William Tyndale
Always Singing One Note: The Translator Who Gave God an English Voice
illiam Tyndale was one of the greatest lovers
of the Lord Jesus Christ that the church has ever been blessed to know. John Foxe introduces him as
“the true servant and martyr of God,” the “apostle of England in this our later
age.”1 The story of his life is one of great
discovery. He was the Englishman who “gave God an English voice.” He was the first man to
translate the Scripture into English from the original Greek and Hebrew. But more importantly, his
singular focus to show Christ to his countrymen through the written Word was used mightily of God for
the rediscovery of the Gospel.
Tyndale responded to the corruptions of the outward church with unique wisdom and grace. He was thoroughly a reformer, though his manners were meeker than the likes of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and Knox. It was not his voice that he tirelessly labored for others to hear; it was the voice of God through the written Word. But God was without an English voice in Tyndale’s day. The words of men had prevailed to distance and obscure the words of God. David Daniell says simply that Tyndale “has reached more people than even Shakespeare.”2
Scripture Silenced
On 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, Mistress Smith, was at first released, until the bishop’s officer heard paper rustling in her sleeve: the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments, written in English. She burned with the six men.
That is the world into which William Tyndale was born. The Bible was not absent from medieval England, but it was locked in Latin, a language never native to the English. John Wycliffe was the first to decry the silence. The translation that bears his name rendered the Latin Vulgate into English between 1382 and 1395, copied entirely by hand. His followers, the Lollards, gathered to read it in secret.
The response was severe. A statute of 1401 made heresy punishable by burning at the stake. Then in 1408 Archbishop Thomas Arundel issued the Constitutions of Oxford:
We enact and ordain that no one henceforth do by his own authority translate any text of Holy Scripture into the English tongue or any other by way of book, pamphlet, or treatise. … Let him that do contrary be punished in the same manner as a supporter of heresy and error. The Constitutions of Oxford14083
Wycliffe was beyond the reach of their punishments, having died in his bed in 1384. So in 1428 the church dug up his bones at Lutterworth, burned them, and threw the ashes into the River Swift. The 1408 decree did not say the Bible could not be translated accurately. It said the Bible in English was dangerous. An open Bible is a standing threat to any authority that does not submit to it, especially the church.
The Scholar
William Tyndale was born about 1494 in Gloucestershire, in the Vale of Berkeley near the Welsh border, into a prosperous family in a county built on cloth. His brother Edward became the most powerful man in the Vale, and another brother, John, organized the production of cloth there and its sale in London.
At about twelve he entered Magdalen School at Oxford. John Foxe tells us that there he “increased as well in the knowledge of tongues, and other liberal arts, as especially in the knowledge of the Scriptures, whereunto his mind was singularly addicted.”4 He took his B.A. in 1512 and his M.A. in 1515.
From Oxford he went to Cambridge. The records do not name him, but the circumstantial case is strong. Erasmus had taught there, and in 1516 his printed Greek New Testament put the apostles’ own words back into scholars’ hands. Cambridge is also the likeliest explanation for Tyndale’s close friendship with John Frith, and probably where he came to know Robert Barnes, Thomas Bilney, and Miles Coverdale. Luther was read and argued over so openly that the men who met at the White Horse Inn were nicknamed “the Germans.” “We are not Germans,” was the reply, “neither are we Romans.” The Greek New Testament, Merle d’Aubigné adds, had made them Christians.5
We have no account of his conversion. He left none. What we have instead is the shape of a life, and the fact that by his Cambridge years his love for Christ was evident to all who knew him. He was not so much a master of the Scriptures as one mastered by them.
A Boy That Driveth the Plow
Already an ordained priest, Tyndale returned to Gloucestershire about 1521 as tutor to the children of Sir John and Lady Anne Walsh at Little Sodbury Manor. He taught during the week and preached on Sundays, in the chapel and in the villages round about. The importance of Tyndale’s preaching is often overlooked. Yet he was known for his preaching before his pen. Even Thomas More, who would become his fiercest opponent, conceded that before Tyndale went over the sea he was “well known … for a man of right good living, studious and well learned in the Scripture, and in divers places in England was very well liked, and did great good with preaching.”6
The Walsh table drew abbots, deans, archdeacons, and doctors of divinity. Foxe, drawing on a Gloucestershire man converted through Tyndale’s ministry, records that when their opinions varied from his, Tyndale “would show them in the Book, and lay plainly before them the open and manifest places of the Scriptures, to confute their errors, and confirm his sayings.”7 At length they grew weary and bore a secret grudge against him. His teachings were opposed on the basis of church authority, not Scripture. The people did not need to believe Tyndale; they needed to believe God.
Then came a pivotal exchange. In dispute with a learned divine, Tyndale pressed him to the point that the man burst out that we were better to be without God’s laws than the pope’s. Tyndale answered:
I defy the pope, and all his laws — and if God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scripture than thou dost. William Tyndaleat Little Sodbury, c. 15238
Tyndale was true to his zeal. This became the banner under which he poured out his life.
No Place in England
The 1408 decree left one legal door open: a bishop could authorize a translation. So in 1523 Tyndale went to London to ask. Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of London, was the obvious patron, a genuine Greek scholar and a friend of Erasmus. To show his competence Tyndale brought a translation he had made from the Athenian orator Isocrates.9 Tunstall answered that he had chaplains enough.
A London cloth merchant, Humphrey Monmouth, heard Tyndale preach at St Dunstan’s in the West and took him into his house for half a year. Years later, under arrest for owning heretical books, Monmouth described his guest: “he lived like a good priest, as me thought. He studied most part of the day and of the night, at his book; and he would eat but sodden [boiled] meat by his good will, nor drink but small single beer.”10 At the end of that year Tyndale reached the conclusion that shaped everything after:11
I 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. William Tyndale
He sailed for the Continent in the spring of 1524, with a little money from Monmouth and other London merchants. He never saw England again. In his devotion to Christ and Christ’s Word, for the sake of Christ’s people, Tyndale at once gave his life to live the rest of his days as an outlaw and a fugitive in exile from his beloved homeland. He may have gone first to Wittenberg.
Cologne and Worms
By the summer of 1525 the translation was at the press of Peter Quentell in Cologne, a city with far more printers than London and close to the great Frankfurt book fair. The work was discovered partway through Matthew. Johannes Cochlaeus, a German Catholic controversialist who made attacking Luther his life’s work, heard the printers boasting over their wine, alerted the city authorities, and wrote to Henry VIII, Wolsey, and Bishop Fisher, urging them to watch every English port. One fragment of that quarto survives, Matthew’s Gospel through chapter twenty-two, the earliest printed English New Testament in existence.
Tyndale took what sheets he could and fled up the Rhine to Worms, the free imperial city where Luther had stood four years earlier. There Peter Schoeffer printed the whole, probably early in 1526: a small octavo, roughly hymn-book size, some seven hundred pages of text without prologue or marginal notes, made to be hidden and carried. The print run is given as three thousand. It was the first complete New Testament ever translated into English from the Greek, and the first ever printed. Of that entire edition, three copies survive.
Bibles in Bales
From the spring of 1526 books and printed sheets traveled hidden in bales of cloth and in sealed casks among other goods, down the Rhine and across the North Sea to Norwich, Bristol, and London, where an underground network was waiting. Foxe tells of a farmer who gave a wagonload of hay for a copy of the Epistle of James. For the first time an ordinary English reader could hold the New Testament in his own tongue, in his own hands, and read it for himself without a priest standing between. These books, Foxe wrote, opened “a door of light … to the eyes of the whole English nation, which before were many years shut up in darkness.”12
The authorities were reading it too. What galled the bishops was not slipshod scholarship. It was Tyndale’s Greek-driven word choices: congregation for church, elder for priest, repentance for penance, love for charity. Each rendering struck at a sacrament, an office, or a source of revenue, and every one of them could be defended from the Greek. Daniell observes that Tyndale “cannot possibly have been unaware that those words in particular undercut the entire sacramental structure of the thousand-year church.”13
Burning God’s Word
On October 24, 1526, Tunstall, the same bishop who had refused to sponsor the translation, preached at St Paul’s against it and required every copy in his diocese to be surrendered within thirty days, on pain of excommunication. His injunction called the translation “that pestiferous and most pernicious poyson.”14 Copies were burned at Paul’s Cross a few days later. On November 3 Archbishop William Warham issued a matching order across his province.
When surrender failed, the bishops tried buying. In 1529 Tunstall, visiting Antwerp, commissioned a London merchant named Augustine Packington, who secretly favored Tyndale, to buy every copy he could find. Hall’s chronicle preserves the scene: “the bishop thinking he had God by the toe, when indeed he had (as he thought after) the devil by the fist,” said, “gentle master Packington, do your diligence and get them, and with all my heart I will pay for them.”15 Packington told Tyndale who his buyer was. Tyndale’s answer is one of the great lines of the English Reformation:
I am the gladder; for these two benefits shall come thereof: I shall get money of him for these books, to bring myself out of debt, and the whole world shall cry out upon the burning of God’s word. William Tyndaleto Augustine Packington, 1529
The money only multiplied production. But the burnings did not stay confined to paper. Men who read the book, sold it, or shipped it went to the stake as well. Thomas Bilney was burned at Norwich in August 1531, and Richard Bayfield, one of the boldest smugglers of Tyndale’s New Testaments, at Smithfield late that year. James Bainham followed in April 1532. Frith and the young tailor Andrew Hewet burned together on July 4, 1533. More, who hunted them, called Tyndale “a hell-hound in the kennel of the devil.”16
The Shepherd
Until 1528 nearly everything from Tyndale’s hand was translation. The assault on the Word forced him into print in his own voice, and the shepherd-teacher in him began to cry out. The Parable of the Wicked Mammon (1528) was an exposition of justification by faith. In the preface he faced his likely end without drama:
Some man will ask, peradventure, Why I take the labour to make this work, inasmuch as they will burn it, seeing they burnt the gospel? I answer, In burning the New Testament they did none other thing than that I looked for: no more shall they do, if they burn me also, if it be God’s will it shall so be. Nevertheless, in translating the New Testament I did my duty, and so do I now. William TyndaleThe Parable of the Wicked Mammon, 152817
In the same preface he handed every reader the standard by which to judge him and all claims: “Whosoever, therefore, readeth this, compare it unto the scripture. If God’s word bear record unto it, and thou also feelest in thine heart that it is so, be of good comfort, and give God thanks. If God’s word condemn it, then hold it accursed, and so do all other doctrines.”18 That is sola Scriptura not as a slogan but as a living principle.
The Obedience of a Christian Man followed in October 1528. Tyndale argued that Christians owe obedience to civil authority, but that every authority stands under God. He reproved those who kept Scripture from the laity: “God gave the children of Israel a law by the hand of Moses in their mother tongue; and all the prophets wrote in their mother tongue, and all the psalms were in the mother tongue.”19
In the providence of God, the little book found its way to Anne Boleyn, and through her to the king. After reading it, according to Merle d’Aubigné, Henry exclaimed, “This is truly a book for all kings to read, and for me particularly.”20 The king took the politics and rejected the theology. When Tyndale’s Practice of Prelates (1530) condemned Henry’s proposed divorce, the crown itself wanted him silenced.
Providence, Delightful and Difficult
No one in England taught Hebrew, but Tyndale was determined to learn it, and he acquired a working competency in exile. It was a delightful providence, though not an easy one. Foxe records that, sailing for Hamburg with his work in 1529, Tyndale was shipwrecked off the coast of Holland and lost all his books, writings, and copies, and had to begin again.
The Pentateuch appeared in January 1530, printed at Antwerp under the false imprint of Hans Luft at Marburg. It was the first portion of the Old Testament ever printed in English out of the Hebrew, each book with its own prologue. Jonah followed in 1531, and Joshua through 2 Chronicles, left in manuscript at his arrest, passed into print the year after his death.
Always Singing One Note
In November 1530 Thomas Cromwell selected Stephen Vaughan, an English merchant sympathetic to the Reformation, to locate Tyndale and offer him safe return. Vaughan met him secretly in a field outside Antwerp.21 On May 20, 1531, Vaughan wrote to Cromwell that Tyndale was so moved at the prospect of the king authorizing a Bible in English that water stood in his eyes. His reply is telling:
If it would stand with the king’s most gracious pleasure to grant only a bare text of the scripture to be put forth among his people, … be it of the translation of what person soever shall please his majesty, I shall immediately make faithful promise never to write more, … but immediately to repair unto his realm, and there most humbly submit myself at the feet of his royal majesty, offering my body to suffer what pain or torture, yea, what death his grace will, so this be obtained. William Tyndaleto Stephen Vaughan, 153122
Tyndale did not ask for his own translation to be authorized. A faithful one is all that he wanted. He did not ask for safety. He offered his body to torture and death. He asked for one thing only: that the English people might have the Scriptures. In exchange he offered to be silent forever. On June 19 Vaughan wrote again: “I find him always singing one note.”23 The king refused. Tyndale went on writing. Five years later he was silenced by the executioner instead.
Driven by Biblical Doctrine
It would be a mistake to remember Tyndale as a brave translator who happened to hold Reformation opinions. He was a theologian, and the translating flowed from the theology. Answering More on whether the church or the gospel comes first, Tyndale reasoned from Romans 10 that Christ must be preached before anyone can believe, and so the Word precedes the faith that receives it: “In as much as the Word is before the faith, and faith maketh the congregation, therefore is the Word or Gospel before the congregation.”24 There is sola Scriptura in a single sentence. The church does not create the Word; the Word creates the church.
He was equally clear about what Scripture is for: “The Scriptures spring out of God and flow into 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.”25
On salvation he was unambiguous. Faith alone justifies, and faith is itself God’s gift. Yet he would not let anyone divide grace from obedience. His statement of the order is worth memorizing: “My works make not my love, nor my love my faith, nor my faith God’s mercy: but contrary, God’s mercy maketh my faith; and my faith, my love, and my love, my works.”26 Mercy first, then faith, then love, then works.
At the center stood Christ and the love that flows from Him. Tyndale called the brethren to “let love interpret the law,” that they might understand its final end, “even to bring thee to the knowledge of God, how that he hath done all things for thee, that thou mightest love him again with all thine heart, and thy neighbour for his sake as thyself, and as Christ loved thee.”27
He Practiced What He Preached
In November 1534 Tyndale issued his thoroughly revised New Testament at Antwerp. Scholars regard it as his masterpiece, the text most people mean when they speak of Tyndale’s English, and Daniell calls it “the glory of his life’s work.”28
For about the last year of his freedom Tyndale lodged in the English Merchants’ House at Antwerp, kept by Thomas Poyntz. Poyntz’s recollections, passed to Foxe, give us what the dramatic accounts cannot: an ordinary week. On Sundays he read and expounded a portion of Scripture to those gathered in the house. On Mondays he visited the English refugees in the city. On Saturdays he walked Antwerp, seeking out the poor, the sick, and the aged in every corner, and gave liberally from what little he had. Every other day he gave himself wholly to his book. He practiced what he preached.
“Concerning Maliciousness be Children”
In 1535 a young Englishman named Henry Phillips arrived in Antwerp, well dressed, well spoken, and well funded from somewhere in England. He won Tyndale’s confidence, was brought to his lodging, and was shown his books and the secrets of his study. Poyntz was suspicious. Tyndale was not. Foxe explains why: “in the wily subtleties of this world he was simple and inexpert.”29 The words of his own translation were at work in his worldly simplicity, “concerninge maliciousnes be chyldre” (1 Corinthians 14:20, The Tyndale New Testament)
Phillips chose a day when Poyntz was away on business. He borrowed forty shillings from Tyndale, claiming to have lost his purse, and stationed the emperor’s officers by the door. Then he walked out with Tyndale toward dinner. Foxe tells what followed:
At the going forth of Pointz’s house, was a long narrow entry, so that two could not go in front. Master Tyndale would have put Philips before him, but Philips would in no wise, but put Master Tyndale before, for that he pretended to show great humanity. … Philips pointed with his finger over Master Tyndale’s head down to him, that the officers might see that it was he whom they should take. The officers afterwards told Pointz, when they had laid him in prison, that they pitied to see his simplicity. John FoxeActs and Monuments30
It was about May 21, 1535. Tyndale was taken to the castle of Vilvoorde, six miles north of Brussels. Poyntz, who worked to free him, was himself arrested and barely escaped with his life. Who paid Phillips has never been established.
Light in the Dark
Tyndale was held about sixteen months. From that time one document in his hand survives: a short letter in Latin, probably written in September 1535 and almost certainly addressed to the governor of the castle. He asks for a warmer cap and coat. He asks for a lamp in the evening, for it is wearisome sitting alone in the dark. And then:
But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency to be urgent with the commissary, that he will kindly permit me to have the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew dictionary, that I may pass the time in that study. … But if any other decision has been taken concerning me, to be carried out before winter, I will be patient, abiding the will of God, to the glory of the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ. William Tyndalefrom Vilvoorde, 153531
The Scriptures would be the true light in the dark.
We do not know whether he received any of it. A cold man in the dark, a year from the fire, asked for a lamp and his Hebrew so that he could steward the time and continue translating the Old Testament he had not yet finished giving to England.
His jailers noticed. He refused the advocate offered him and answered for himself, and “he had so preached to them who had him in charge … that they reported of him, that if he were not a good Christian man, they knew not whom they might take to be one.”32 Foxe adds that he converted his keeper, the keeper’s daughter, and others of the household. Even the procurator-general who prosecuted him said he was homo doctus, pius, et bonus, a learned, godly, and good man.
Lord, Open the King of England’s Eyes
Condemned in August 1536, Tyndale was degraded from the priesthood in a public ceremony: his hands scraped where they had been anointed, the bread and wine taken from him, his vestments stripped away one by one. Early in the morning, October 6, 1536, he was brought out to the place of execution at Vilvoorde.
Brought forth to the place of execution, he was tied to the stake, strangled by the hangman, and afterwards consumed with fire, at the town of Vilvorde, A.D. 1536; crying at the stake with a fervent zeal, and a loud voice, “Lord! open the king of England’s eyes.” John FoxeActs and Monuments33
Not a defense of himself. Not a curse on his betrayer. A prayer for the man who had hunted him, and through him, for a nation. Earlier, answering the charge that his translation was full of heresies, he had written to Frith: “I call God to record against the day we shall appear before our Lord Jesus, that I never altered one syllable of God’s Word against my conscience, nor would do this day, if all that is in earth, whether it be honour, pleasure, or riches, might be given me.”34
Not in Vain
Within a year of Tyndale’s death, Henry VIII had licensed an English Bible. Within two, he had ordered one set up in every parish church in the realm. Miles Coverdale published the first complete English Bible in 1535, on the Continent, while Tyndale lay in Vilvoorde. In 1537 came the Bible bearing the name Thomas Matthew, in truth John Rogers, Tyndale’s friend in Antwerp. Matthew’s Bible gave Tyndale’s New Testament and Pentateuch with trifling revision, together with Joshua to 2 Chronicles from his manuscripts, and it went into England under the king’s license. The Great Bible followed in 1539, resting heavily on Tyndale. His words were now read aloud, by royal command, in the churches of the land that had burned his book and hunted him to death.
And the plowboy came. In Chelmsford in 1538, poor men of the town bought a New Testament and sat reading it aloud on Sundays at the lower end of the parish church. A boy of fifteen named William Malden came among them. His father forbade it and told him he could get all the Bible he needed at Latin matins. So the boy taught himself to read, bought a New Testament with his father’s apprentice, hid it in his straw bed, and took a beating for it. That is what the vow at the Walsh table meant: not a slogan, but a fifteen-year-old with an English Testament in his mattress.
The line runs on. Daniell writes that the sages assembled by King James “took over Tyndale’s work. Nine-tenths of the Authorized Version’s New Testament is Tyndale’s. The same is true of the first half of the Old Testament.”35
Why We Keep This History
We do not venerate men. But we love, respect, and thank God for William Tyndale. We celebrate the God who gave Tyndale to us, and the Scriptures for which Tyndale gave his life that they could be in English. The sacred writings “are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 3:15). Tyndale did not translate to distribute information. He translated so that sinners would meet Christ.
Five hundred years on, the plowboy has his Bible. Tyndale offered his body to torture and death for a bare text in English. We have everything he asked for and more. The question this puts to us is not whether we admire the man who died for the book, but whether we open it. To know the facts about Tyndale is not enough. Strive to know the heart, the cause, the burden, the passion, the pain, and most importantly, the God of William Tyndale.
Kings opposed it, churchmen condemned it, authorities burned it, and Tyndale himself was silenced by martyrdom. The Scripture could not be silenced. When Scripture is unsilenced, reform results.
soli Deo gloria