The Burned Pages That Built a Bible

In 1526, copies of William Tyndale's English New Testament began arriving in England, smuggled inside bales of cloth and barrels of flour. The Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, was so outraged that he purchased every copy he could find and burned them publicly at St. Paul's Cross. Church authorities declared Tyndale a heretic. His work was condemned as dangerous, unfit, rejected.

Tyndale himself was eventually betrayed, strangled, and burned at the stake in 1536. His final words were a prayer: "Lord, open the King of England's eyes."

Within three years, that prayer was answered. King Henry VIII authorized the Great Bible, which drew heavily on Tyndale's translation. When the King James Version appeared in 1611, scholars estimate that nearly 84 percent of its New Testament came directly from Tyndale's pen. The very words the bishops had thrown into the fire became the foundation upon which English-speaking Christians would encounter Scripture for centuries.

The psalmist knew this pattern well. "The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. The Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes." What religious authorities cast aside, the Almighty lifted up. What powerful men tried to destroy, God made indispensable.

Tyndale's story reminds us that God's steadfast love works through rejection, through fire, through death itself. The discarded becomes the essential. The condemned becomes the cornerstone. This is the Lord's doing, and it is indeed marvelous.