William Tyndale
gigatos | January 30, 2022
Summary
William Tyndale (born between 1494 and 1536 in the county of Gloucestershire, England) was an English Protestant who made the first translation of the Bible into English from the Hebrew and Greek texts. That translation was the first to use Jehovah as the name of God, preferred by the English Protestant Reformers; it was the first Bible printed in the English language and the first of the new English Bibles of the Protestant Reformation. It was considered a direct challenge to the hegemony of both the Catholic Church and the laws of England that maintained the Church”s position. In 1530, Tyndale also wrote The Practyse of Prelates, opposing the annulment of Henry VIII”s marriage because it contravened Scripture.
Reuchlin”s Hebrew grammar was published in 1506. Tyndale worked at a time when Greek was available to the European scholarly community for the first time in centuries. Erasmus of Rotterdam compiled and edited the Greek Scriptures. It was made possible by the capture of Constantinople in 1453 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks; many Greeks escaped to the West bringing with them the classical Greek texts that served to fuel the Renaissance.
A copy of Tyndale”s The Obedience of a Christian Man fell into the hands of Henry VIII, and provided the king with the grounds for splitting the Church of England from the Catholic Church (1534). In 1535, Tyndale was arrested and imprisoned in the castle of Vilvoorde, outside Brussels, for more than a year. In 1536, he was convicted of translating the Bible, which the Church of England at the time did not want, and executed by strangulation, after which his body was burned at the stake. His last prayer was that the eyes of the king of England be opened; this seemed to find fulfillment only two years later with the authorization of Henry VIII”s Great Bible. For the Church of England, which was largely the work of Tyndale, sections were missing, supplemented by translations by Miles Coverdale. The Tyndale Bible, as it was known, continued to play a key role in spreading Reformation ideas throughout the English-speaking world and, eventually, the British Empire.
A BBC poll in 2002 ranked Tyndale 26th of the 100 greatest Britons in history.
He studied at Oxford, the same university where John Wycliffe had been a little more than 120 years earlier. Possibly Tyndale”s ideals were influenced by Wycliffe. In 1515 he graduated as a “master of arts” (bachelor of arts) from Oxford University and possibly did his further studies at Cambridge University. After graduating, he moved to Cambridge where he possibly met Erasmus of Rotterdam, who was completing his compilation of the Novum Instrumentum Omne (the New Testament in Greek). In addition to English as his mother tongue, in the course of his life Tyndale learned French, Greek, Hebrew, German, Italian, Latin and Spanish.
John Foxe, in his book Christian Martyrs, tells how the study of this New Testament transformed his life. Exhorting some priests on the importance of studying the Bible, a priest told him: “It would be better to be without the law of God than without the law of the pope”. Frustrated Tyndale replied: “I defy the pope and all his laws; and if God permits me, I will one day make it possible for the man who drives the plow in England to know more of the Scriptures than the pope himself”.
Tyndale set out to translate the New Testament into the English of the common people. For this he relied on Erasmus” Greek New Testament. He soon realized that his project was not possible in England at the time. In 1521, King Henry VIII had published a vigorous treatise defending the Catholic pope and lambasting the Protestant Luther (just for the question of the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, King Henry VIII would break with Rome in 1534, creating the new Church of England). Tyndale went to the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tonstal, to be allowed to work on the translation in the bishop”s palace itself. But the bishop told him that there was no place for such a thing in his palace. With sadness Tyndale said: “I perceived that not only in the Bishop of London”s palace, but in all England there was no place to try to translate the Scriptures”.
In 1521 he was ordained a Catholic priest, working as a preceptor to the children of Sir John Walsh, until 1523.
Determined to undertake the translation of the Bible into English, he left England and moved to Cologne, in the German Empire. He worked so diligently that in 1524 he presented his manuscript of the New Testament to the printer in Cologne. Secretly they began to make the plates to print the book. But a priest, Cochlaeus, heard a rumor that they were about to print the New Testament. Cochlaeus alerted the authorities who soon confiscated the plates before they could print them. Tyndale collected the unconfiscated plates and fled to Worms and there in 1526 managed to print 3000 copies of the New Testament.
Tyndale proceeded to send his books to England clandestinely, in boxes, barrels, bundles of clothes, sacks of flour, and in any other way he could. In May 1526 the first copies arrived in England. A few months later it was distributed in many places. Cochlaeus had warned the English clergy and when they realized that the books were arriving, they put guards at all the ports to confiscate them before they entered the country. Many were discovered and burned in a solemn ceremony at St Paul”s Cross in London. But despite these measures, many found their way into the hands of the people. Seeing that this could not be prevented, Cuthbert Tonstal, the Bishop of London, paid a merchant friend of Tyndale”s to buy the rest of the books. These were destroyed but the money received from the sales helped Tyndale to continue printing. From 1527 to 1530 he was able to print 18,000 copies. Today only two copies are known to exist.
Finally, in May 1535, Tyndale was seized by his enemies who proceeded to imprison him in the castle of Vilvoorde, near Antwerp, Belgium. From there he wrote to the governor:
If I have to remain here during the winter, may he do me the favor of asking the procurator if he would be so kind as to send me, from my goods which he has in his possession, a warmer cap, because I suffer extremely and constantly from a cold, which is worsened by the conditions of this cell. Also a warmer coat, because the one I have is very thin, also a piece of cloth to mend my leggings; my shirts are also worn out.
On October 6, 1536, they took him out of his cell to execute him. They tied him to a stake. First they strangled him and then burned his body.
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Stage in England
In Tyndale”s time, the (vulgar) people did not have higher education, studies were conducted in Latin (the language of the Church and of the Scriptures) and, with regard to the latter, the matter was more delicate (it was forbidden to translate and read the Bible in the vernacular, unless there was permission from the episcopate) according to the Constitutions of Oxford.
There were precedents in the sense that, for daring to contravene this “law”, a large number of Lollards ended up at the stake for reading and distributing John Wickliffe”s Bible (an English version of the Vulgate).
In addition, the airs coming from continental Europe (Luther”s reforming work) caused great uneasiness in the Catholic Church of England.
William Tyndale took a letter of introduction to Bishop Tunstall (he knew he was learned and had supported Erasmus). However, to his surprise, neither the letter of introduction, nor the written request for an interview, met with a response.
Tyndale was known for his criticism against the ignorance and fanaticism of the ecclesiastics. It was also known of a confrontation he had with an ecclesiastical hierarch, he even had to appear before the administrator of the diocese of Worcester for false accusations of heresy. Possibly all this made Bishop Cuthert Tunstall refuse to receive Tyndale.
It was not long before Tyndale saw the need to leave England if he was to achieve his goal: ”to translate the New Testament into English. In 1521 he left the island, never to return.
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Stage in continental Europe
William Tyndale found asylum in Germany (the place is unknown, although indications point to Hamburg). With the economic help of Monmouth, a merchant friend of his, he was able to afford the printing of the Greek Scriptures, entrusting this work to Quentall, of Cologne. An enemy named Dobneck – known by Cochlaeus – aware of the matter, informed a friend of King Henry VIII of what Tyndale intended to do. Steps were immediately taken to prohibit Quentall”s printing. Tyndale and his assistant William Roye escaped for their lives, resuming the printing work again in Worms (Germany), where the English translation of the New Testament was finally completed and achieved.
Once the entire text of the New Testament had been translated and printed, he endeavored to introduce it into England, which was accomplished by smuggling in goods on ships bound for the island. Shipments that were intercepted went directly to the stake (ecclesiastical agents were determined to prevent the entry of Tyndale”s version). On February 11, 1526, Cardinal Wolsey, accompanied by bishops and provosts, gathered near St. Paul”s Cathedral in London, to see books and publications, including copies of Tyndale”s New Testament, burned in clear defiance of anything that opposed the Church. Tyndale produced new editions of his version, which were systematically confiscated and burned by the clergy.
Between 1526 and 1528 he went to Antwerp, staying with his friend and benefactor Thomas Poyntz, where he was safe for a while from the intrigues of Cardinal Wolsey. It would not last long, because a certain Henry Phillips (English) managed to gain the confidence of Tyndale and betrayed him in 1535 by denouncing him to the imperial power and was arrested and imprisoned in the castle of Vilvoorde, where he remained imprisoned for 16 months).
It is believed that some 6000 copies of the first edition of Tyndale”s New Testament were published. Today, only two copies of this first edition of Tyndale”s translation remain: one complete (the other, missing 71 pages, is in the library of St. Paul”s Cathedral (no one knows how it got there).
The commission that judged William Tyndale was composed of three theologians from the Catholic University of Louvain, where Henry Phillips (who had betrayed him) had studied, three canons of Louvain and three bishops, as well as other dignitaries.
He was condemned for heresy and suspended from the Catholic priesthood. He was executed by strangulation and then burned in public on October 6, 1536.
The term “Tyndale”s Bible” is not strictly correct, because Tyndale never published a complete Bible. The task was completed by Miles Coverdale, who supplemented Tyndale”s translations with his own to produce the first complete printed Bible in English in 1535. Before his execution, Tyndale had only finished translating the entire New Testament and about half of the Old Testament. Of the latter, the Pentateuch, Jonah, and a revised version of the book of Genesis were published during his lifetime. His other Old Testament works were first used in the creation of the “Matthew Bible”. And he also had a major influence on every major English translation of the Bible that followed.
Unlike the Vulgate, Tyndale”s version of the original Greek text displayed accessible and clarifying language in English.
Tyndale”s translation was a challenge in an era of religious fanaticism.
The legacy of his English New Testament was such that it was predominant in the Bishops” Bible and the King James Bible.
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What some authors say about Tyndale
As a translator, Tyndale was outstanding for his good judgment. Although he worked under very adverse conditions – on the frontiers of what was known of biblical languages in his time – he produced translations that set the model for all English translators who followed him.
Tyndale”s honesty, sincerity, and scrupulous integrity, his straightforward directness, his magical phraseological simplicity, his modest music, have given his text an authority which has prevailed in all subsequent versions. Nine Tenths of the Authorized New Testament is still Tyndale”s finest work.
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