B {the B-I-B-L-E}

Question for today...

How many Bibles do you have in your home? (Don't forget to include the one you may have uploaded on your phone, your iPad, your Kindle, your computer...oh and check the kids rooms too!)

5? 10? Maybe more?

How many of those Bibles can you read?

My guess is that unless you have a Greek or Hebrew translation laying around (I'm sure there are a few of you that do!), you can easily read every copy you have in your possession.

We are a blessed people. We have the opportunity to be educated, to learn to read in the language we best understand. For us, it's English. It's our heart language.

But for us to get the Bible into our heart language was no small task. There was a price paid and sacrifice made.

Jason is a history buff and loves to find how things originated. Several months ago, he spoke at church and gave some history about how the English Bible we have came into being. So for today, I completely stole borrowed his notes! :)

The Bible was originally written in the languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.  The old testament in Hebrew and Aramaic and the new in Greek.


To make a long story short, eventually there later came a translation entirely in Greek called the Septuagint and one entirely in Latin called the Vulgate.  Christianity came to England in the days of Roman rule and the Roman Catholics arrived in the year 597.  Till this time, English Christians had no Bible and the the Roman Catholics brought the Latin Vulgate that they couldn’t read.  


David Ewert, in his book A General Introduction to the Bible says “It is staggering to think that for a thousand years of Christianity in England, English Christians had no Bible.”

That’s where the name John Wycliffe comes in. John Wycliffe lived from 1329-1384 and was a theologian at Oxford.  He became concerned with the Roman Catholic church of his day and the corruption in it and wanted to bring people back to a solid biblically based faith.  This was an impossible task without a Bible in English that the average person could read.  

So he began to translate the Bible into English and completed two versions of the Bible in English.  For this he was labeled a heretic by the church hierarchy.  His bible was banned by law, he was forced to retire from his job at Oxford, and died a year and a half later.  

Wycliffe wrote this to those who opposed his work:

“You call me a heretic because I have translated the Bible into the common tongue of the people.  You say that the Church of God is in danger from this book.  How can that be?  Is it not from the Bible that we learn who is the Builder and Sovereign of the Church?  It is you who place the Church in jeopardy by hiding the Divine warrant, the royal missive of her King.” 

Because of Wycliffe’s pioneering work in translating the Bible into English, Cameron Townsend, named the Bible translation organization he founded after him.

Another man came along after Wycliffe and furthered the work of an English translation. It’s a name you might recognize from today, but only as a book publisher.  William Tyndale (1494-1536) was his name.  

Tyndale’s work culminated in his edition of 1534.  David Ewert says in his book that “it is estimated that nine-tenths of the King James Version of 1611 is Tyndale, and where the Authorized Version departed from Tyndale, later revisers often returned to it.”  

Tyndale was also severely persecuted for his work and in 1535 was kidnapped, imprisoned, convicted of heresy and eventually burned at the stake.

 As you can see, it was not without great sacrifice that we have come to be able to read and understand the Bible in our own language.

In the world today there are nearly 7,000 spoken languages.

Of those 7,000 languages there are over 2,000 languages that do not have any Scripture.

Those 2,000 languages equate to more than 340 million people.

340 million people without the word of God to encourage, reassure and give them hope.