This was the first action of the English ecclesiastical authorities, and it was clearly taken not from distrust of what the same bishop calls “the most holy Word of God,” but because they looked on the version sent forth by Tyndale as a profanation of the Bible, and as intended to disseminate the errors of Lutheranism.
Of the Lutheran character of the translation the authorities, whether in Church or State, do not seem to have had from the first the least doubt. The king himself, in a rejoinder to Luther’s letter of apology, says that the German reformer “fell in device with one or two lewd persons, born in this our realm, for the translating of the New Testament into English, as well with many corruptions of that holy text, as certain prefaces and other pestilent glosses in the margins, for the advancement and setting forth of his abominable heresies, intending to abuse the good minds and devotion that you, our dearly beloved people, bear toward the Holy Scripture and infect you with the deadly corruption and contagious odour of his pestilent errors.”[254]
Bishop Tunstall, in 1529, whilst returning from an embassy abroad, purchased at Antwerp through one Packington, all copies of the English printed New Testament that were for sale, and, according to the chronicler Hall, burned them publicly at St. Paul’s in May 1530. For the same reason the confiscated volumes of the edition first sent over were committed to the flames some time in 1527,[255] and Bishop Tunstall explained to the people at Paul’s Cross that the book was destroyed because in more than two thousand places wrong translations and corruptions had been detected. Tyndale made a great outcry at the iniquity of burning the Word of God; but in _The Wicked Mammon_ he declares that, “in burning the New Testament they did none other thynge than I looked for.” Moreover, as he sold the books knowing the purpose for which they were purchased, he may be said to have been a participator in the act he blames. “The fact is,” says a modern authority, “the books were full of errors and unsaleable, and Tyndale wanted money to pay the expense of a revised version and to purchase Vastermann’s old Dutch blocks to illustrate his Pentateuch, and was glad to make capital in more ways than one by the translation. ‘I am glad,’ said he, ‘for these two benefits shall come thereof: I shall get money to bring myself out of debt, and the whole world will cry out against the burning of God’s Word, and the overplus of the money that shall remain to me shall make me more studious to correct the said New Testament, and so newly to imprint the same once again, and I trust the second you will much better like than you ever did the first.’”[256]