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As much as English-speaking and reading Christians should consider themselves indebted to Tyndale, they should consider themselves equally indebted to Johannes Gutenberg—without him, Tyndale’s “revolution” might well have been almost inconsequential.

Of course Gutenberg was not the first man ever to have thought of or used movable, mechanical type for duplicating documents; Chinese and Korean printers had developed and begun using some forms of movable type as early as 1060 A.D.

But if Gutenberg—or someone like him—hadn’t designed and built the first commercially effective printing facility ever, in Mainz, Germany in 1450, then Tyndale would have had to publish his translation of the New Testament into English by means of hiring scribes to copy it by hand. And even the fastest of scribes could not have produced in one year the number of copies of the New Testament that a Gutenberg-like press could produce in just a few weeks.

Without Gutenberg, production and distribution of Tyndale’s translation would have been severely slowed down by merely technical problems, not to mention all the resistance Tyndale received from official Roman Catholic and government sources.

But because Gutenberg devised the means to print a Latin version of the Bible with movable type in an original edition of 150 copies on heavy paper, plus 30 on fine vellum, Tyndale was able to print thousands of copies of an English version of the Bible on regular paper, and get them distributed all across his native England. And while we are certainly indebted to Tyndale for his steadfastness against the official resistance, both we and Tyndale are indebted to Gutenberg for his steadfastness against resistance of a different sort.

It is difficult to piece together the details of Gutenberg’s early life, but it is not hard to imagine this son of a scribe spending his days watching his father at work, and anguishing. The scribe’s job saw him bent over his writing table for hours on end, sometimes in minimal light, with infinite pains copying long and intricate manuscripts over and over again for the nobility, clergy and lawyers—and all by hand. A single book could take months to copy, and then it might start all over again.

So Johannes apparently watched his father, and thought, and came to a paradoxical resolution. While he appreciated the beauty and craft of his father’s handiwork—the intricately illustrated initial letters and the carefully aligned rows of graceful text—he was also moved with compassion over the drudgery of his father’s work and determined to do something to bypass the excruciating slowness of the process. He was inspired by the majesty of the craftsman’s finished product, a book, but was somehow more inspired with the idea that he could by some means produce hundreds of beautiful pages in the time his father produced one. And without the errors and deviations from copy to copy that always appeared in scribes’ work, even his father’s, no matter how painstaking they might be.

But first he had to encounter the resistance, which would wrestle with him throughout his life and finally beat him at the end: the resistance of financial shortages, legal manipulators and industrial self-protection.

In 1428, the Gutenberg family had to move from Mainz (Johannes’ boyhood home) to Strasbourg. It seems the trade guilds of Mainz succeeded in ousting the patricians, of whom the Gutenbergs were members. Today we would call this “unionism-out-of-control.” By this time, the 28-year-old Johannes had already sunk large portions of his personal finances into printing experiments, and was looking for funds from others.

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