As Jehoiakim, king of Judah, and the princes under King Zedekiah showed their contempt for God by burning the writings of Jeremiah, and confining the prophet in a dungeon (Jer. 36:20-23; 38:1-6), so now men sought to stem the rising tide of reform by burning the Bible and its translators.

Bible burning was inaugurated in England by the destruction of copies of the Antwerp edition of Tyndale's New Testament, at St. Paul's Cross, London, in 1527, followed by the burning of a second edition in 1530. A little later there were wholesale burnings of the writings and translations of Wyclif, Tyndale, Basil, Barnes, Coverdale, and others.

Forty-three years after the death of Wyclif, or in a.d. 1428, by order of the Council of Constance his bones were dug up and burned. Oct. 6, 1536, by order of Charles V of Germany, Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake at Vilvorde, near Brussels. “If Luther will not retract,” wrote Henry VIII of England, “let himself and his writings be committed to the flames.”