Once upon a time, there was a religion who claim to be Christian but wanted the monopoly of Bible reading only for themselves. They don't want common people to own or even read the Bible. You will be hanged, burn, or brutally killed if you disobey them by reading the Bible. Your crime? Heresy.
Here are some real people, not fictional character that they have executed under the name of their Religion...
Among the few early translations to a common language (other than Latin or Greek), we find the Anglo-Saxon Gospels (only four books of the New Testament) in A.D. 995. Later, there were French and Spanish translations used by the often bilingual English nobility. Otherwise, it was Latin or nothing—only the priests could tell or interpret what was in the Scriptures, especially for the masses of common folk.
Historically, the Anglo-Saxon love of freedom has taken on legendary status, and that sense of liberty stirred interest in an English translation in the 1380s. John Wycliffe, an English theologian, published hand-copied volumes of his own English translation of the Latin Bible. A brilliant man at odds with the established church, Wycliffe was eventually declared a heretic due to his translation and publication of the Scriptures in the common English. So angry was the religious establishment that leaders of the Catholic Church in Rome ordered his bones exhumed and burned in 1428—some 40 years after his death!
By the mid-1400s, the Gutenberg printing press was invented, revolutionizing the manufacture and availability of all books, but especially the Bible. One early customer was Desiderius Erasmus, a Dutch scholar and expert in Greek. From early manuscripts, he assembled a more accurate copy of the New Testament in Greek than the official Latin version used by the Roman church. His work (published in 1516) is known as the Textus Receptus, that is, the "Received Text," from which the New Testament in the King James Bible was later translated.
The movement away from the pope's complete religious domination of traditional Christianity was gaining momentum around this time. One year later, in 1517, Martin Luther effectively launched a protest against a number of Roman Catholic doctrines and practices, hence the term Protestant.
Luther translated the Bible into German, and a brilliant and brave British theologian named William Tyndale translated the New Testament from Erasmus' Greek Textus Receptus into English. In 1526, Tyndale, too, made use of the printing revolution. The Roman church leaders in England were so enraged at Tyndale for publishing his translation that he was forced to do most of his work in seclusion in Germany or Holland.
Historians call William Tyndale "the architect of the English language," largely because of the beauty and accuracy of his Bible translation. Hard as it might be to believe, considering the shallow, secular-mindedness of our godless century, the Bible profoundly shaped the language, culture and history of the English-speaking nations!
Educated at Oxford College and fluent in eight languages, Mr. Tyndale produced such a fine translation of the Bible that a significant portion of his wording was carried over into the King James Version. But he translated at the ultimate cost.
Renowned for later precipitating the Protestant Reformation in England, King Henry VIII supported the pope during his early reign. Sadly, both the king's operatives and Roman church agents hunted down and imprisoned Tyndale. After 500 days in deplorable conditions, followed by a sham trial, the great English Bible translator was strangled and burned at the stake in 1536.
At Elizabeth's death, her second cousin King James VI of Scotland was crowned King James I of England and Ireland in 1603. The next year, he hosted the famous Hampton Court Conference of religious leaders to hear the Puritans' reasons for opposing the corrupted Latin Bible. As king, he then decreed that a new translation of the Scriptures should be made.
Control issues resurfaced with a violent vengeance in 1605. Roman church supporters attempted a bloody coup d'etat by hiding a massive stockpile of gunpowder in the basement of the House of Commons, intending to blow up James and the entire British government when the king came to address Parliament. Divine intervention prevailed. The Gunpowder Plot was discovered and defused.
James involved himself in the translation process by organizing highly esteemed teams of Greek, Hebrew and Bible scholars based at the education centers of Oxford, Cambridge and Westminster in 1607. After four years of systematic and carefully reviewed translation, the Authorized King James Version of the entire Bible was finalized for publication in 1611.
Why they are so enrage if common people learn to read the word of God? The answer is simple...their crime will be expose.
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