Scripture Unsilenced
n the fourth of April, 1519, seven people
were burned alive at Coventry. Their crime was teaching their own children the Lord’s Prayer in
English. One of them was a woman known to us only as Mistress Smith. At the first, she was released.
But as the bishop’s officer was leading her away by the arm, he heard paper rustling in her
sleeve. It was a crumpled copy of the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten
Commandments—something for which church authorities should have rejoiced. But these were written
in English, not Latin. He immediately turned her around and took her back to the bishop. She burned
with the six men.1
That is the world into which William Tyndale was born, and it deserves a moment’s reflection. We are five hundred years removed and liable to quite another danger. Ours is a world of tolerance. And this tends to depreciation. The danger we face is the loss of value and veneration of God-breathed Scripture. We take the light for granted. We are satiated. Our familiarity has weakened our sense of astonishment and awe at having ready access to sacred writ in our own language. Not so for the English in Tyndale’s day. They were a people shut up in darkness for many years—many of whom valued the light over their own earthly life. A woman was executed, not for a scrap of paper in her sleeve, but for the value she placed on the words inscribed on it.
A Consuming Conviction
Tyndale was a Gloucestershire man, Oxford-trained, ordained, and by every ordinary measure destined for a quiet clerical career. But God had other plans. Instead of following the well-worn paths of tradition, Tyndale was awakened through the power of the gospel to a single consuming conviction: that the Scriptures must be put into English. And this not as before. His was a passion for the purity of God’s Word, translated from the original languages. His aim was the glory of God and the everlasting joy of his countrymen.
For this gospel purpose, Tyndale concluded that “it was impossible to establish the lay-people in any truth, except the scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother-tongue, that they might see the process, order, and meaning of the text.”2 The moment is famous when this ambition was first disclosed. Arguing with a learned prelate who finally burst out that the church would be better off without God’s laws than the pope’s, Tyndale answered that he defied the pope and all his laws, and added:
If God spare my life, ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth a plow shall know more of the Scripture than thou doest. William Tyndaleat Little Sodbury3
No Room in England
The law stood squarely against him. The Constitutions of Oxford, promulgated under Archbishop Arundel in 1408, forbade any man to translate any part of Scripture into English, on pain of punishment as a heretic. It had one loophole: a bishop could authorize the work. So Tyndale went to London and asked Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of London, a genuine Greek scholar and a friend of Erasmus, to be his patron. Tunstall declined. He sensed in Tyndale the air of reform and promptly distanced himself from the endeavor.
Tyndale’s summary of that year is one of the saddest sentences in English church history: he came to understand “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.”4
He crossed to the Continent in 1524, at about thirty, supported by London merchants who traded in cloth. He never saw England again.
Bibles in Bales
The first attempt failed. A printer at Cologne got as far as Matthew 22 before the authorities raided the shop. Tyndale grabbed what he could and fled upriver to Worms, the same city where Luther had stood four years earlier. There, in 1526, several thousand copies of the first complete printed English New Testament came off the press. Three copies survive.5
Getting them home required a conspiracy. Loose printed sheets went into bales of cloth and watertight casks of wine and oil, down the Rhine, across the North Sea, into Norwich and Bristol and London, where believers waited on the docks. Foxe reports that one farmer traded a wagonload of hay for a single copy of the Epistle of James.6
Later in Chelmsford, a fifteen-year-old named William Malden watched poor men of the town buy a New Testament and sit reading it aloud at the back of the parish church on Sundays, with a crowd gathering to listen. His father forbade him to go and told him he could get all the Bible he needed from Latin matins. So the boy taught himself to read, got a copy of his own, hid it in his straw bed, and took a beating for it.7
Here was Tyndale’s ambition coming to fruition. The plowboy knowing Scripture was not a mere slogan.
Sola Scriptura
It would be a mistake to remember Tyndale merely as a translator with unusual courage. He was a theologian, and the translating flowed from the theology.
Answering Thomas More on the question of whether the church or the gospel came first, Tyndale reasoned from Romans 10 that Christ must be preached before anyone can believe. Therefore the preacher’s word precedes the hearer’s faith. And so:
Inasmuch as the word is before the faith, and faith maketh the congregation, therefore is the word or gospel before the congregation. William TyndaleAn Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue, 15318
That single sentence is sola Scriptura in its basic form. The church does not create the Word; the Word creates the church. Rome had inverted the order and built an entire apparatus of authority on the inversion. Tyndale simply put it back the right way round—and then spent his life making sure ordinary people could see and steward the Scriptures for themselves.
He was equally clear on what Scripture is for. It is not a quarry for clever men. “The scriptures spring out of God, and flow unto Christ, and were given to lead us to Christ. Thou must therefore go along by the scripture as by a line, until thou come at Christ, which is the way’s end and resting-place.”9 The Bible is medicine, he said, and the point is to apply it to your own sores rather than gnaw the bitter bark and never reach the sweet pith within.
The Cost
The book was banned. On October 24, 1526, Tunstall preached against Bible translation and had Tyndale’s New Testament burned in St. Paul’s churchyard.10 Paper was not all that burned. Men who read the book, sold it, or shipped it went to the flames as well.
For nine months before the end, Tyndale lodged in the English Merchants House at Antwerp. A friend there left an account of his ordinary week: Sundays reading and expounding Scripture to whoever gathered, and again after dinner; Mondays visiting English refugees; Saturdays walking the city, looking into every corner and hole for the elderly, the outcast, the destitute, and giving away what he had; every other day given wholly to his book.11 This is the man his enemies called a hell-hound.
He was betrayed by a young Englishman named Harry Phillips, who had been paid to find him. When his deceptive schemes gave birth to arrest, Tyndale was taken by night to the castle at Vilvoorde outside Brussels on May 21, 1535. He was imprisoned sixteen months.
From that cell comes a letter in his own hand, written to the officer in charge. He asks for a warmer cap, because his head is cold; a warmer coat, because the one he has is thin; cloth to patch his leggings; a lamp, since it is wearisome to sit alone in the dark. And then, above all, he begs to be permitted his Hebrew Bible, grammar, and dictionary, that he might spend the time in that study.12
A cold man in a dark cell, a year from a stake he could see coming, asking for a lamp and his Hebrew grammar. He was not finished. He was still translating.
On October 6, 1536, he was strangled at the stake and his body burned. He was forty-two.13 Foxe records his last words as a prayer:
Lord, open the King of England’s eyes. William TyndaleVilvoorde, 153614
Not in Vain
Within a year, Henry VIII had licensed an English Bible. Within two, he had ordered that one be placed in every parish church in the realm. Tyndale’s life and death were not in vain.
Myles Coverdale published the first complete English Bible in 1535. John Rogers brought out the Matthew Bible in 1537 under a pseudonym—a volume that was very largely Tyndale’s work, dedicated to the king who had hunted him. The Great Bible followed in 1539 under Cranmer, set by royal injunction in every parish. And when King James’s translators finished their work in 1611, they were in the main revising Tyndale: nearly nine-tenths of the King James New Testament is his.15
Cranmer’s preface to the Great Bible would have gladdened Tyndale’s heart:
Here may all manner of persons, men, women, young, old, learned, unlearned, rich, poor, priests, laymen, lords, ladies, officers, tenants, and mean men, virgins, wives, widows, lawyers, merchants, artificers, husbandmen, and all manner of persons, of what estate or condition so ever they be, may in this book learn all things what they ought to believe, what they ought to do, and what they should not do, as well concerning almighty God, as also concerning themselves and all other. Briefly, to the reading of the Scripture, none can be enemy, but that either be so sick that they love not to hear of any medicine, or else be so ignorant that they know not Scripture to be the most helpful medicine. Thomas Cranmerpreface to the Great Bible16
The authorities burned the book and they burned the man. Both fires were in vain. The Scripture is no longer silenced.
soli Deo gloria