William Tyndale

I'm reading a lengthy biography of William Tyndale's life and I am finding it humbling and highly educational. The excerpt below is taken from a work Tyndale wrote called The Obedience of a Christian Man. He is offering an apology, yet again, for why a literal translation of the scriptures in English from the original languages was so necessary. It is not difficult to see why his considerable rhetorical skill rocked the boats of the ecclesiastical powers that be. It reads beautifully out loud:

"The greatest cause of which captivity and the decay of the faith and this blindness wherein we now are, sprang first of allegories. For Origen and they of his time drew all the scripture unto allegories. Whose ensample they that came after followed so long, till at the last they forgot the order, and process of the text, supposing that the scripture served but to feign allegories upon. Insomuch that twenty doctors expound one text twenty ways, as children make descant upon plain song. Then came our sophisters with the Anagogical and chopological sense, and with an anti-theme of half an inch, out of which some of them draw a thread of nine days long. Yea thou shalt find enough that will preach Christ, and prove what some ever point of the faith that thou will, as well out of a fable of Ovid or any other Poet, as out of St. John's gospel or Paul's epistles. Yea they are come into such blindness that they not only say that the literal sense profiteth not, but also that it is hurtful, and noisome and killeth the soul. Which damnable doctrine they prove by a text of Paul, 2 Cor iii where he saith the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life. We must therefore, say they seek out some chopological sense." ~ David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography, 240.

I love "ensample," the wonderful musical analogy, and of course, "chopological"! This is the man who gave us the KJV!