Before It Was Ordinary: Tyndale’s Radical Bible

Taking something for granted is, I suppose, a sign of success. In this case, it would be reading the Bible in the vernacular. And to prove the point, this year marks the 500th anniversary of William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament, and I’m not sure how many people would particularly care. They should, of course, for cultural and political as well as theological reasons.   

Tyndale was born in 1494 in Gloucestershire, graduated from Oxford in 1512, and was ordained three years later. He’s come under the influence of early reformers, Lollards as they were known, and serving as a priest in Lincolnshire and Cambridge in eastern England, where these new ideas were especially strong, sharpened his evangelical tendencies. The Bible used by the church at the time was the St. Jerome’s Vulgate, a competent if flawed translation in a language not understood by the vast majority of people. There was an English version, translated by John Wycliffe in the late 14th century, but its language was overly refined, outdated, and considered heretical. 

The impetus for change came from continental Europe. In 1516, Erasmus published “Novum Instrumentum omne,” which contained the first published Greek New Testament and a new Latin translation. Two more editions would appear in the next six years. It was this translation that Martin Luther used for his German version of the New Testament. 

Tyndale was one of many young intellectuals intrigued by events abroad. A vernacular Bible was only part of the new thinking, of course, usually accompanied by an aggressive questioning of church authority. Once scripture could be read and understood by every Christian, why should the institutional church assume such influence over teachings and doctrine? Where were nuns and monks in the Gospels, why were clergy celibate, and was there a Biblical foundation for religious hierarchy and authority? More significantly, are we saved by faith alone, and is the celebration of the eucharist an important but symbolic act rather than the literal miracle of transubstantiation taught by the church? 

Tyndale was able to speculate on all this and work on his translation while serving as chaplain to Sir John Walsh in Little Sodbury Manor in Gloucestershire, where he was protected, and partly because his work was not widely known. Translating scripture wasn’t strictly illegal but did require the approval of a bishop, and if Tyndale was to reach a larger audience, he needed such episcopal support. He approached the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, widely respected as a moderate, a humanist, and a friend of scholarship. Tunstall refused, however, and because of his approach, Tyndale and his work were now known, and not in the way he’d hoped. In 1524, he fled to what is now Germany, to Wittenberg, where Martin Luther lived and taught. 

He completed his translation of the New Testament and travelled to Cologne to have it printed. Cologne was Roman Catholic, not safe, and news of what Tyndale intended soon leaked. He was forced to flee once again, and it was in Antwerp in 1526 that the translation was eventually printed, and where he would translate some books of the Old Testament and also write theological pamphlets. 

In the following years, Tyndale’s reputation grew, and so did opposition to his activities. He was betrayed, arrested and spent a year in prison. In 1536, Tyndale was executed, not specifically for his Bible translation but for the crime of heresy. It was the English government that was behind his fate. Before being strangled and then burned at the stake, it is claimed that he prayed, “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.” Henry’s eyes remained firmly closed, alas, and one of the reasons he wanted Tyndale silenced was because the reformer had opposed the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, condemning it as unscriptural. The ironies are numerous.   

Nothing that Henry ever wrote had much of an impact on posterity, but one of his royal successors, James 1, commissioned a Bible translation that became one of the most influential books of all time. Around 80% of the Authorized Version’s New Testament is based on Tyndale. “Salt of the earth”, “A law unto themselves”, “Filthy lucre”, “Signs of the times”, “The powers that be”, “Eat, drink, and be merry”, “Wolf in sheep’s clothing”, and so many more are all Tyndale. 

He famously said, “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy who drives a plough to know more of the scriptures than you do.” It may sound archaic today, but the repercussions of what the man achieved are enormous. The shape of the English language, the notion of equality through knowledge of scripture that was so fundamentally influential in Protestant culture, helped to shape the Puritan movement that won the English Civil War, established a republic, and eventually led to a constitutional monarchy. The British and, to an extent, Canadian left, traditionally said to owe more to Methodism than Marxism, can trace its roots back to an individual interpretation of the Bible. And the United States would become, like it or not, a Protestant superpower, based on citizens and their Bibles. I wonder if Tyndale would have imagined it?