William Tyndale

• 1. Introduction

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  William Tyndale died with a prayer on his lips. Tied to a stake outside Brussels in the autumn of 1536, he called out in a loud voice: "Lord! Open the King of England's eyes." Then he was strangled. Then his body was burned. Within four years of that execution, four new English translations of the Bible were published in England at that same king's command. The irony is almost perfect.

  Tyndale was born around 1494, most likely in a village near Dursley in Gloucestershire, into a family that sometimes went by the name Hychyns. He would die a convicted Lutheran heretic in the Netherlands, having spent much of his adult life in exile on the European continent. But the work he produced during those years between Oxford and the stake at Vilvoorde transformed the English language and the English church in ways that outlasted every authority that tried to silence him.

  His Bible translations were the first English scriptures drawn directly from Hebrew and Greek texts. They were the first to use a printing press. They were the first to introduce the name Jehovah into the English language. And after seven years of work by 47 scholars, the King James Version of 1611 would owe between 55% and 83% of its New Testament to Tyndale's words.

  The questions his life raises are not merely historical. How does a man translate a book that his own country has made a capital crime to own? What does it cost to insist that a ploughboy deserves to read the same scripture that a bishop does? And how did one difficult, monomaniacal scholar from Gloucestershire come to shape the English that billions of people still read today?

• 2. The Forbidden Book

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  Owning a Bible in English was not merely frowned upon in the early 16th century. It could get you killed. The Lollard movement of the previous century, associated with the Wycliffite Bibles written in early Middle English, had been suppressed with such violence that heresy had been treated as sedition under English law, carrying the death penalty. Manuscripts with Wycliffite material were destroyed. Possession of such texts could be used as evidence in inquisitions.

  By Tyndale's time those old Wycliffite translations were becoming unreadable anyway, as English had shifted from Middle English into what scholars call Early Modern English. But the legal danger remained. Partial Old English translations had existed since the 7th century, and contemporary vernacular versions were available in most other major European languages by the 14th century. England was the exception. The religious establishment had made it one.

  The wider European world was, however, changing. Greek-speaking scholars had fled to Catholic Europe as refugees after Constantinople fell in 1453, bringing manuscripts that had been unavailable to western scholars for centuries. Erasmus compiled, edited, and published the Koine Greek New Testament in 1516. Johann Reuchlin's Hebrew grammar had appeared in 1506. Luther's German Bible translation came between 1522 and 1534. The intellectual infrastructure for a new generation of vernacular scripture was assembling itself across the continent, even as England held the door shut.

• 3. Scholar and Linguist

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  Tyndale enrolled at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in 1506 under the family name Hychyns. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1512 and was ordained a subdeacon the same year. In July 1515 he received his Master of Arts, which qualified him to begin preparation for a doctorate in theology. He was regarded as a man living an unblemished life. But the curriculum infuriated him.

  He later attacked the standard university course of study in scathing terms, writing that scholars had "ordained that no man shall look on the Scripture until he is modeled in heathen learning eight or nine years and armed with false principles, with which he is clean shut out of the understanding of the Scripture." For a man of his linguistic gifts, this must have felt like a particularly absurd obstruction. Over the years he became fluent not only in Latin and Greek but in Hebrew, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

  Between 1517 and 1521 he studied at Cambridge, though his time there did not overlap with the period when Erasmus had taught Greek there from August 1511 to January 1512. Around 1521 he became chaplain and tutor in the household of Sir John Walsh at Little Sodbury in Gloucestershire. His opinions soon provoked local clergymen, and the following year he was summoned before John Bell, the Chancellor of the Diocese of Worcester. No formal charges were laid, but the tension at that meeting reportedly produced one of the most famous declarations in English religious history.

  According to John Foxe, Tyndale had an argument with a clergyman who claimed the Pope's laws mattered more than God's. Tyndale's reported reply became a kind of personal manifesto: "I defy the Pope and all his laws; and if God spares my life, ere many years, I will cause the boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost."

• 4. Translation and Persecution

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  In 1523 Tyndale went to London to seek sponsorship for an English Bible translation. He applied to join the household of Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London, a humanist scholar who had worked with Erasmus. Tunstall declined, saying his household was already full of scholars. Tyndale relied instead on the support of cloth merchant Humphrey Monmouth and preached at various London venues including St Dunstan-in-the-West on Fleet Street.

  In the spring of 1524 he left England for the continent, possibly stopping in Hamburg before traveling on to Wittenberg. A matriculation entry at the University of Wittenberg lists a "Guillelmus Daltici ex Anglia," which has been interpreted as a Latinisation of "William Tyndale from England." He began translating the New Testament there, completing it in 1525 with help from an Observant Friar named William Roy.

  In 1525 a printer in Cologne named Peter Quentell began publishing the work, but anti-Lutheran pressure shut down the operation. A full edition appeared the following year, printed by Peter Schöffer the Younger in Worms, a city then converting to Lutheranism. More copies followed from Antwerp. The books were smuggled into England by hiding pages inside other legal volumes.

  The response from English authorities was swift. Bishop Tunstall, the same man who had refused to fund Tyndale two years earlier, condemned the translation in October 1526, warned booksellers, bought up every available copy, and had them burned publicly. The spectacle of burning scripture, as one contemporary observer noted, provoked controversy even among the faithful. Cardinal Wolsey condemned Tyndale as a heretic in open court in January 1529. The more the church tried to suppress the work, the wider it spread.

• 5. Caught Between Monarchs

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  Tyndale's 1528 book The Obedience of a Christian Man argued that monarchs, not popes, should control a nation's church. This argument, the first instance of advocating the divine right of kings in England, reached King Henry VIII himself and gave the king a theological framework for breaking the English church away from Rome in 1534.

  Then Tyndale undid whatever goodwill he had earned. In 1530, writing from exile, he published The Practice of Prelates, which opposed Henry's attempt to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Tyndale argued the annulment was unscriptural and claimed it was a scheme by Cardinal Wolsey to draw Henry into the papal courts of Pope Clement VII. This made him an enemy of both crown and church at once.

  Henry asked Emperor Charles V to have Tyndale seized and returned to England under the Treaty of Cambrai. The emperor replied that formal evidence was required first. In 1531, Henry sent a man named Stephen Vaughan to persuade Tyndale to retract his views and come home. Vaughan forwarded copies of Tyndale's books to the king, but it did not satisfy Henry.

  Historian Bruce Boehrer summarized Tyndale's position this way: he undercut both Church and King because he found them both resting on the same objectionable premise, that the word of God should be subject to a single man's final judgment. That principle left no room for compromise with anyone holding supreme authority. Tyndale stayed on the continent, kept writing, and kept translating.

• 6. Arrest, Trial, and Death

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  Tyndale was betrayed by a man named Henry Phillips, who delivered him to ducal authorities representing the Holy Roman Empire. He was seized at the English House in Antwerp in 1535, a building located in the same block as the world's first stock exchange. He was then held in the castle of Vilvoorde near Brussels.

  His imprisonment lasted a year and a half. His inquisitor, Jacobus Latomus, gave him the opportunity to write a book laying out his views. Latomus wrote a reply. Tyndale wrote two responses. Latomus wrote two further replies. The formal exchange produced a five-book theological debate conducted between prisoner and inquisitor, which Latomus eventually published as one volume.

  Strikingly, the charges against Tyndale in that formal proceeding never mentioned unauthorized Bible translation. Bible translation was not illegal in the Netherlands. The charges focused on Lutheran heresy, specifically his positions on justification by faith, free will, and the nature of the soul. During his imprisonment Tyndale was apparently allowed to continue translating from the Hebrew.

  Thomas Cromwell was involved in some form of intercession or extradition planning, but it came to nothing. When Tyndale could not be convinced to renounce his views, he was handed to the secular authorities and tried in 1536. He was found guilty by his own admission. He was strangled at the stake and his body burned, most likely in early October 1536, though biographer David Daniell could fix the date only as "one of the first days of October 1536." The 6th of October became the traditional date of commemoration.

• 7. Words That Survived Him

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  The 47 scholars who completed the King James Version in 1611, after seven years of work, drew extensively from Tyndale's translations. Estimates place the New Testament of the King James Version at between 55% and 83% of Tyndale's words, and the first half of the Old Testament at 76%. The translators of the Revised Standard Version in the 1940s acknowledged that the King James Version "owed most, especially in the New Testament, to Tyndale."

  That chain of influence ran through several intermediate translations, each building on his work: the Great Bible of 1539, the Geneva Bible of 1560, the Bishops' Bible of 1568, and the Douay-Rheims Bible of 1582-1609. Tyndale's translation choices, George Steiner later wrote in his book After Babel, reflected "the genius of Tyndale, the greatest of English Bible translators."

  In 2002 a BBC poll placed Tyndale 26th among the 100 Greatest Britons. Memorials stand in Vilvoorde, where he was killed, and a bronze statue by Sir Joseph Boehm commemorating his life was erected in Victoria Embankment Gardens in London in 1884. It shows him with his right hand on an open Bible resting on an early printing press. The Tyndale Monument was built in 1866 above his supposed birthplace at North Nibley in Gloucestershire.

  The stained-glass window made for the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1911 by James Powell and Sons was reinstalled in 1994 at Hertford College, Oxford, the successor institution to Magdalen Hall where Tyndale had studied. It depicts a printing shop in action, words from Tyndale's own writing, the opening words of Genesis in Hebrew, and the opening words of John's Gospel in Greek, alongside the names of other pioneering Bible translators. His name now appears in the church calendars of Anglican, Lutheran, and other Protestant communities every the 6th of October.