A Dialogue Concerning Heresies

The title page of the text cited is dated 1530 and describes the book as newly revised by its author, by then Chancellor of England. The work is cast as a conversation between Thomas More and a visitor who puts to him the objections people were raising. In the third book the visitor asks why William Tyndale’s translation was burned. More answers that it deserved to be called Tyndale’s or Luther’s testament, that it mistranslated three words of great weight wherever they occur, “priests”, “church” and “charity”, and that the changes were made with intent. Later in the book he says that the church’s law did not forbid English Bibles as such and that he would welcome a translation made by a sound scholar and approved by the bishops.

It states, in the words of a learned layman and royal councillor, the case against Tyndale’s version. It is controversy and gives the other side only through the mouth More lends it.