Filling Up the Afflictions of Christ

The Cost of Bringing the Gospel to the Nations in the Lives of William Tyndale, Adoniram Judson, and John Paton

John Piper

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781433521386
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

The fifth volume in Piper's acclaimed The Swans Are Not Silent series illustrates powerful and enduring lessons through the missional sufferings of Tyndale, Judson, and Paton.

Jesus' words in John 12 are sobering: unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it will bear little fruit. The history of Christianity's expansion proves that God's strategy for reaching unreached peoples with the gospel includes the sufferings of his frontline heralds-the missionaries who willingly die a thousand daily deaths to advance God's kingdom.

Pastor John Piper's latest addition to The Swans Are Not Silent series focuses on this flesh-and-blood reality in the lives of William Tyndale, Adoniram Judson, and John Paton. The price they paid to translate the Word of God, to pave the way for missionary mobilization around the world, and to lead the hostile to Christ was great. Yet their stories show in triplicate how the gospel advances not only through the faithful proclamation of the truth but through representing the afflictions of Christ in our sufferings.

Part of theTheSwans Are Not Silentseries.

1

WILLIAM TYNDALE

“Always Singing One Note”—A Vernacular Bible:The Cost of Bringing the Bible to England

Stephen Vaughan was an English merchant commissioned by Thomas Cromwell, the king’s adviser, to find William Tyndale and inform him that King Henry VIII desired him to come back to England out of hiding on the continent. In a letter to Cromwell from Vaughan dated June 19, 1531, Vaughan wrote about Tyndale (1494–1536) these simple words: “I find him always singing one note.”¹That one note was this: Will the King of England give his official endorsement to a vernacular Bible for all his English subjects? If not, Tyndale would not come. If so, Tyndale would give himself up to the king and never write another book.

This was the driving passion of his life—to see the Bible translated from the Greek and Hebrew into ordinary English available for every person in England to read.

Whatever It Costs

Henry VIII was angry with Tyndale for believing and promoting Martin Luther’s Reformation teachings. In particular, he was angry because of Tyndale’s book An Answer unto Sir ThomasMore's Dialogue. Thomas More (famous today for his book Utopia and as portrayed in the movie A Man for All Seasons) was the Lord Chancellor who helped Henry VIII write his repudiation of Luther called Defense of the Seven Sacraments. Thomas More was thoroughly Roman Catholic and radically anti-Reformation, anti-Luther, and anti-Tyndale. So Tyndale had come under excoriating criticism by Thomas More.²In fact, More had a “near-rabid hatred”³for Tyndale and published three long responses to him totaling nearly three-quarters of a million words.⁴

But in spite of this high-court anger against Tyndale, the king’s message to Tyndale, carried by Vaughan, was mercy: “The king’s royal majesty is . . . inclined to mercy, pity, and compassion.”⁵

The thirty-seven-year-old Tyndale was moved to tears by this offer of mercy. He had been in exile away from his homeland for seven years. But then he sounded his “one note” again: Will the king authorize a vernacular English Bible from the original languages? Vaughan gives us Tyndale’s words from May 1531:

I assure you, if it would stand with the King’s most gracious pleasure to grant only a bare text of the Scripture [that is, without explanatory notes] to be put forth among his people, like as is put forth among the subjects of the emperor in these parts, and of other Christian princes, be it of the translation of what person soever shall please his Majesty, I shall immediately make faithful promise never to write more, nor abide two days in these parts after the same: but immediately to repair unto his realm, and there most humbly submit myself at the feet of his royal majesty, offering my body to suffer what pain or torture, yea, what death his grace will, so this be obtained. Until that time, I will abide the asperity of all chances, whatsoever shall come, and endure my life in as many pains as it is able to bear and suffer.⁶

In other words, Tyndale would give himself up to the king on one condition—that the king authorize an English Bible translated from the Greek and Hebrew in the common language of the people.

The king refused. And Tyndale never went to his homeland again. Instead, if the king and the Roman Catholic Church would not provide a printed Bible in English for the common man to read, Tyndale would, even if it cost him his life—which it did five years later.

As I Live, the Plowboy Will Know His Bible

When he was twenty-eight years old in 1522, he was serving as a tutor in the home of John Walsh in Gloucestershire, England, spending most of his time studying Erasmus’ Greek New Testament that had been printed just six years before in 1516.

We should pause here and make clear what an incendiary thing this Greek New Testament was in history. David Daniell describes the magnitude of this event:

This was the first time that the Greek New Testament had been printed. It is no exaggeration to say that it set fire to Europe. Luther [1483–1546] translated it into his famous German version of 1522. In a few years there appeared translations from the Greek into most European vernaculars. They were the true basis of the popular reformation.⁷

Every day William Tyndale was seeing these Reformation truths more clearly in the Greek New Testament as an ordained Catholic priest. Increasingly, he was making himself suspect in this Catholic house of John Walsh. Learned men would come for dinner, and Tyndale would discuss the things he was seeing in the New Testament. John Foxe tells us that one day an exasperated Catholic scholar at dinner with Tyndale said, “We were better be without God’s law than the pope’s.”

In response Tyndale spoke his famous words, “I defy the Pope and all his laws. . . . If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow, shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.”⁸

The One-Note Crescendo

Four years later Tyndale finished the English translation of the Greek New Testament in Worms, Germany, and began to smuggle it into England in bales of cloth. He had grown up in Gloucestershire, the cloth-working county, and now we see what that turn of providence was about.⁹By October 1526, the book had been banned by Bishop Tunstall in London, but the print run had been at least three thousand. And the books were getting to the people. Over the next eight years, five pirated editions were printed as well.¹⁰

In 1534, Tyndale published a revised New Testament, having learned Hebrew in the meantime, probably in Germany, which helped him better understand the connections between the Old and New Testaments. Daniell calls this 1534 New Testament “the glory of his life’s work.”¹¹If Tyndale was “always singing one note,” this was the crescendo of the song of his life—the finished and refined New Testament in English.

The Very First New Testament in English from the Greek

For the first time ever in history, the Greek New Testament was translated into English. And for the first time ever, the New Testament in English was available in a printed form. Before Tyndale, there were only handwritten manuscripts of the Bible in English. These manuscripts we owe to the work and inspiration of John Wycliffe and the Lollards¹² from a hundred and thirty years earlier.¹³For a thousand years, the only translation of the Greek and Hebrew Bible was the Latin Vulgate, and few people could understand it, even if they had access to it.

Before he was martyred in 1536, Tyndale had translated into clear, common English¹⁴ not only the New Testament¹⁵ but also the Pentateuch, Joshua to 2 Chronicles, and Jonah.¹⁶All this material became the basis of the Great Bible issued by Miles Coverdale in England in 1539¹⁷ and the basis for the Geneva Bible published in 1557—“the Bible of the nation,”¹⁸which sold over a million copies between 1560 and 1640.

Under God, Tyndale Gave Us Our English Bible

We do not get a clear sense of Tyndale’s achievement without some comparisons. We think of the dominant King James Version as giving us the pervasive language of the English Bible. But Daniell clarifies the situation:

William Tyndale gave us our English Bible. The sages assembled by King James to prepare the Authorized Version of 1611, so often praised for unlikely corporate inspiration, took over Tyndale’s work. Nine-tenths of the Authorized Version’s New Testament is Tyndale’s. The same is true of the first half of the Old Testament, which was as far as he was able to get before he was executed outside Brussels in 1536.¹⁹

Here is a sampling of the English phrases we owe to Tyndale:

“Let there be light.” (Genesis 1:3)

“Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9)

“The LORD bless thee and keep thee. The LORD make his face to shine upon thee and be merciful unto thee. The LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.” (Numbers 6:24–26)

“There were shepherds abiding in the field.” (Luke 2:8)

“Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4)

“Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” (Matthew 6:9)

“The signs of the times” (Matthew 16:3)

“The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” (Matthew 26:41)

“He went out . . . and wept bitterly.” (Matthew 26:75)²⁰

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

“In him we live, move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)

“A law unto themselves” (Romans 2:14)

“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels” (1 Corinthians 13:1)

“Fight the good fight.” (1 Timothy 6:12)

According to Daniell, “The list of such near-proverbial phrases is endless.”²¹Five hundred years after his great work, “newspaper headlines still quote Tyndale, though u...