Clergy

"John Wycliffe, Englishman, the greatest theologian of his time, held alone for many years the magisterial chair (as it is called) in teaching and disputing at Oxford. Apart from the truly apostolic life which he led, he far excelled all his fellows in England by his ability, eloquence, and erudition. ... He was roused by the spirit of the eternal father to stand for His truth in the midst of the darkness of impious locusts, as the magnanimous warrior of Jesus Christ, and he became the most invincible organ of his day against Antichrists. He was indeed the most strong Elias of his times to reform all distortions. He was one and the first after the loosing of Satan to bring the light of truth in that age of darkness, and who dared before the whole synagogue of the devil to confess Christ, and to reveal the abominable turpitude of the great Antichrist. For he shone like the morning star in the midst of a cloud, and remained for many days as the faithful witness in the church. As the radiant sun he shone in the temple of God, and like incense burning in the fire. He was always of the most irreproachable faith, and most absolute attachment to the truth."

"Robert Craft: “Are you interested in the current revival of eighteenth-century Italian masters?” Igor Stravinsky: “Not very. Vivaldi is greatly overrated—a dull fellow who could compose the same form so many times over.”"

"Christopher Hogwood: "Caricaturists of all countries I have a great interest in; I like to observe what happens to an artist's vision when there is a deliberate distortion for the viewer. This is found in Italian art and in much Italian music. Vivaldi sometimes uses caricature in a very serious and grim sense, not at all comic.""

"Overrated: Vivaldi. He has recently become Mr. Baroque, and that is not fair to Bach and Handel. His music does not have the substance, the innovative quality or the passion of the greatest composers. Of course, it's perfectly good music and it makes the listener feel good, but there is no door opening as there is with the great masters."

"Italians have such illustrious people they can celebrate, that everyone celebrates — Michelangelo, Vivaldi and, of course, for us on the left, Sacco and Vanzetti."

"Se questa non piace, non voglio più scrivere di musica."

"With Antonio Vivaldi, Italian Baroque music reached its zenith. The prosperous, cultivated world of contemporary Venice shines through all his works, composed with innate craftsmanship."

"Overrated: Antonio Vivaldi. I'm tired of him. Stravinsky once said that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 500 times. I disagree. Instead, I think he began 500 concertos and never achieved anything in them. So he kept trying over and over again without ever quite succeeding."

"I call God to record against the day we shall appear before our Lord Jesus, that I never altered one syllable of God's Word against my conscience, nor would do this day, if all that is in earth, whether it be honor, pleasure, or riches, might be given me."

"I defie the Pope and all his lawes. If God spare my life, ere many yeares I wyl cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture, than he doust."

"Take heed, therefore, wicked prelates, blind leaders of the blind; indurate and obstinate hypocrites, take heed …. Ye will be the chiefest in Christ's flock, and yet will not keep one jot of the right way of his doctrine …ye keep thereof almost naught at all, but whatsoever soundeth to make of your bellies, to maintain your honour, whether in the Scripture, or in your own traditions, or in the pope's law, that ye compel the lay-people to observe; violently threatening them with your excommunications and curses, that they shall be damned, body and soul, if they keep them not. And if that help you not, then ye murder them mercilessly with the sword of the temporal powers, whom ye have made so blind that they be ready to slay whom ye command, and will not hear his cause examined, nor give him room to answer for himself."

"This word church has diverse significations."

"How many does it take to annul the commandments of God, and render that lawful, which HE has forbidden? How many does it take to metamorphose wickedness into righteousness?"

"But now, instead of discussion and argument, brute force rises up to the rescue of discomfited error, and crushes truth and right into the dust. "Might makes right," and hoary folly totters on in her mad career escorted by armies and navies."

"fight the good fight"

"live and move and have our being"

"the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak (which is like Luther's translation of Mathew 26,41: der Geist ist willig, aber das Fleisch ist schwach; Wyclif for example translated it with: for the spirit is ready, but the flesh is sick.)"

"gave up the ghost"

"it came to pass"

"filthy lucre"

"the salt of the earth"

"my brother's keeper"

"the powers that be"

"let there be light"

"the word of God which liveth and lasteth forever"

"judge not that you not be judged"

"ask and it shall be given you"

"eat, drink and be merry"

"seek and you shall find"

"fashion not yourselves to the world"

"a moment in time"

"twinkling of an eye"

"knock and it shall be opened unto you"

"lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil"

"By sanctifying cruelty, early Christianity set a precedent for more than a millennium of systematic torture in Christian Europe. If you understand the expressions to burn at the stake, to hold his feet to the fire, to break a butterfly on the wheel, to be racked with pain, to be drawn and quartered, to disembowel, to flay, to press, the thumbscrew, the garrote, a slow burn, and the iron maiden (a hollow hinged statue lined with nails, later taken as the name of a heavy-metal rock band), you are familiar with a fraction of the ways that heretics were brutalized during the Middle Ages and early modern period. During the Spanish Inquisition, church officials concluded that the conversions of thousands of former Jews didn’t take. To compel the conversos to confess their hidden apostasy, the inquisitors tied their arms behind their backs, hoisted them by their wrists, and dropped them in a series of violent jerks, rupturing their tendons and pulling their arms out of their sockets. Many others were burned alive, a fate that also befell Michael Servetus for questioning the trinity, Giordano Bruno for believing (among other things) that the earth went around the sun, and William Tyndale for translating the Bible into English. Galileo, perhaps the most famous victim of the Inquisition, got off easy: he was only shown the instruments of torture (in particular, the rack) and was given the opportunity to recant for “having held and believed that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center and moves.”"

"[H]is writing is the bedrock of English language and literature... Tyndale's best memorial is that whenever anyone writes or speaks well in English, she or he echoes the simple but majestic rhythms that Tyndale introduced. He showed that plain English was a mighty tongue. His voice is the forgotten ghost in the language... Tyndale had the revolutionary idea that the English of ordinary folk could be the finest literary language in the world. He was a passionate populist and democrat, as well as a rich scholar... [H]is words are blood and bone of the English language."

"For this book is for me and all kings to read."

"Most important was Tyndale's Bible translation...which gave currency to Erasmian and Lutheran revisions of such crucial established concepts as ecclesia (church or congregation?) and presbyter (priest or elder?), and which was accompanied by powerfully reformist prefaces and prologues. Tunstall's attempt to stamp out this dangerous New Testament had greatly amused the reformers who financed further operations out of the money the bishop paid over in buying up the offending edition. In 1528 Tyndale also entered the lists as a theorist of politics when in his Obedience of a Christian Man he elaborated Luther's teaching on the subject's duty of submission to his secular ruler in ways highly satisfactory to Henry who read the book with pleasure; next year, however, Tyndale cast himself into outer darkness again by violently attacking the Divorce in a work, The Practice of Prelates, mainly concerned to blast Wolsey and the English hierarchy in general."

"Tyndale was more than a mildly theological thinker. He is at last being understood as, theologically as well as linguistically, well ahead of his time. For him, as several decades later for Calvin... and in the 20th century Karl Barth) the overriding message of the New Testament is the sovereignty of God. Everything is contained in that. It must never, as he wrote, be lost from sight... Tyndale, we are now being shown, was original and new — except that he was also old, demonstrating the understanding of God as revealed in the whole New Testament. For Tyndale, God is, above all, sovereign, active in the individual and in history. He is the one as he put it, in whom alone is found salvation and flourishing."

"These opening chapters of Genesis are the first translations — not just the first printed, but the first translations — from Hebrew into English. This needs to be emphasized. Not only was the Hebrew language only known in England in 1529 and 1530 by, at the most, a tiny handful of scholars in Oxford and Cambridge, and quite possibly by none; that there was a language called Hebrew at all, or that it had any connection whatsoever with the Bible, would have been news to most of the ordinary population."

"William Tyndale gave us our English Bible. The sages assembled by King James to prepare the Authorised Version of 1611...took over Tyndale's work. Nine-tenths of the Authorised Version's New Testament is Tyndale's. The same is true of the first half of the Old Testament... William Tyndale was a most remarkable scholar and linguist, whose eight languages included skill in Greek and Hebrew far above the ordinary for an Englishman of the time... His unsurpassed ability was to work as a translator with the sounds and rhythms as well as the senses of English, to create unforgettable words, phrases, paragraphs and chapters, and to do so in a way that, again unusually for the time, is still, even today, direct and living: newspaper headlines still quote Tyndale, though unknowingly, and he has reached more people than even Shakespeare."

"Tyndall (who assuredlie sheweth himself in myn opynyon rather to be replete with venymous envye rancour and malice then with any good lerning vertue knowlage or discression)."

"[N]ow everyone learned what those specialists had always known: that for those parts of the Bible which Tyndale translated, the whole of the New Testament and much of the Old Testament, more than eighty per cent of the words in what we call the Authorised Version of 1611 are his. Such altogether memorable passages as the account of the Nativity in Matthew ('shepherds abiding in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night'), and the story of the Prodigal Son in Luke ('father, I have sinned against Heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son') are wholly his. It was Tyndale who gave us 'the burden and heat of the day', 'filthy lucre', 'God forbid', 'the salt of the earth', 'the powers that be', 'eat, drink and be merry'. The list is endless. What is extraordinary is that Tyndale's English is actually a more English English, more demotic in its language and tone, than the version of 1611 of three generations later, where a committee has smoothed over many rough edges and produced something more stately, more ecclesiastical, safer."

"Tyndale, coming out of the remote Forest of Dean, hard by the Welsh border, somehow or other (and it remains a mystery to me how he did it, but it was an achievement comparable to Martin Luther's, in his German Bible) fashioned, in the pages of his New Testament, the English which we still speak and write; an English employing a vocabulary which if not at first universally understood and assimilated soon was; an English partly derived from the word order and sentence structure of the Greek and especially of the Hebrew biblical texts in which Tyndale, a remarkable and precocious classical philologist, was thoroughly proficient. Tyndale had an intuitive and strong sense of the affinity of English with these ancient tongues, an affinity which he believed was not to be found in the Latin language and in the Latin Bible."

"Tyndale founded English Puritanism as the theological, religious, and moral system that univocally regarded scripture as God's law for everyman, binding everyman and God together in a contract that enjoined and rewarded strict morality."

"Except for Geoffrey Chaucer I would think someone who comes closest to being authentically of Shakespeare's greatness, that is William Tyndale...who is the principal translator of [the King James Bible] ... I am not quite sure that I would agree that even Shakespeare could write more powerfully than William Tyndale in Tyndale's Bible, in his version of the story of Joseph. Unfortunately it vanishes in King James even though they use so much of Tyndale. There is a wonderful sentence, "And the Lord was with Joseph and he was a lucky fellow", which is superb and worthy of Shakespeare."

"Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God."

"Fight the good fight."

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and yet had no love I were even as the sounding brass or as a tinkling cymbal."

"A law unto themselves."