Abstract
In 1526, the first complete edition of William Tyndale’s New Testament was printed. Translating into English from Greek and Hebrew, Tyndale set himself the task of producing a colloquial Bible, allowing unprecedented access to the sacred text. The Catholic Church saw this as a challenge to its authority, based on the 4th century Vulgate. There had been earlier translations of the Bible into the colloquial, but Tyndale’s was different in being the first to take advantage of the new mass technology of printing.
In the modern age, when blasphemy has been replaced with ‘religious offence’, public opinion makes a good substitute for God
The threat that Tyndale’s Bible would spread free interpretation of scripture was too much to bear for the Church. In 1536, he was captured, charged with heresy, strangled and burned at the stake.
Tyndale’s heresy, however brutally punished, was at least intentional. He knew the risks. The past few years in Britain have seen the rise of the unintentional martyrs, the Tyndales of Twitter who unwittingly have stretched the nation’s idea of what it is acceptable to say on the web, and who we allow to say it.
The case of Yorkshire teenager Azhar Ahmed is probably the clearest example. In March 2012, Ahmed, 19, was enraged by the deferential coverage of the death of British soldiers in Afghanistan, and the lack of corresponding coverage of the death of Afghan civilians. He posted on his Facebook page that British soldiers should die and go to hell for killing civilians.
Strongly worded, perhaps, but an honest opinion, and not an incitement to violence (and certainly not racially aggravated, as an original police charge suggested). Ahmed’s apparent crime was to express an opinion contrary to that of the public mood, which is supportive of soldiers serving in Afghanistan while not necessarily being supportive of the war they are fighting. He got a criminal conviction.
The prosecution of Liam Stacey was perhaps an even more instructive tale in modern heresy.
On 17 March 2012, Bolton Wanderers footballer Fabrice Muamba suffered a cardiac arrest while playing in a televised match at Tottenham Hotspur. As Muamba lay unconscious, thousands of Twitter users, watching in horror, posted sympathetic tweets. Stacey, drunk in a pub in Swansea having watched Wales win the Six Nations rugby championship, tweeted a crass joke saying he hoped Muamba died.
Deliberately swimming against the tide, certainly. What followed was alarming. Thousands of people, rather than choosing to ignore a tweet from someone they’d never heard of, retweeted Stacey. He was challenged, and his own language became increasingly violent and racist.
Stacey was arrested and hauled to the courts, where it was made quite clear by the judge that his crime, his sin, his heresy, had been against public opinion. Sentencing Stacey, District Judge John Charles said: ‘Not just the footballer’s family, not just the footballing world, but the whole world were literally praying for Muamba’s life. Your comments aggravated this situation. I have no choice but to impose an immediate custodial sentence to reflect the public outrage at what you have done.’
Note the ludicrous assertion that ‘the whole world’ was ‘literally praying for Muamba’s life’. Note that causing public outrage seems to be Stacey’s crime. It’s as if the judge has taken on the righteous fury of the Twitter mob, the amorphous but powerful legion that can amplify, exaggerate, judge and condemn anything that comes into its view within minutes.
The old heresies were against the divine. In the modern age, when blasphemy has been replaced with ‘religious offence’, public opinion makes a good substitute for God. The problem being that, just as with God, it is the loudest, prickliest and most thin-skinned who claim to speak for public opinion.
The Reformation in which Tyndale’s English New Testament played such a crucial role moved very quickly from religious freedom to the realm of the Witchfinder General. Heretics became heretic hunters, and the freedom provided by access to scripture soon became a cage for anyone who dared dissent.
If we’re not careful, the freedom provided by social media will go the same way.