The average plowboy and milkmaid first got access to an English Bible because of a man who gave his life for that cause, a Chattanooga-born theologian says.
Dr. Timothy George, founding dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., said the King James Version of the Bible "owes so much" to William Tyndale, the first person to translate it into English from Hebrew and Greek texts.
"It was a courageous and brave and gutsy thing to do," he said.
Translating the Bible led to Mr. Tyndale being burned at the stake for being a heretic in the early 1600s.
Dr. George will deliver the 28th annual C.S. Lewis Lecture at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga on Monday. The title of his lecture is "The Making of the English Bible."
The speaker "is very much homegrown," a product of the distinctively local Bible in the Schools program and was an original recipient of the Dora Maclellan Brown Scholarship, lecture planning committee member Henry Henegar said.
Dr. George said his work as the general editor of a 28-volume work for InterVarsity Press, "The Reformation Commentary of Scripture," and his general interest in Reformation history led to the lecture topic.
Mr. Tyndale, he said, tried to get approval in England for the Bible translation, "but he was met with nothing but closed doors." Since it was his passion, he eventually had to leave England to finish his work and fled from place to place, Dr. George said.
Over time, according to Dr. George, individual leaves of the translated Bible were smuggled back into England in bales of cloth. By the time authorities caught up to the reformer and burned him at the stake as a heretic, about 6,000 copies had made it back to the country.
"It's an amazing kind of story," he said.
IF YOU GO* What: "The Making of the Bible," 28th annual C.S. Lewis Lecture* When: 7:30 p.m. Monday* Where: UTC's Benwood Auditorium, Engineering, Math and Computer Science Building, corner of Vine and Palmetto streets* Admission: Free
Not only do the King James Version of the Bible and subsequent translations owe so much to Mr. Tyndale's 1611 translation, Dr. George said, but his work "shaped the English language."
The works of William Shakespeare and others were greatly influenced by the words and phrases Mr. Tyndale used, he said.
Mr. Tyndale's translation has a "freshness and liveliness about it," Dr. George said. "There is a power in the language itself. A lot of modern translations fall down bitterly (against it)."
He said Mr. Lewis, the 20th-century Christian apologist and author of the "Chronicles of Narnia" books, was no stranger to Bible translation, having been on a Bible translation committee and partially being responsible for a newer English translation.