into ecclesiastical disputation with the church dignitaries. Later, when he preached at Bristol, he set the tongues of the clergy wagging because of what they considered his heresy. For his divergent views he was summoned to appear before the chancellor.
Disturbed in heart and mind by the gross ignorance and sordid living of the priests and monks, Tyndale sought advice from an old chancellor, and in return this man told him that the pope was the antichrist of the Scriptures.
This startled the young priest so much that he prayed and studied anew, taking Erasmus’s Greek New Testament still closer to heart.
He soon began to be convinced as to what his lifework was to be.
Realizing that the church would rather have thousands of books written against its teachings than to have the common people have access to the Bible, he determined to translate the New Testament. As his mission in life became clearer to him, he remarked,
“I perceived by experience how that it is impossible to establish the lay people in any truth, except that the Scriptures were plainly laid before their eyes, that they might see the process, order, and meaning of the text.” — Quoted by Luke S. Walmsley in Fighters and Martyrs for the Freedom of the Faith, page 73.
To one of his opponents who had expressed the thought that the pope’s laws were better than God’s, Tyndale replied,
“I defy the pope and all his laws; and if God spare my life, ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.” — Quoted by J. F. Mozley in William Tyndale, page 35.
So Tyndale began looking around as to who might help him with his task.
He felt that surely the bishop of London would do so; but when he appealed to him in 1523, the bishop would have nothing to do with it.
Another on whom he thought he could count opposed it, namely, Sir Thomas More, who advocated that only a group of responsible scholars, and not an individual, should undertake such a task, furthermore, that the ignorant man of the street should not have access to the Bible, lest some fanciful interpretations result.
However, one day as Tyndale was preaching at St. Dunstan’s, a wealthy cloth merchant and London alderman, Sir Humphrey Monmouth, heard him, became his friend, and offered him his London home to write in. Here for a year Tyndale found shelter where he could work to his heart’s content.
Then the priests were after him. As a consequence he came to the conclusion that there was not a place in all England where he could
translate the Scriptures; and he sailed in May, 1524, for the Continent, and he never saw his beloved country again.
For the next twelve and a half years Tyndale lived the life of a persecuted, hunted, and disappointed man, as he fled from one city to another to evade his oppressors. He moved frequently among the cities of Wittenberg, Cologne, Hamburg, Worms, Strasbourg, Marburg, and Antwerp.
He is supposed to have visited Luther in Wittenberg in 1524, where he stayed nearly a year, working at his translating. In Cologne in 1525 the printing started, but a careless word to the effect that England would soon rub her eyes caused the news to travel to the bishops of England. Tyndale fled to Worms, taking what precious sheets he could with him.
Here his New Testament was printed in 1526, and six thousand copies were said to have been sent to England in the winter of 1526-27, in spite of the fact that the bishops were zealously watching the ports. It was the small size of the edition which made it possible to pack the copies in cases, sacks of flour, bales of merchandise, and barrels. It is recorded that in the four years following, some fifteen thousand copies passed into England.
The Roman Catholic Church immediately seized one thousand copies and had them burned in 1527, and later the bishop of London bought up all he could find. He also called on Sir Thomas More publicly to expose the errors in the translation.
To have the old edition disposed of by purchase was all to Tyndale’s favor, for it enabled him to publish a revised edition, much better than the first. And the second soon came out “thick and threefold,” as well as did seven more editions during the next ten years.
The bishops were incensed. One reason was that Tyndale’s translation had lost for them some of their choice Christian words. He had used repentance for penance, acknowledge for confess, favor for grace, image for idol, elder for priest, love for charity, congregation for church, to give a few examples. For his text he had taken Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, and he had doubtless followed Luther’s German translation, which had been completed at the Wartburg a short while before.
At the time Tyndale made his translation, there was no English Bible for the common people. Wycliffe’s Bible, which that Reformer had translated into the early Middle English, was largely obsolete, and it had been taken from the Latin Vulgate, itself a translation. Then, too, there was much opposition to Wycliffe’s doctrines.
Tyndale said of his own translation, “I had no man to counterfeit (imitate), neither was helped with English of any that had interpreted the same, or such like thing in the Scripture beforehand.” His objective was to produce an absolutely honest, simple, straightforward translation of the Scriptures into English so all England could read it. To the translator’s credit it can be said that he shunned the use of the overornate, euphuistic, or Arcadian stylistic devices so prevalent in the sixteenth century. Had he succumbed to the temptation, his translation would doubtless not have served as the basis for the Authorized Version of 1611.
Concerning Tyndale’s part in this Authorized Version, authorities state that when the English Bible of 1611 left the hands of the revisers, the work of Tyndale remained largely undisturbed, and where the King James committee had departed from Tyndale’s translation the revisers of 1881 restored the original words.
“These revisers of the Authorized Version had indeed many virtues, but above all they had that great and rare virtue of not meddling with what was too good to be improved. They were the last of a long series of revisers who had based their work on Tyndale with comparatively little modification: for indeed, where one reviser had altered Tyndale’s wording, his successor had often returned to the original. And Tyndale had fixed the pattern upon which they had all alike worked.” — R.W. Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind, page 191.
It has been said that at least 90 per cent of the King James Version may be attributed to Tyndale, thus establishing Tyndale’s position among the literary immortals of England. He is “the man whose choice of words has for four hundred years exercised supreme influence upon English prose.”
Froude is given credit for the following tribute to the translator’s literary faculty:
“The peculiar genius which breathes through the English Bible, the mingled tenderness and majesty, the Saxon simplicity, the
grandeur, unequaled, unapproached in the attempted improvements of modern scholars, all are here, and bear the impress of the mind of one man and that man William Tyndale.” — Luke S. Walmsley, Fighters and Martyrs for the Freedom of the Faith, pages 77,78.
The question that will doubtless arise in the minds of many is, Why have not scholars discovered before now the great debt English Protestantism owed to Tyndale? The answer is that Tyndale published his translation when such translations were still forbidden by the English government.
Tyndale’s enemies said that Tyndale had deliberately put heresies into his work in order to get his false doctrines before the people. Consequently, shortly after Tyndale’s martyrdom, when translations were authorized, Tyndale’s name was deliberately withheld by his publishers in order that his cause might triumph.
Before his death Tyndale translated not only the New Testament, but the five books of Moses, the book of Jonah, and probably everything from Joshua to Second Chronicles. It is even possible that he translated all of the Old Testament, although some contend that the books from Ezra to Malachi were taken from the Coverdale Bible of 1535. Still others maintain that whatever untranslated portions remained when Tyndale died were supplied by John Rogers, who doubtless used the Coverdale version as a guide. A year after Tyndale’s martyrdom Rogers took the manuscript, edited and published it as the Matthew Bible. This Bible was used as a basis for all later revisions, but Tyndale’s name was separated from his work.
For the four-hundredth anniversary of Tyndale’s death, in 1936, Great Britain honored her Reformation hero by publishing his New Testament for the occasion and asking the British people in thousands of churches
and schools to read from his translation. Many of them, it is said, for the first time recognized the close resemblance between Tyndale’s version and that of the Authorized. Isaac Foot, in his introduction to this New
Testament of Tyndale’s, wrote, July, 1938, “The persistence of Tyndale’s work is in fact the outstanding miracle of English letters.”
That Tyndale is among the most heroic of English figures cannot be
gainsaid. As a good humanist and a stanch defender of the principles of the Reformation during the days when kings championed the papacy, he brought his great learning to the service of a great cause. Besides the translation of the Bible he also wrote a number of treatises in which he scathingly and contemptuously held the clergy up to ridicule for their departure from the early simplicity of the church. In them he indicted the whole church, and in one of his pamphlets he expounded on the doctrine of justification by faith.
Tyndale’s life conformed to his preaching. From his first declaration of intention to make the plowboy know more than the priest, until his last words, “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes,” his life shone like a pure white light leading to his set goal. He was at the same time humble and heroic. He remained a celibate priest all his life.
It has already been mentioned that the bishops in England attempted to keep Tyndale’s translation out of the country; but when he succeeded to the extent he did, they smarted greatly under his victory. In spite of their efforts at repression, many thousands of copies eluded their vigilance and reached the common masses. The bishops had burned some of his books;
now they resolved that he must be burned at the stake.
Tyndale was not unaware of the fate awaiting him. Eight years before the end he wrote,
“If they shall burn me, they shall do none other than I look for.”
Around the 1530’s Henry VIII lent his aid that Tyndale might be brought to trial, but when he attempted to gain possession of Tyndale’s person by asking Charles V to deliver him, the emperor refused. Sir Thomas Elyot, author of the Governor, was sent to trap him, but he was unsuccessful.
The papal party did not give up. They were in league with the papal party in the Low Countries. They were likewise astute enough to realize that Charles V, whom Luther defied at Worms, would not stand in their way to take the life of an English Reformer, particularly with Henry VIII having treated Charles V’s aunt, Catherine of Aragon, the way he had.
So it was a man by the name of Phillips who undertook the job of luring Tyndale from the house, where he was staying, on the pretext of taking him out to dine. On the way Tyndale was captured and taken to the castle of Vilvorde, a state prison of the Low Countries, in which dungeon he remained sixteen months.
Among the charges preferred against him were that he maintained that faith alone sufficed for justification, that conscience should not be established on human traditions, that there was no purgatory, and that neither the Virgin nor the saints interceded for human beings.
He was taken out of prison Friday, October 6, 1536. First he was strangled, and then he was burned at the stake.
Some five years later a Bible purportedly translated by “divers excellent learned men” reached the desk of Henry VIII. He ordered that every church within his kingdom receive a copy. Thus Tyndale triumphed over the noose and the flames!