00:32 On October 26, 1553,
00:35 Michael Servetus was convicted of heresy
00:38 and sentenced to death by burning.
00:41 The following day, he was chained to a post in the city of Geneva.
00:45 Around his feet were placed piles of wood ready to be lit.
00:51 What was his crime?
00:53 Servetus loved Bible truth and was unable to reconcile
00:57 the teachings of the church with his own studies of the Bible.
01:02 Michael Servetus died slowly,
01:05 yet never once did he recant
01:08 his faith in the Bible as the Word of God.
01:14 This was by no means the first time fire had been used
01:18 to dissuade or destroy individuals
01:20 who loved the Bible and its teachings.
01:23 Throughout history,
01:25 the Bible has faced repeated attacks.
01:28 Empires have tried to destroy it;
01:31 religious leaders have tried to hide it.
01:34 But despite opposition and the threat of death,
01:37 many have risked their lives and reputations to protect it.
01:42 The Bible was completed around the year 98 C.E.
01:47 At this point, most, if not all,
01:50 Christians lived in territory controlled by the Roman Empire.
01:54 Roman Emperor Diocletian began ruling in 284 C.E.
02:00 Dr. Peter Williams works at Tyndale House,
02:03 a center for biblical studies.
02:05 Rome didn’t have much time for people
02:09 who didn’t like the Roman religion.
02:11 Diocletian instigated a persecution
02:14 —a systematic persecution of the Christians.
02:17 Probably the most systematic persecution
02:20 that any Roman emperor ever undertook.
02:23 He also was very much against the Christian books,
02:27 so he wanted to get rid of peoples’ Bibles
02:29 and copies of books of the Bible.
02:31 There’s a serious attempt
02:33 to destroy Christianity if possible.
02:43 Given such extreme opposition,
02:45 the survival of the Bible and Christianity might have seemed impossible.
02:49 How did the Bible writings survive this intense opposition?
02:53 Here in Dublin we will begin to find the answer.
02:57 I’m meeting Jessica Baldwin, the Head of Collections
03:01 at the Chester Beatty Library.
03:03 The Chester Beatty Library houses three important papyri
03:08 known as P45, P46, and P47.
03:11 It’s believed that these papyri date back to the third century C.E.,
03:16 making them some of the oldest known manuscripts
03:18 of the New Testament.
03:20 This is Chester Beatty’s Biblical Papyrus No. 2,
03:23 which is also known as P46,
03:25 and it’s the earliest surviving copy
03:28 of the Pauline Epistles.
03:30 The term “papyrus” is used quite extensively,
03:33 but when you look at the manuscripts,
03:35 you can actually see the material that they’re made of.
03:37 So papyrus is made from the pith of the papyrus plant,
03:40 and it was made in Egypt.
03:43 This is interesting because it appears there’s—
03:45 Is that a fold that’s down the middle of that?
03:48 These were large manuscripts; they were substantial;
03:50 they weren’t single scrolls that were rolled and unrolled.
03:53 For a scholar and for the community at the time
03:57 which these texts would have been so vital to,
03:59 to have it in a codex form which you could almost
04:01 —you could turn to the section that you want to refer to.
04:04 You could really use it as a text to be read, thought about, understood.
04:08 Professor McGing showed me these manuscripts
04:11 in further detail.
04:13 These are real gold-standard texts.
04:16 They clearly are the four Gospels together and Acts.
04:20 The letters are all separated out beautifully.
04:23 It was smooth, elegant lines
04:26 neatly arrayed.
04:29 That in itself is, I suppose,
04:31 a tribute to the faith of the people doing it.
04:35 This was a task that was important
04:38 —it was important to do properly, accurately, and beautifully.
04:42 These have survived because they were contained
04:45 within a ceramic pot and buried.
04:48 These were clearly, carefully tended for;
04:53 they couldn’t really survive in this form otherwise.
04:57 Whoever it was that protected these manuscripts
05:00 showed that they loved the Bible.
05:05 As the centuries passed,
05:07 the Bible faced new challenges.
05:16 William Tyndale was the first person to seek
05:19 to translate the Bible from the original languages
05:21 into English.
05:23 Tyndale was born in the late 15th century.
05:27 He was born in the area of Gloucestershire
05:30 but had a chance to go to Oxford and became a priest.
05:34 In the 15th century, there was a lot of resistance
05:37 —the idea that the Word of God
05:38 could just simply be accessible by the general people.
05:42 People knew the Latin Bible from church,
05:45 which was interpreted by the priest for them.
05:48 They never had direct access to the Bible themselves.
05:51 Tyndale was not allowed to do this translation in England.
05:54 He went to the Bishop of London
05:56 asking for his permission to translate the New Testament
06:00 from the Greek —the original text—
06:04 into English but was not given that permission.
06:09 Such was the opposition to Bible translation
06:12 that Tyndale later wrote that there was
06:14 no place to do it in all England.
06:17 And so with the help of merchants sympathetic to his cause,
06:21 Tyndale fled to Germany where he could more easily work
06:24 on his English translation of the New Testament.
06:27 By 1525,
06:29 his translation was complete and ready to be printed.
06:32 The British Library in London holds the answer
06:36 to what happened next.
06:38 Dr. Karen Limper-Herz, a lead curator at the library,
06:42 is going to help us find out.
06:44 So we are looking at a unique copy of the first edition
06:47 of Tyndale’s New Testament, printed in Cologne in 1525.
06:50 The Cologne Fragment is the only known copy
06:53 of what exists of Tyndale’s first edition of the New Testament.
06:56 The fact that it is a fragment shows that it was a dangerous thing to do.
07:00 The printer had too much to drink and mentioned that he
07:03 was printing this pro-Lutheran English New Testament
07:07 for somebody called William Tyndale.
07:09 The authorities found out about it, and the print shop was raided.
07:12 Tyndale and his partners ran
07:14 —and this is all that survives today—
07:16 and they went down the Rhine a bit further to Worms.
07:18 So the fact that they didn’t get much further than part way through Matthew
07:22 is quite indicative of how dangerous it was.
07:24 The first complete copies of Tyndale’s translation
07:27 of the Christian Greek Scriptures were finally printed
07:31 in the city of Worms in Germany
07:34 in 1526.
07:36 Around 3,000 or more of these books were produced.
07:48 After leaving Germany,
07:50 Tyndale moved to Antwerp.
07:53 This bustling city was ideal for Tyndale.
07:56 It had a thriving printing industry and its busy port
08:01 made it easy for his books to reach readers in England.
08:05 Professor Guido Latré has kindly offered to show me
08:08 around the very streets that Tyndale would have walked himself
08:11 some 500 years ago.
08:14 What he saw around him here were ordinary people
08:17 having access to the Bible in Dutch.
08:20 He wanted the same for his own folk in England.
08:24 If you wanted to smuggle Bibles on a large scale into England,
08:28 this was Northern Europe’s biggest seaport.
08:32 You can’t easily smuggle
08:35 a big volume and a big format.
08:38 So tiny loose leaves
08:41 that were taken to places like this
08:43 —these underground cellars, the warehouses—
08:45 and between the leaves
08:47 of larger books that were not forbidden,
08:50 the tiny leaves of Tyndale’s translation would have been hidden.
08:53 In London, someone would have recognized:
08:56 ‘Aha! These are the stacks that are marked.
08:59 ‘I must have a look at these
09:01 and find the loose leaves of Tyndale’s Bible.’
09:04 There were about 30,000 copies of Tyndale’s Bible available
09:09 by the end of his life.
09:10 This was a brave man and a big man in terms of courage
09:14 and in terms of investment of time.
09:16 And the risks he took are not to be underestimated.
09:21 William Tyndale was imprisoned
09:23 here in Vilvoorde, just north of Brussels.
09:26 As he languished in prison for over a year,
09:29 he no doubt contemplated the cruel death that inevitably awaited him.
09:34 Tyndale is often renowned for his influence on the English language,
09:38 but his work was more than that of just scholarly ambition.
09:42 Tyndale loved the Bible.
09:44 Maybe it can be said of him
09:47 that he shared the feelings of the psalmist who spoke of God’s Word
09:50 and said: “How I do love your law!”
10:09 As news of Tyndale’s death
10:12 spread throughout Europe,
10:14 it no doubt concerned other truth seekers
10:16 who were making their own studies of the Bible.
10:18 One such man was Michael Servetus,
10:22 whom we mentioned at the outset.
10:24 He was born here, in the Aragon region of Northern Spain.
10:28 We have traveled to Villanueva de Sijena
10:30 to find out more about him.
10:34 Sergio Baches is the director of the Michael Servetus Institute,
10:37 which runs a museum in the house
10:39 where it is believed Servetus was raised.
10:43 We have a young man
10:45 who is exposed
10:46 to the main religious problems
10:48 at that time that influenced his future thoughts
10:53 about some of the tricky issues
10:56 related to Christianity,
10:57 such as, for instance, the dogma of the Holy Trinity.
11:01 So he wanted to go to the sources.
11:04 And that’s what Servetus thought:
11:08 The truth must be found in the Bible.
11:11 Doctor Marian Hillar has published work on Michael Servetus.
11:17 He was sent,
11:19 probably upon the advice of his father,
11:21 to Toulouse to study the law.
11:25 In Toulouse, which was a very restrictive place
11:27 where reading of the Bible was forbidden,
11:31 he got involved in serious studies of the Bible.
11:34 He had intellectual curiosity.
11:36 At that time, the main issue which people
11:38 were really discussing in the streets and everywhere was religion.
11:42 In 1531, Servetus published his first book
11:46 entitled On the Errors of the Trinity.
11:49 In his book, he questioned the teachings of the church
11:52 regarding the identity of God and Jesus.
11:56 He later wrote: “In the Bible,
11:59 “there is no mention of the Trinity.
12:01 “We get to know God,
12:03 “not through our proud philosophical concepts,
12:06 but through Christ.”
12:09 In his writings, Servetus quoted from or alluded to
12:13 at least 52 of the 66 books of the Bible.
12:17 It’s clear that Michael Servetus was a man who valued
12:21 the teachings of the Bible above all others.
12:24 Servetus was arrested
12:27 and was accused of heresy.
12:30 It’s a crystal clear example
12:34 of cruelty and religious bigotry.
12:38 It was expressed that he has to be punished.
12:41 And at that time, the only punishment
12:43 which you could imagine was death.
12:46 I guess his driving force
12:48 was the search of truth,
12:51 the need to restore Christianity to its origins.
12:56 Although various views on Servetus’ conclusions have been raised,
13:01 it’s clear he was driven by a sincere thirst for Biblical truth.
13:06 He wrote: “A book has been given us from heaven,
13:10 so that in it we may search after God.”
13:14 History is full of accounts of those who have risked and given their lives
13:19 to read, to translate, or to understand the Bible.
13:23 Their overriding motivation must surely have been
13:26 the value they placed on the Bible.
13:30 The Bible has come to us through great opposition.
13:34 It has survived physical destruction.
13:37 The simple act of translating it has been outlawed
13:41 and those who have strived to read and understand it
13:43 have often been punished with death.
13:46 And yet, the Bible and the wisdom in it
13:49 survives to this day,
13:51 a faithful transmission of the original writers’ words.
13:55 No wonder so many have placed such value on the Bible.
