Professor Daniell's life of the 16th century English Bible translator torpedoes the theory that the Roman Church would eventually have produced an English vernacular Bible without the Protestant Reformation. This theory has been advanced on the ground that devotional books containing material from the Gospels were already appearing in English in the late medieval period:
Catholic revisionist historians miss the vital point. The Gospels-as-pap represents no New Testament theology. The Church would never permit a complete printed New Testament from the Greek, because in the New Testament can be found neither the Seven Sacraments nor the doctrine of purgatory, two chief sources of the Church's power. The recent remark 'there was nothing in the character of religion in late medieval England which could only or even best have developed within Protestantism', only points to how far religion in late medieval England was from mainstream Christianity. An elementary working knowledge of the Bible, the ulimate root of the Christian faith, could only have developed within Protestantism (David Daniell, William Tyndale, Yale, p100).
Your curate wishes the youth group a very happy New Year and prays for many opportunities for all of us to serve the living Christ as the Bible reveals Him in the coming year and to proclaim the truth of His wonderful gospel of salvation.
Even though we often find ourselves marginalised and beleaguered even and perhaps especially within the visible Church, the biblical truth Tyndale unleashed on our nation through his English Bible is not peripheral but mainstream Christianity. By God's grace may that truth be unleashed again in our day and generation.
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