GOD'S WORD FOR THE COMMON MAN

Edward II was monarch of England in 1324, the year John Wycliffe, the "Morning Star of the Reformation," was born. During Edward's reign, Wycliffe was elected Archbishop of Canterbury, but he was soon removed by a new king, Edward III. Religion at that time was rife with superstition because God's Word in understandable form was not available to counter off-base ideas.

Wycliffe tried to work within the church but lost hope. Finally, he decided to translate pieces of the Bible into medieval English.

Many people were ready. They absorbed Bible passages. The most devoted were called Lollards, or "mutterers," because they spoke written portions of the Bible in common English. Many Lollards were martyred for speaking and spreading God's Word.

Wycliffe escaped martyrdom, though his body was later exhumed and burned, and the ashes scattered in a river.

The public dissemination of the Bible only gained momentum—particularly after 1453, when Johanne Gutenberg invented the printing press. This machine was capable of spreading ideas in written form with great speed and little outside control.

Church authorities now could not stop Bible printings. By 1455 Gutenberg printed his own Gutenberg Bible, a Latin Vulgate. Gutenberg's partner, John Fust, with Peter Schoeffer, later printed a smaller Gutenberg Bible, the first Bible exported from Germany.

Then, in 1483, in Saxony, Germany, Martin Luther was born. He mastered Greek and Hebrew, inspired by Erasmus—the world's then-greatest scholar. Erasmus may not have been a Christian, but he revived study of the ancient biblical languages of Greek and Hebrew needed to translate God's Word.

One day in a library, Luther "accidentally found a copy of the Latin Bible, which he had never seen before," Foxe says. He read it all "greedily, and was amazed to find what a small portion of the Scriptures was rehearsed to the people."

Luther had what he called his "Tower Experience" when he read in Romans that salvation comes only by faith in Jesus. On All Saints Eve—October 31, 1517—he posted his 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg, sparking the Protestant Reformation.

Rome's great thinkers kept debating Luther, but he ably refuted them from the Bible. His main trial was at Worms. Not long after he left there, the Word of God was further unleashed.

Hiding in a castle, Luther started translating the Bible into common German, using Erasmus' Greek New Testament. Luther's German New Testament was completed in 1522, and his entire German Bible in 1534, just eight years after Tyndale's English version of the New Testament appeared.

Germans suddenly could read about Jesus for themselves. The Bible soon surpassed the Mass in value to commoners because it let them better understand Jesus' life and ministry. "Jesus became a 16th century contemporary" to the average working person, Pelikan says.

Though Luther died of natural causes, he suffered great persecution during his life. Sadly, some Reformers lost focus. Swiss Reformation leader Ulrich Zwingli tried to stifle others' Bible interpretations. Zwingli's own Greek and Hebrew students, Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz, came to believe—in contrast to Zwingli—that Scripture teaches believers' baptism over infant baptism, which had become Christendom's unchallenged practice.

One cold January day in 1525, Manz, Grebel and others sharing these new convictions met for earnest prayer. Then they all submitted to believers' baptism—a radical act of Christian heresy and defiance of state laws.

"This was clearly the most revolutionary act of the Reformation," says scholar William Estep, author of The Anabaptist Story. He adds: "It was a culmination of an earnest searching of the Scriptures."

Manz and Grebel began to witness house to house, baptizing converts. Grebel soon died of the plague, but Manz was seized by the government.

As he walked to his death, his mother called out for him to stay faithful. Bound and placed in a boat in the Limmat River, he sang aloud, "Into thy hands, O God, I commend my spirit," and was toppled into the river to die on January 5, 1527.

Another Anabaptist martyr, Michael Sattler, knew both Greek and Hebrew. He codified Scripture into the Schleitheim Confession of 1527, which contained seven articles of faith agreed upon by the Anabaptists, or Swiss Brethren. His goal was the same one Luther had in penning the 95 Theses: to combat the unsound teachings of the day with truth.

For this, his tongue was cut out and his flesh ripped apart; then he was burned alive. Sattler prayed: "I will with Thy help to this day testify to the truth."

WORLDWIDE DISTRIBUTION

Other translations of the Bible continued to make their appearance. In 1535, a year before Tyndale's martyrdom, the Coverdale Bible was printed by a Tyndale disciple. Matthew's Bible followed in 1537, also published by a Tyndale follower, John Rogers. It was the first to include margin notes.

Bloody Mary, then queen of England, condemned Rogers to martyrdom. "That which I have preached, I will seal with my blood," he proclaimed as he burned, his wife and 11 children watching on.

In 1560 John Calvin, with his disciples, translated the Geneva Bible, creating the first translation with verse divisions. The Pilgrims used this version. Eventually, a half-million copies were circulated among England's 6 million residents.

Finally, in 1604, Puritan John Reynolds pressed the king of England for a new translation to rival the Geneva Bible. Forty-seven scholars worked at Westminster, Cambridge and Oxford for five years. The result in 1611 was the King James Bible, the most printed book ever.

Today, the Bible remains the world's best-seller. New English translations that take the evolving language into account—the New International Version, the New American Standard Bible, the New King James Version, and so on—help us gain an ever-greater understanding of the Scriptures.

Still, some people do not have the Bible in their own language. We may wonder how they shall be converted and discipled, for Tyndale wrote that he had "perceived by experience how that it was impossible to establish the laypeople in any truth, except the Scriptures were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue."

One Cakchiquel Indian of Guatemala asked William Cameron Townsend, founder in 1942 of Wycliffe Bible Translators: "If your God is so smart, why doesn't he speak Cakchiquel?"

Townsend worked 10 years to produce a Cakchiquel Bible. He was committed to the task of making it possible for every man, woman and child to read God's Word in his own language.

Even before Townsend's time, the written Word of God had begun to move beyond Europe to span the globe. Matthew's Gospel was translated into Malaysian as early as 1629. American John Eliot translated the Bible into the language of the Massachusetts Indians in 1662.

By 1800, as many as 66 languages had some portion of Scripture and 40 had the whole Bible, according to Wycliffe Bible Translators. From 1793 to 1834, William Carey translated or helped translate Scripture into 45 languages and dialects.

Starting in 1804, Bible societies began to form to translate, publish and distribute Bibles worldwide. Many modern missionaries still die for this goal. Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Pete Fleming, and Roger Youderian—college graduates turned translators—were speared to death in 1956 by Ecuadorian Indians when they tried to bring the gospel to these isolated people.

God's Word still spreads, mingled with the blood of martyrs. About 1,640 languages have Bible translations in progress; 876 have at least one book; 1,079 have the New Testament; and 422 have the entire Bible.

Yet of the world's 6.5 billion people, more than 270 million still have no Bible in their native tongue. Considering that "the Word is the Spirit's only sword, the Spirit's only tool for accomplishing the work and will of God," as historian and editor Stanley Burgess says, what is to be our response? Will Spirit-filled believers today risk all to spread God's Word—in the hope of saving a plowboy's soul?