Poet's license

In the 1500s, England was ruled by Henry VIII. He’s the one who cut the heads off his wives heads when they didn’t do what he wanted. He’s the one who finally threw the pope out of England so he could marry another woman.

As the king from 1509-1547, Henry was very antagonistic, not just to Rome, but to Protestants. It was during that time that much of the Bible, including William Tyndale’s translation, the Matthews Bible and the Great bible, was done.

William Tyndale finished his translation in Saxony (on the continent) because Henry, who had banned everything Tyndale wrote, had falsely accused him of sedition and Tyndale had to flee England to keep the king from cutting his head off.

“Saints can be kind of wise as serpents and harmless as doves,” observes Jordan. “At one point Tyndale had finished the revision of his translation and wanted to publish but had run out of money, so a merchant friend of his in London went to the archbishop and said, ‘I have a way to purchase some 2,000 of Tyndale’s Bibles—we could purchase them and then burn them.’

“So they purchased through this emissary all these old Tyndale bibles that Tyndale wanted to replace anyway. The archbishop buys them, brings them to London, burns them and makes a big thing out of it. The king’s ever so happy. Tyndale takes the money and reprints his revised edition. Of course, the merchant friend didn’t let on that he was a friend of Tyndale’s; he just went ahead and made the business deal.

“After he died his nephew became King Edward VI. Edward was a ‘Live and Let Live’ kind of a guy. When he died, Bloody Mary took over and she was as rabidly Roman Catholic as anyone could be. The Catholics had set up in the meanwhile on the mainland, where the Douay-Rheims translation came from.

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Ignatius Loyola founded the Jesuits. Loyola was a general in the army of Ferdinand Isabella, the one who financed Christopher Columbus, and he was also rabidly Roman Catholic. Much of the Spanish Inquisition took place under his nose.

“Loyola was wounded in the fighting to expel the Muslims from Europe. He couldn’t be a soldier anymore so he was casting about, ‘Well what should I do for the good of man and the glory of God,’ so he comes up with the idea…by that time the Protestants had spread all over Europe and the papacy was sort of behind the scenes.

“In 1454, Constantinople fell (Istanbul). The Ottoman Empire comes in and takes over the Byzantine Empire. All of the eastern church, the Muslims came in and took them over and the Byzantines flee to Europe.

“For the first time in a millennium, Greek language, manuscripts, culture and understanding comes into Europe. The Romans (Latin) had pushed them out. When they did that, Erasmus is there. All of this original language and Greek understanding comes in and there’s this confluence of all this education, thinking and opportunity. It was an exciting time.

“The pope was beginning to wake up: ‘We’re in trouble!’ Two-thirds of Europe is Protestant and the other third is leaning that way. Loyola says, ‘I know what we need to do. We’ll found the Jesuits for the specific purpose of subverting the Protestant Reformation.’ That’s what the Jesuits were for. That was their charter.

“One of Loyola’s goals was to train 300 priests to send back to England to re-establish Romanism in England. But because the English have been translating this bible into English, you know, Wycliffe comes along and he takes all of these disparate pieces of translations. You’ve got a new language developing. He puts this complete English bible together, begins to publish it and Wycliffe was a statesman. He’d been a member of parliament, called on by the king of England to help. He was a well-known figure.

“So Loyola says, ‘What we need to do is get us an English bible,’ and they go to Rheims France and start translating the bible. They also set out a place and they’re training 300 priests they’re going to send back.

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“Bloody Mary’s over here chopping the heads off of people. She literally beheaded some of the great saints of the Protestant Reformation in England. And then she croaks.

“After she dies, Queen Elizabeth comes on the throne and she was as much the other way as Mary was that way. She was rabidly Protestant, so now all the Catholics have to uproot and go. The 300 dudes being trained, forget it, they can’t come. Douay-Rheims is a failed effort.

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From 1558-1603 you have this golden era of English accomplishments and moving forward under Queen Elizabeth’s reign. When she died there were a whole bunch of different bible translations and before she died she actually sent to parliament a proposed legislation to authorize one final English translation that would gather together all the bibles that had been done and make out of them just one final acceptable English translation.

“Before that passed she died, but it was on the books as being a proposal,” says Jordan. “James the sixth of Scotland was born in 1566 in the summer. He was crowned King of Scotland while he was a baby.

“By the way, his coronation sermon was preached by John Knox, one of the great saints of the old school in church history. He preached his coronation message. I say that so you understand it came out of a strongly Protestant heritage.

“Now, 36 years later he became James I of England in July of 1603 after the death of Queen Elizabeth. James, when they talk about him being ugly, vile and vulgar; when they say vulgar, they don’t mean cursing, they mean plain, ordinary.

“When you see pictures of James he was kind of a reddish-looking faced guy. Looks sort of like a red-headed stepchild kind of cartoon character. He was a skinny guy. He was married, had kids, so forth, a family man, but he was nerdy, as we would say. He was a bookworm. He wasn’t the warrior-type ready to pick up the sword and slay the dragon. He was a poet. He translated. He was educated and fluent in languages.

“People who would come in and meet him as a child (7-10 years old), and the ambassadors from France, for example, would go away and say how fluent he was in French and then how he met the Italian ambassador and that he could speak as equally in Italian as he could in French and spoke both as well as he did English.

“In 1584, he wrote ‘The Essays of a Pretense into the Divine Art of
Poetry.’ He wrote, ‘A Fruitful Meditation on the 6th, 8th, 9th and 10th Verses of Chapter 20 of the Book of the Revelation.’ That’s an interesting thing to write. In 1589 he wrote, ‘A Meditation on the First Book of the Chronicles of the Kings.’ In 1591 he wrote, ‘His Majesty’s Poetical Exercises.’ In 1598 he wrote, ‘The Law of Free Monarchies.’ In 1597, he wrote a book called ‘Demonology,’ in which he denounces homosexuality quite clearly.

“He wrote a book for his son, ‘Basilikon Doran,’ which became an international best-seller, something that didn’t happen a lot in that era.

“I say all that so you understand that before James became King of England he had a background in thinking and understanding and knowledge and awareness of doctrine, things that pertain to Scripture. He was a man who enjoyed the study of Scripture. He actually had translated a Psalter, a book with some of the psalms in it, himself.”

To be continued…