26 | William Tyndale, Church, and Ekklesia

Welcome to episode 26 of The UnSunday Show. I recently launched a new UnSunday Show Facebook page. You can get to it by going to https://www.facebook.com/unsunday/. I want to give a shoutout to all of you who have given that new page some likes. It's one more way to keep in touch and keep current with what's happening here at The UnSunday Show.

Today's episode is a look at William Tyndale and his authoring of the New Testament in the English language. He wanted the people of his day to have a New Testament in their own language so they could read and interpret it for themselves instead of having to rely solely on the church hierarchy of the day to tell them what it meant. In his desire to remain true to the Greek text, he translated a handful of words according to their true meaning as opposed to the church's long standing definitions. Particularly, he translated ekklesia as congregation, not church. He translated presbuteros as elder, not priest, agape as love, not acts of charity, and metanao as repent, not penance.

But this didn't go over well with the church of his day because it exposed the true meaning of these words the church had been keeping from the people for hundreds of years. As a result, Tyndale was strangled and then burned at the stake for refusing to compromise with the top-down authority figures in the church and water down his translation of the New Testament.

Let's talk about it...