry out. Never mind the Taliban or Antifa taking
the fun out of history by calling for an iconoclasm that would put
Cromwell to shame.

It is time to give them a punch in the nose and conserve history

in stone. ‘Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty,’ wrote
Henry David Thoreau, and I am nominating the original ‘Rebel
Priest’, William Tyndale, who disobeys his bishop and bequeaths
to us our foundational freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom
of conscience and freedom of religion.

Most people know Tyndale as the greatest Bible translator in the

English tongue. But beyond this, Tyndale becomes the ‘Father of
Modern English.’ Working with a language lacking precision and
standardisation, Tyndale shapes the syntax, grammar, and
vocabulary of English more than Chaucer or Shakespeare during
its transition from Middle English to Early Modern English.
Tyndale constructs the refined speech of a nation that becomes
the lingua franca of the world.

Tyndale’s lesser-known contribution to liberty, tolerance and the

British and American constitutional order parallels his
outstanding achievements in language and Bible translation.
Liberty and language are intertwined in the work of the great
reformer who seeks the ‘democratisation of the Bible’.
Constitutional lawyer Michael Farris, in From Tyndale to
Madison: How the Death of an English Martyr led to the
American Bill of Rights, debunks the standard mythology that the
Enlightenment is responsible for the religious and other
freedoms we enjoy today. It is Tyndale who sows the seeds of this
exceptional accomplishment, he argues.

In 1522, Oxford scholar and cleric William Tyndale secures a

position in Little Sodbury, Gloucestershire, as tutor for the
children of the lord of the manor, Sir John Walsh, and his wife,
Lady Anne. A theological debate erupts between him and another
cleric, in which Tyndale demonstrates that his interlocutor’s
position is contrary to the Bible.

The priest defiantly seeks to put down Tyndale’s biblical

knowledge by claiming that the church is better off with the
Pope’s laws than God’s laws. ‘I defy the Pope and all his laws,’
retorts the original Rebel Priest. ‘If God spare my life many years,
I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of
Scripture than you do.’

Envious clerics fabricate charges of heresy. Tyndale is brought to

trial. ‘This I suffer because the priests of the country be
unlearned,’ he exclaims. How true! But none of the clergy
publicly stand as his accusers and Tyndale is exonerated.

The Constitutions of Oxford (1408) have made it illegal to

translate the Bible into English or to own an English Bible.
Tyndale approaches Bishop of London Cuthbert Tunstall for
permission to translate the New Testament from Greek into
English. Tunstall turns him down. Tyndale flees to Cologne and
later to Worms where he completes his translation of the New
Testament in early 1526. By February, copies of Tyndale’s
translation are selling like hot cakes in London.

Bishops order Tyndale’s Bible to be burned and booksellers to

stop sales. At a public burning of Tyndale’s New Testament,
Bishop Tunstall preaches at St Paul’s Cathedral, rubbishing the
translation as having more than two thousand errors.
Tyndale defends himself with an argument that becomes
foundational for the freedom of conscience: every man has the
right to look in the Word of God and decide for himself whether
what is being taught is true. He accuses the church’s hierarchy for
‘laws of your own making, wherewith ye violently bind the lay
people that never consented unto the making of them’, thus
endorsing the principle of democracy wherein all laws require the
people’s consent.

‘Tyndale’s concepts of law by consent of the governed, even-

handed justice, religious equality before the law, due process, fair
trials, the freedom to speak, publish, and to decide for one’s self
the truth about God were prescient and profound,’ writes Farris.
‘He advanced these concepts into the English system at a time
when, at least in practice, they were utterly foreign. These
conclusions were the necessary outgrowth of his belief that men
should have the Scripture in their own language so they could
come to God directly as individuals by their own choice rather
than according to the dictates of either government or the
hierarchical church.’

Tyndale is one of the first scholars to use secular history to argue

against the church usurping the lawfully constituted authority of
secular government. In his controversy with Lord Chancellor
Thomas More, he charges ‘that by a combination of force and
guile the Pope and his clergy wrested the government of the
European states from the lawful rulers.’

Brad Pardue in Printing, Power, and Piety: Appeals to the Public

during the Early Years of the English Reformation, explores how
Tyndale also lays the groundwork for the idea of the ‘public’ and
the central place it now occupies in Western society. Thanks to
the printing press, which produces copies of Tyndale’s Bible, for
the first time in history the public is able to judge the ‘validity of
revolutionary ideas’ through a mass-medium which uses the
vernacular.

Church and State can no longer tolerate Tyndale the

troublemaker. He is tried for heresy, condemned, strangled and
burned at the stake. His final prayer ‘Lord, open the King of
England’s eyes,’ is partly answered when three years later in 1539,
Henry VIII orders every parish church in England to make a
copy of the English Bible available to its parishioners.

For Tyndale, God is the author of liberty. It is this radical concept

that sows the seeds of modern idea of freedom, even if sections
of the church’s hierarchy are hell-bent on tyranny. It is often
argued that Muslim nations have failed because they have had no
movement comparable to the Enlightenment. It would be more
plausible to argue that Muslim nations have failed because they
have had no figure comparable to William Tyndale.