William Tyndale (1494 -
1536) *****
Bible translator and reformer, Tyndale was ordained as a priest in 1521, having studied Greek diligently at Oxford and Cambridge universities Following his studies he joined Sir John Walsh's household, with duties not easy to define. Some accounts describe him as a tutor to Sir John's children; some make him chaplain to the household; while another suggests he acted as secretary to Sir John. One day Tyndale was engaged in a discussion with a learned man who told him it was better to be without God's law than that of the Pope. To this Tyndale retorted that he defied the Pope and all his laws, adding that if God were to spare his life, before many years passed he would cause a boy who drove the plough to know more of the Scriptures than this learned man. Tyndale had found his vocation: translation of the Bible into English. Tyndale conferred with Luther in Germany and stayed on the continent translating the Bible from Greek into English. The printing of the translation was begun at Cologne in 1525, but was stopped by an injunction obtained by Johann Dobeneck, a vain and conceited man who hated the Reformation and opposed it in every possible way. Tyndale fled to Worms, where the book was printed. Copies were smuggled into England, where Archbishop Warham and Bishop Tonstall ordered them seized and burned. Eventually Tyndale was betrayed by a friend and arrested in Brussels, Belgium. Despite the efforts of Thomas Cromwell and others to save him, he was tried for treason and heresy against the Church. He was condemned, degraded from holy orders, strangled, and his body burned. His last words were a prayer, "Lord, open the king of England's eyes." Tyndale's influence upon English literature was great, chiefly through the use made of his renderings in the King James Version of the Bible (1611). It is estimated that 60 percent of this translation is derived from that of Tyndale.
Another View
The first printed English Scripture was the New Testament, an everlasting monument to William Tyndale.7 Born about 1494 in Gloucestershire, he went early to Oxford, where he took his B.A. in 1512 and M.A. in 1515; then to Cambridge, where Erasmus and others had been stirring up interest in Greek and the Greek Testament. In 1520 he returned to Gloucestershire as tutor in the family of Sir John Walsh of Little Sodbury, where he met many traveling leaders of the church, and others with whom he often argued. To one of them he proclaimed what soon became his life's object: "If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that drives the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou doest." For, as he wrote later, "I had perceived by experience, how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth, except the scripture were plainly lade before their eyes in their mother tongue, that they might se the processes, order and meanings of the text."
About 1523 he went to London, hoping that Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London, a friend of Sir Thomas More and of Erasmus, might help him in his undertaking, presenting as a sample of his skill a translation of an oration of Socrates. This hope proving vain, he spent a year in London living in the house of Humphrey Monmouth, a cloth merchant and later an alderman of London, who continued his support for some years.
In May 1524, when he "understood at the last, not only that there was no room in my lord of London’s palace to translate the new testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all England," he left his country which he dearly loved, destined never to see it again. After landing at Hamburg he went directly to Wittenberg where his matriculation at the University is registered under May 27, 1524. There he visited with Luther until going to Cologne to begin the printing of the New Testament. Before it was completed, however, he was forced to flee up the river to Worms, where an octavo edition of the New Testament was published, followed by a quarto edition. Early in 1526 copies must have reached England. From 1527 to 1531 he was at Marburg, engaged in the publication of his principal doctrinal and controversial works and the translation of the Old Testament, of which the Pentateuch was published in 1530 in Marburg, and Jonah in Antwerp, in 1531. John Fox, Acts and Monuments, London: John Day, 1570; the account is added in this second edition. tells of a trip to Hamburg, including a shipwreck and loss of his manuscript in 1529, where Coverdale met him to aid in the translation work, but this has not been clearly substantiated. After 1531 he was in Antwerp, busy in further translation and revision until he was treacherously betrayed in May 1535 and imprisoned in Vilvorde Castle near Brussels. His friends could not procure him protection; he was condemned to death for heresy and on October 6, 1536, he was strangled and his body burned. His last words were "Lord, open the King of England's eyes." So lived and died this devout and determined man who gave us our first printed English New Testament, and whose power as a translator has colored all the great versions since.