News > Europe

London UBF

November 12. 2012

WILLIAM TYNDALE

[This short summary is based on a biography of William Tyndale ‘God’s Outlaw” by Brian Edwards and an excellent talk from John Piper available on the internet[1].]

William Tyndale is responsible for bringing the bible into vernacular English. Today we take this for granted but for over 1500 years most people had not heard for themselves the words of God. For a thousand years the only translation of the Greek and Hebrew Bible was the Latin Vulgate, and few people could understand it, even if they had access to it. Tyndale burned with a passion to see ordinary people have access to the bible. The cost of this could not be higher – this was a time when people were burnt alive for having the bible in English. To put this in context 7 Lollards were burned at Coventry in 1519 for teaching their children the Lord’s Prayer in English. Yet Tyndale knew that getting the bible into vernacular English was a matter of life or death and for him he ultimately paid with his life when he was strangled and burnt in 1536. He died age about 45. Yet his life was dedicated to the task of translating the bible. His driving passion of his life was to see the Bible translated from the Greek and Hebrew into ordinary English available for every person in England to read. Like the Apostle Paul he knew the importance of this. As Paul said, “faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.” It’s hard to overstate the impact this man has had on the English speaking world.

About 90% of the KJV’s New Testament is Tyndale’s. John Piper estimates about 70% of the ESV NT is basically Tyndale. He has shaped the English language and some say he is more often quoted than Shakespeare. We quote Tyndale, often without noticing: “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3). “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9) “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” (John 1:1). “Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name” (Matthew 6:9). “The signs of the times” (Matthew 16:3) “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41). There are hundreds of such examples. As any translator will tell you there are numerous ways of translating from one language to another and Tyndale’s has often not been improved upon in 500 years. He has literally shaped the English language like no other. There were earlier translations such as Wycliffe but Tyndale was the first to bring the Greek New Testament into vernacular English.

I. His life and times

We know surprisingly little of the facts of Tyndale’s life. He spent 12 years in exile where a lot of his translation work was carried out and because of the risk of arrest he kept his movements and whereabouts. After exile in 1524 he would never again set foot in England.

Tyndale was born on the Welsh border, probably in Gloucestershire, sometime between 1490 and 1495. In 1510 he went to Oxford, where he entered Magdalen Hall– later Hertford College. It was a time of huge change. Guttenberg had developed the first mechanical press in 1450 and now printing was taking hold in Europe and this new technology was opening up availability to books for the first time. Erasmus’ Greek New Testament was printed in 1516 and was starting to have an explosive effect as the NT was available to scholars for the first time. Luther would print the 95 thesis in 1517 and with printing these could be widely distributed.  Yet for the bible availability even of the Greek NT was limited – to afford the book and to be able to read it would be beyond the reach of the common man.

Tyndale later studied in Cambridge and was ordained into the Catholic Church but never took up a position as a priest. Instead around 1520 he became a tutor for the family of Sir John Walsh, at Little Sodbury in Gloucestershire. He would teach his two sons and while there he lived a simple and devoted life. Later, even Tyndale’s enemies could not find fault with his simple life. It seems it was here that he began studying the bible from Erasmus’s Greek New Testament and was increasingly persuaded that the church and its practices were simply wrong. Doctrines of purgatory, transubstantiation, penance, papal infallibility, selling of indulgences could find no basis in the bible. Around this time he began preaching in and around Bristol and attracting attention for his reformist thinking.

Sir John Walsh had many visitors, often catholic dignitaries and academics, and Tyndale would debate with them. One day an exasperated Catholic scholar at dinner with Tyndale said, “We were better be without God’s law than the pope’s.” In response Tyndale famously replied, “I defy the Pope and all his laws. . . . 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.”

With such conflict it would be hard to remain with Sir John Walsh and he travelled to London in order to seek permission to translate the bible into English. But this was viciously opposed by the Roman Catholic Church. After John Wycliffe had translated the bible from Latin in the late 1300s in 1401 Parliament passed the law de Haeretico Comburendo—“on the burning of heretics”—to make heresy punishable by burning people alive at the stake. Then in 1408 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundell, created the Constitutions of Oxford which warned, “It is a dangerous thing….to translate the text of the Holy Scripture out of one tongue into another, for in the translation the same sense is not always easily kept. . . . We therefore decree and ordain, that no man, hereafter, by his own authority translate any text of the Scripture into English or any other tongue . . . and that no man can read any such book . . . in part or in whole.^”

These statutes combined to mean you could be burned alive by the Catholic Church for simply reading the Bible in English. And it happened. The playwright John Bale records “as a boy of 11 watched the burning of a young man in Norwich for possessing the Lord’s Prayer in English.”

Tyndale naively thought that he could get official authorization for his translation and came to London to ask the Bishop of London if he could do this. But he was refused and soon realised that he had to flee England simply for wanting to do this. He therefore left England in 1524 for Germany and was never able to return.

He was supported by some of those he met in London but lived a poor frugal life usually spending hours in solitary translation. From here his whereabouts become harder to pin down. He appears to have visited Hamburg and Wittenberg and it seems here that it was here that he first translated the NT into English. The first printing of the New Testament was in quarto (a book size of about  24 × 30 cm determined by folding printed sheets twice to form four leaves or eight pages) and begun at Cologne in the summer of 1525, and completed at Worms.

The second edition was a smaller octavo edition –  16 × 23 cm, determined by printing on sheets folded to form 8 leaves or 16 pages. The pages were printed and then smuggled across to England in ships carrying bails of cloth and then sown together in England. Around this time there was a horrific drought and grain importation was vital yet was illegal. It means that there was a lot of unlawful smuggling into England. And this provided great cover for ship owners wanting to make money brining the bible into the country.  An unbound book would cost one shilling and eight pence. A bound copy was one shilling more. That means roughly about a week’s wages for a labourer which immediately opened up availability to the ordinary man.

Tyndale’s literary activity during this time was extraordinary. When he left England, his knowledge of Hebrew, if he had any, was basic yet he mastered Hebrew to such an extent that he was able to translate the entire Pentateuch, the Books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Kings, 1^st Chronicles and of the Book of Jonah. These later made up 90% of the Authorized Version. All this material became the basis of theGreat Bible issued by Miles Coverdale in England in 1539and the basis for theGeneva Bible published in 1557 which sold over a million copies between 1560 and 1640. This was not merely a literary phenomenon; it was a spiritual explosion. Tyndale’s Bible and writings were the kindling that set the Reformation on fire in England.

II. A high price… 

Tyndale paid a high price. On a personal level he struggled to survive. One letter remains in which he refers to… “my pains . . . my poverty . . . my exile out of mine natural country, and bitter absence from my friends . . . my hunger, my thirst, my cold, the great danger wherewith I am everywhere encompassed, and to ….innumerable other hard and sharp fighting’s which I endure”.

But worse was the price paid by others. Tyndale would watch as his translations came to England and saw the Catholic Church’s opposition. He learned that young men were burned alive who were converted by reading his translation and his books. His close friend, John Frith, was arrested in London and tried by Thomas More and burned alive in 1531, at the age of 28. Richard Bayfield ran the ships that took Tyndale’s books to England. He was betrayed and arrested, and Thomas More wrote on December 4, 1531, that Bayfield “the monk and apostate [was] well and worthily burned in Smythfelde.”

Three weeks later John Tewkesbury was defending justification by faith alone which he had come to believe in through Tyndale. He was whipped in Thomas Moore’s garden and had his brow squeezed with small ropes till blood came out of his eyes. Then he was sent to the Tower where he was racked till he was lame. Then at last they burned him alive. Thomas More “rejoiced that his victim was now in hell, where Tyndale ‘is like to find him when they come together.’”  Thomas More hated Tyndale. He was offered £5000 to write and refute Tyndale’s writings. He refused the money but such was his zeal that he wrote about ¾ million words in response.

Tyndale was pursued by the church who searched hard for someone to betray him. They found an Englishman, Henry Philips, who had won Tyndale’s trust. He got Tyndale to leave his house one day and arranged for him to be arrested in a narrow passage where he stood behind him and blocked his escape. Philips had asked Tyndale if he could borrow £2 before the betrayal. Tyndale gave the money thinking he was lending it to a friend. Tyndale was taken to the castle of Filford, eighteen English miles from Antwerp, and remained there 18 months until he was put to death. As a priest he was spared being burnt alive and they strangled him first and then burnt him at the stake.  His last words were said to be “Lord Open the king of England’s eyes”. On 5 September 1538, 2 years after his death Henry VIII ordered every church in England to have a bible in English available. By 1539 the king had received many complaints about people gathering round the chained bible reading the bible out loud so much that they were disrupting services. The Lord heard Tyndale’s prayer.

III. So what drove Tyndale? Why do all this?

What drove Tyndale to do all this?At heart, it was his knowledge of Jesus Christ and the need for Jesus. Tyndale had a rock-solid conviction that all humans were in bondage to sin. Because of sin all are blind, dead, damned, and helpless. He believed that God had acted in Christ to provide salvation by grace through faith. Tyndale burned with a passion that the Bible must be translated for the sake of the liberating, life-giving gospel.

Tyndale burned with the hope that people may be liberated from the bonds of sin and eternal condemnation. He said “Neither can any creature loose the bonds, save the blood of Christ only.” It may sound to some like dry theology but Tyndale knew that at the heart of this was the doctrine of justification by faith alone. This is why the Bible had to be translated, and ultimately this is why Tyndale was martyred. By faith are we saved only in believing the promises.

Second why the extraordinary zeal of the opposition to Tyndale? John Piper points out that there were surface reasons and deeper reasons why the church opposed an English Bible. The surface reasons were that the English language is rude and unworthy of the exalted language of God’s word; and when one translates, errors can creep in, so it is safer not to translate; moreover, if the Bible is in English, then each man will become his own interpreter, and many will go astray into heresy and be condemned; and it was church tradition that only priests are given the divine grace to understand the Scriptures; and what’s more, there is a special sacramental value to the Latin service in which people cannot understand, but grace is given. Such were the kinds of things being said on the surface.

But there were deeper reasons why the church opposed the English Bible. The church realized that they would not be able to sustain certain doctrines biblically because the people would see that they are not in the Bible. And the church realized that their power and control over the people, and even over the state, would be lost if certain doctrines were exposed as unbiblical—especially the priesthood and purgatory and penance. Thomas Moore’s criticism of Tyndale boils down mainly to the way Tyndale translated five words. He translated presbuteros as elder instead of priest. He translated ekklesia as congregation instead of church. He translated metanoeo as repent instead of do penance. He translated exomologeo as acknowledge or admit instead of confess. And he translated agape as love rather than charity.

Clearly these words underpinned the churches power and control of the church. When they were removed such power and control collapsed and with the reformation this is exactly what happened.

Sitting here the idea of justification by faith alone, by grace alone and sola scriptura are common enough and agreed by reformed believers. Yet for Tyndale it was not enough to cry sola scriptura, he had to do all he could to ensure that men had the bible and could find Jesus for themselves. Today the bible is here yet biblical ignorance is surely as high as it was in Tyndale’s time. We can deplore the church for preventing people from preventing access to the bible but today believers that know Christ do the same when they are silent about the absolute need for Jesus Christ. They may have the book yet like the church then block people from access to the scriptures. Perhaps not the pages but certainly the content.

The Apostle Paul was driven to bring a knowledge of the truth to people. The price could not be higher and is about life and death. Tyndale knew and did Paul “faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.” May we like Tyndale burn with the passion to see people with the bible – not just the physical pages but with the true content, Jesus Christ.

By Paul , London UBF