Speaking for The King James Bible Trust, Former Laureate Andrew Motion recently praised the poetry of the KJV on BBC Radio 4's 'Today' Programme...However - not one one word of William Tyndale, whom the Trust confirms was responsible for 80% of the content of the KJV...
(To listen to the programme excerpt, click on the image above).
Unaccountably, on the King James Bible Trust's website, Tyndale - the Gloucestershire scholar who taught himself Hebrew and Greek, became an outlaw of his own country, was hunted down by the authorities and strangled before being burned at the stake for his translation of '80% of the KJV' - does not merit a mention under 'Bible Heroes' (unlike Shakespeare, Florence Nightingale, Cecil B. DeMille, J.R.R. Tolkein and the vicar who founded the RSPCA).
However, Tyndale does get two sentences under 'Music'...
Come on King James Bible Trust - we think you can do a little better than that!
To encourage the Trust to say a little more about Tyndale - a true Bible hero - please email them here to add the weight of your opinion: info@kjbtrust.com
Click here to read Mary Clow's letter to The Today Programme.
Letter to 'The Today Programme'from Tyndale Society Chairman Mary Clow:
ReplyDelete"Shakespeare's language was based on the work of a scholar from Gloucestershire who was fired with the belief that ordinary English people should be able to read the Bible in their mother tongue: as he said 'the boy that follows the plough should know the Gospels as well as a learned man'.
His translation was the foundation of the Geneva Bible that Shakespeare knew, and formed 80% of the King James Bible. He was burned at the stake in 1536 for this: his name is William Tyndale.
Tyndale's bibles were printed abroad as pocket volumes, smuggled into England and read in danger & secrecy - books for which you could be burned.
The King James Bible was an officially sponsored work, agreed by academics & churchmen, lectern size 'to be read in churches'as part of a government programme to suppress controversy.
That it is 'the bible of the heart' is due to the unattributed work of William Tyndale."