William Tyndale
William
Tyndale was the Captain of the Army of Reformers, and was their
spiritual leader. Tyndale holds the distinction of being the first man to
ever print the New Testament in the English language. Tyndale was a true
scholar and a genius, so fluent in eight languages that it was said one
would think any one of them to be his native tongue. He is frequently referred
to as the “Architect of the English Language”, (even more so
than William Shakespeare) as so many of the phrases Tyndale coined are still
in our language today.
William Tyndale (1494-1536) Biblical translator and martyr;
born most probably at North Nibley (15 miles south-west of Gloucester),
England, in 1494; died at Vilvoorden (6 miles north-east of Brussels), Belgium,
Oct. 6, 1536. Tyndale was descended from an ancient Northumbrian family,
went to school at Oxford, and afterward to Magdalen Hall and Cambridge.
William Tyndale Overview
Tyndale was a theologian and scholar who translated the Bible into an
early form of Modern English. He was the first person to take advantage
of Gutenberg’s
movable-type press for the purpose of printing the scriptures in the English
language. Besides translating the Bible, Tyndale also held and published
views which were considered heretical, first by the Catholic Church, and
later by the Church of England which was established by Henry VIII. His
Bible translation also included notes and commentary promoting these views.
Tyndale's translation was banned by the authorities, and Tyndale himself
was burned at the stake in 1536, at the instigation of agents of
Henry
VIII and the Anglican Church.
The Early Years of William Tyndale
Tyndale enrolled at Oxford in 1505, and grew up at the University. He
received his Master’s Degree in 1515 at the age of twenty-one! He
proved to be a gifted linguist. One of Tyndale’s associates commented
that Tyndale was “so skilled in eight languages – Hebrew,
Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, English, and German, that whichever
he speaks, you might
think it his native tongue!” This gift undoubtedly aided him in his
successful evasion of the authorities during his years of exile from England.
Early Controversy Surrounding Tyndale
Around 1520, William Tyndale became a tutor in the family of Sir John Walsh,
at Little Sodbury in Gloucestershire. Having become attached to the doctrines
of the Reformation, and devoted himself to the study of the Scriptures,
the open avowal of his sentiments in the house of Walsh, his disputes with
Roman Catholic dignitaries there, and especially his preaching, excited
much opposition, and led to his removal to London (about Oct., 1523), where
he began to preach, and made many friends among the laity, but none among
church leaders.
A clergyman hopelessly entrenched in Roman Catholic dogma once taunted
Tyndale with the statement, “
We are better to be without God’s
laws than the Pope’s”. Tyndale was infuriated by such
Roman Catholic heresies, and he replied, “
I defy the Pope
and all his laws. If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause
the boy that drives
the plow to know more of the scriptures than you!”
William Tyndale First Prints The Scripture in English
He was hospitably entertained at the house of Sir Humphrey Monmouth, and
also financially aided by him and others in the accomplishment of his purpose
to translate the Scriptures into the commonly spoken English of the day.
Unable to do so in England, he set out for the continent (about May, 1524),
and appears to have visited Hamburg and Wittenberg. The place where he translated
the New Testament, is thought to have been Wittenberg, under the aid of
Martin Luther. The printing of this English New Testament in quarto was
begun at Cologne in the summer of 1525, and completed at Worms, and that
there was likewise printed an octavo edition, both before the end of that
year. William Tyndale’s Biblical translations appeared in the following
order: New Testament, 1525-26; Pentateuch, 1530; Jonah, 1531.
His literary activity during that interval was extraordinary. When he
left England, his knowledge of Hebrew, if he had any, was of the most rudimentary
nature; and yet he mastered that difficult tongue so as to produce from
the original an admirable translation of the entire Pentateuch, the Books
of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings,
First Chronicles, contained in Matthew's Bible of 1537, and of the Book
of Jonah, so excellent, indeed, that his work is not only the basis of
those
portions of the Authorized King James Version of 1611, but constitutes
nine-tenths of that translation, and very largely that of the English Revised
Version of 1885.
In addition to these he produced the following works. His first original
composition,
A Pathway into the Holy Scripture, is really a reprint,
slightly altered, of his
Prologue to the quarto edition of his
New Testament, and had appeared in separate form before 1532;
The Parable
of the Wicked Mammon (1527); and
The Obedience of a Christian Man
(1527-28). These several works drew out in 1529 Sir Thomas More's
Dialogue,
etc. In 1530 appeared Tyndale's
Practyse of Prelates, and in 1531
his Answer to the
Dialogue, his
Exposition of the First Epistle
of St. John, and the famous
Prologue to Jonah; in 1532,
An
Exposition upon the V. VI. VII. Chapters of Matthew; and in 1536,
A
Brief Declaration of the Sacraments, etc., which seems to be a posthumous
publication. Joshua-Second Chronicles also was published after his death.
All these works were written during those mysterious years, in places of
concealment so secure and well chosen, that neither the ecclesiastical nor
diplomatic emissaries of Wolsey and Henry VIII., charged to track, hunt
down, and seize the fugitive, were able to reach them, and they are even
yet unknown. Under the idea that the progress of the Reformation in England
rendered it safe for him to leave his concealment, he settled at Antwerp
in 1534, and combined the work of an evangelist with that of a translator
of the Bible.
The Betrayal and Death of William Tyndale
Tyndale was betrayed by a friend, Philips, the agent either of Henry or
of English ecclesiastics, or possibly of both. Tyndale was arrested and
imprisoned in the castle of Vilvoorden for over 500 days of horrible conditions.
He was tried for heresy and treason in a ridiculously unfair trial, and
convicted.
Tyndale was then strangled and burnt at the stake in the prison yard, Oct.
6, 1536. His last words were, "
Lord, open the king of England's
eyes." This prayer was answered three years later, in the publication
of King Henry VIII’s 1539 English “Great Bible”.
Tyndale's place in history has not yet been sufficiently recognized as
a translator of the Scriptures, as an apostle of liberty, and as a chief
promoter of the Reformation in England. In all these respects his influence
has been singularly under-valued. The sweeping statement found in almost
all histories, that Tyndale translated from the Vulgate and Luther, is most
damaging to the reputation of the writers who make it; for, as a matter
of fact, it is contrary to truth, since his translations are made directly
from the originals, with the aid of the Erasmus 1516 Greek-Latin New Testament,
and the best available Hebrew texts. The Prolegomena in Mombert's
William
Tyndale's Five Books of Moses show conclusively that Tyndale's Pentateuch
is a translation of the Hebrew original.
