William Tyndale

William Tyndale was born in 1494 in Gloucestershire, in the west of England, probably in the countryside near the villages of Slimbridge and North Nibley rather than in the county town of Gloucester itself. His family, sometimes recorded under the alternative surname Hychyns, were reasonably prosperous yeoman farmers and cloth traders in a region whose wool business connected it to markets across the Channel ^[1].

Around 1506 he went up to Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he took his Bachelor of Arts in 1512 and his Master of Arts in 1515. The Oxford curriculum of the day required years of philosophy and logic before a student could touch theology, an ordering Tyndale later criticized because it kept scripture out of a scholar's hands until his mind, as he saw it, had been trained in everything except the Bible ^[2].

He was ordained a priest, and tradition holds that he spent some time at Cambridge, where the ideas of Erasmus and, soon after, of Martin Luther circulated among younger scholars. Whether or not he studied there formally, Tyndale absorbed the new humanist learning: a command of Greek, an interest in returning to original texts, and a conviction that Christian teaching should rest on scripture rather than on accumulated custom ^[1].

By about 1521 Tyndale had returned to Gloucestershire as tutor to the children of Sir John Walsh at Little Sodbury Manor. Dinner table debates with local clergy sharpened his views, and a complaint against him was heard by the chancellor of the Worcester diocese around 1522, though no formal charge followed. From this period comes the famous report, preserved by the martyrologist John Foxe, that Tyndale told a learned opponent he would one day cause a boy driving the plough to know more of scripture than the clergyman did ^[3].

The obstacle was legal as much as intellectual. The Constitutions of Oxford, issued in 1408 in response to the Lollard movement, forbade anyone to translate the Bible into English or to own an unauthorized English version without a bishop's approval. Tyndale therefore travelled to London in 1523 and asked Cuthbert Tunstall, the scholarly bishop of London, for permission and patronage to translate the New Testament. Tunstall turned him away, saying he had no room in his household ^[2].

Supported for months by the London cloth merchant Humphrey Monmouth, Tyndale concluded that no bishop in England would sponsor the work, and indeed that there was no place in all of England to do it. In 1524 he sailed for the continent, and he never saw his homeland again ^[1].

Tyndale settled first in the German lands, possibly spending time in Wittenberg, and began translating the New Testament from the Greek text that Erasmus had published in 1516. Printing started at Cologne in 1525 but was interrupted when city authorities, alerted by the anti-Lutheran campaigner Johannes Cochlaeus, raided the press. Only a fragment of that Cologne edition survives. Tyndale moved to Worms, and there in early 1526 the first complete printed English New Testament appeared ^[4].

Copies were smuggled into England hidden in bales of cloth and other cargo. The response from authority was fierce: Bishop Tunstall preached against the translation and had copies burned at St Paul's Cross in London, and Cardinal Wolsey sought Tyndale's arrest abroad. Demand only grew. The book was small, portable, and readable, and for the first time English people could buy the New Testament in their own tongue in print ^[3].

Among William Tyndale achievements, the language matters as much as the fact of translation. He worked from Greek and Hebrew rather than from the Latin Vulgate, and he coined or fixed in English such words and phrases as scapegoat, Passover, "let there be light", "the powers that be", "my brother's keeper", and "the salt of the earth" ^[5]. Scholars have estimated that a very large share of the King James New Testament of 1611 descends directly from his wording, which is why students of the English Bible so often begin with him ^[4].

He then taught himself Hebrew, a language almost unknown in England at the time, and translated the Pentateuch, printed at Antwerp in 1530, followed by the book of Jonah in 1531. He also produced a substantially revised New Testament in 1534, correcting his earlier work against the Greek. Alongside translation he wrote original treatises, including The Parable of the Wicked Mammon (1528) on justification by faith and The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), which argued that Christians owed allegiance to their king rather than to the pope, a book that reportedly pleased Henry VIII when Anne Boleyn brought it to his attention ^[2].

Tyndale's translations were not neutral in the eyes of the English church, and he did not intend them to be. He rendered the Greek ekklesia as "congregation" rather than "church", presbyteros as "senior" or "elder" rather than "priest", and agape as "love" rather than "charity". Each choice cut at the institutional claims of the medieval church by suggesting that the New Testament described a community of believers rather than a clerical hierarchy ^[4].

His most formidable opponent was Sir Thomas More, who attacked the translation and its maker in his Dialogue Concerning Heresies of 1529. Tyndale replied in his Answer unto Sir Thomas More's Dialogue in 1531, and More returned with the enormous Confutation of Tyndale's Answer. The exchange, running to hundreds of thousands of words on More's side, was one of the fiercest polemical battles of the English Reformation ^[3].

Tyndale also managed to anger the king he had defended. In The Practice of Prelates (1530) he argued against the annulment of Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, holding that scripture did not permit it. Henry, who had briefly considered inviting Tyndale home, instead pressed the imperial authorities to treat him as a criminal. When the royal agent Stephen Vaughan met Tyndale near Antwerp in 1531 and urged him to return, Tyndale answered that he would come back and submit to any torment if the king would only grant a bare text of the scripture in English to his people ^[2].

Tyndale never married and left no known descendants. The picture that survives, drawn mainly from Foxe and from the reports of men who met him, is of an austere and disciplined scholar. In Antwerp, where he lived from about 1528 in the protected house of the English merchant community, he was said to keep two days a week for what he called his pastime: visiting the poor English exiles and refugees in the city and giving away much of the money his patrons provided ^[3].

His learning was unusual by any measure. The Nuremberg humanist Hermann Buschius is reported to have described an Englishman, generally identified as Tyndale, as so skilled in seven languages, including Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Spanish, that whichever he spoke seemed to be his native tongue. Whatever allowance is made for compliment, his surviving work confirms rare command of both biblical languages and of plain, rhythmic English ^[1].

He knew the risks of his position and lived carefully, publishing some works under the name of fictitious printers and keeping his lodgings within the legally privileged English House in Antwerp. A shipwreck off the Dutch coast around 1529 cost him a completed manuscript of Deuteronomy, which he had to translate again from the beginning ^[4].

The protection of the English House failed him in May 1535. A young Englishman named Henry Phillips, who had wormed his way into Tyndale's confidence over some weeks, lured him into a narrow lane in Antwerp where imperial officers were waiting. Who paid Phillips has never been established with certainty, though historians have suspected conservative churchmen in England. Tyndale was carried to the castle of Vilvoorde, north of Brussels, the state prison of the Low Countries ^[2].

He spent about sixteen months there while heresy proceedings ground forward under the laws of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. A single letter in his hand survives from the imprisonment, written in Latin to the governor of the castle, asking for a warmer cap and coat against the winter cold, a lamp for the evenings, and above all his Hebrew Bible, grammar, and dictionary so that he could continue working. Thomas Cromwell made efforts from England on his behalf, but they came to nothing ^[3].

Condemned as a heretic and degraded from the priesthood, Tyndale was executed at Vilvoorde on October 6, 1536, the date now kept as his commemoration. As a concession he was strangled at the stake before his body was burned. Foxe records his last words as a loud cry: "Lord, open the king of England's eyes" ^[1].

The prayer, if such it was, found an answer almost at once. Within a year of Tyndale's death the Matthew Bible, assembled by his associate John Rogers and consisting largely of Tyndale's own translations, circulated in England with royal licence, and in 1539 the Great Bible, prepared by his former helper Miles Coverdale, was ordered set up in every parish church. The king who had hunted him was now distributing his words ^[5].

Every major English Bible of the next century built on his foundation. The scholars of the King James Version of 1611 revised earlier versions rather than starting fresh, and analyses of the text have found that the great majority of the King James New Testament reproduces Tyndale's wording exactly or nearly so. Through that channel his short Saxon sentences, his taste for concrete words, and his cadences entered the everyday speech of the English-speaking world ^[4].

Any William Tyndale biography must also reckon with his standing beyond the history of translation. Biographers such as David Daniell have argued that he deserves a place beside Shakespeare among the makers of modern English prose. Memorials to him include a monument on Nibley Knoll in Gloucestershire near his birthplace, a statue on the Victoria Embankment in London, and a museum at Vilvoorde, and the Church of England commemorates him each October. The Tyndale Society and continuing scholarly editions keep study of William Tyndale facts and texts active five centuries on ^[5].