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[The name of the Christians has been
extinguished].
In A.D. 1530, in the days before the
beginning of the Reformation in the 16
th
century, the State-Church of the Middle
Ages waged a relentless warfare against
the free use of the Bible by the common
people, in almost all parts of Europe.
When her efforts to keep the Bible locked
away in a dead language (Latin) proved
futile, the Church did not hesitate to
confiscate and burn the Book. In 1530,
the Bishop of London burned William
Tyndale’s printed English Testaments
outside St. Pauls. Tyndale himself was
strangled and burned on the Continent.
In the same century, Martin Luther’s
translations of the Scriptures into the
tongue of the common German people
were publicly committed to the flames.
