Tyndale and the Internet

Possibly the greatest invention of the Renaissance, the printing press helped the printing of texts become more feasible.  Because of the printing press, William Tyndale was able to publish his English version of the Bible and distribute it to many people. The English version, as opposed to the Vulgate (Latin version), was comprehensible to people outside of the Catholic clergy. Tyndale translated the Bible, even under threats to his livelihood, because he understood the importance of that accessibility.

During class on Wednesday, Dr. Burton discussed how experimenting with new media can be analogous to publishing in the Renaissance period.

BYU’s editing department, in conjunction with the Church, is helping the church appeal to younger members by creating a website that attempts to gather many different articles from sites like fairmormon.org, josephsmithpapers.org, and others about topics that youth may wonder about (things like gay rights, women and the priesthood, polygamy). Then, they write short blurbs about those articles that will succinctly describe the article and include a link to it if the reader wishes to learn more. The hope is that having one place to go for all this information will foster thought and understanding within the youth of the church about difficult subjects.
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I’m just getting involved with this project, and it is exciting! Although not equal in scope or difficulty, this new website is like Tyndale’s translation of the Bible in small ways. It also attempts to make texts more accessible to others through a new medium, in this case, the relatively new Internet. Teenagers aren’t adept at reading long and verbose articles, like how the masses weren’t adept at reading Latin. To counter this, we are trying to summarize those articles in 250 words or less so teenagers can be more comfortable reading them like how Tyndale translated the Bible to English so people could read it. It’ll be exciting to see how effective the website can be.