When the Word Became English

ABSTRACT: William Tyndale’s New Testament remains significant not just because of its inherent achievement and impact when it was first published in the sixteenth century. His work of translating the New Testament into English continues to shape English Bible readers and translation efforts in three spheres: translation theory, matters of diction and style for English Bible translations, and Bible literacy in English-speaking lands. Five hundred years later, English-speaking Christians have abundant reason to thank God for Tyndale.

The English-speaking segment of the Christian church is in the midst of commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of its most epoch-making book. Only three copies of this book have survived. When the British Library purchased one of these copies from Bristol Baptist College in 1994, it declared the book to be “the most important printed book in the English language.”¹ That book is William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament, which marked the first time the Bible had been translated directly from its original language into modern English.

The importance of Tyndale’s New Testament resides not just in its inherent achievement and its impact in its own day. These are significant, but more relevant to us is the lesser-known story of the five-hundred-year influence of Tyndale’s New Testament after it ceased to be printed following Tyndale’s death. This legacy is the subject of the essay that follows. My goal is to paint a picture of what we owe to Tyndale’s New Testament today and how we came to receive these benefits.

Radical Commitment to God’s Word

Before we trace the influence of Tyndale’s New Testament over its five-hundred-year history, we need to know something about its parentage and birth. William Tyndale was a farm boy from Gloucestershire, England. He was probably born in 1494. The uncertainty of that date, coupled with a complete scarcity of verifiable information about his childhood, tells us that he came from an undistinguished background. Yet God endowed him with such an extraordinary linguistic ability that in his later years he spoke seven languages fluently in addition to his native English: Latin, Hebrew, Greek, German, Italian, Spanish, and French.

Of course, Tyndale did not master those languages without an education in them, but when we inquire into that education, we are in for a surprise. Although Tyndale spent a dozen years in the hallowed halls of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, nearly everything that he carried away of use in his eventual work of translation was the result of self-education, not the classroom. In fact, during his five years in Luther-friendly Cambridge, Tyndale spent his time as an independent scholar engaged in self-directed study instead of a degree program.

After his heady years at Oxford and Cambridge, Tyndale returned to his native region and served a two-year tenure as tutor to the sons of a prominent local family. It was here that he discovered and confirmed his life’s vocation as a translator of the Bible. The famous moment that codified Tyndale’s calling occurred when a Catholic priest said in his hearing that “we were better to be without God’s law than the pope’s.” Tyndale famously replied, “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.”² This is the first time we hear of Tyndale’s resolve to be a Bible translator, and it was the turning point of his life. As we will see, the plowboy statement is the most misunderstood and misrepresented sentence associated with Tyndale.

The story of Tyndale’s fugitive life of exile is well-known. Since it was a capital offense in England to own any part of the Bible in English, Tyndale saw that the only way he could pursue his vocation as Bible translator was to move to Germany. Even there his work was a risky venture. When the printing of Tyndale’s New Testament had reached Matthew 22, the printer’s shop was raided by Catholic sympathizers, and Tyndale barely escaped with his unpublished manuscript in hand. In 1526 the book that shaped our world was published in Germany and smuggled into England, where it was publicly burned by Catholic authorities and privately circulated throughout the land among the growing numbers of Reformation adherents.

Tyndale died a martyr’s death in 1536. He remains influential in our lives today because he was receptive and faithful to the calling of God on his life. In the rest of this essay, I explore three spheres of Tyndale’s five-hundred-year influence — on Bible translation theory, on the words and style of English Bible translations, and on Bible literacy in English-speaking lands. In all three spheres, Tyndale’s New Testament still speaks, even though its publication ceased with Tyndale’s death.

Tyndale’s Influence on Bible Translation Theory

Tyndale’s influence on the philosophy of Bible translation is a little-known aspect of Tyndale’s legacy.³ But this topic is important because every translation of the Bible has specific characteristics based on the philosophy of translation adopted by a translator or committee of translators, a fact hidden from most Bible readers to their detriment.⁴

Tyndale’s philosophy of translation set the compass for English Bible translation until the middle of the twentieth century, and even after that it has been accepted by half of the Bible-reading public. That legacy is as important as the words and style that Tyndale chose for his English translation because those words and style are dependent on his philosophy of translation. Another philosophy would have yielded different words and a different style from what are being praised in this commemorative year.

Thankfully, Tyndale left a remarkably complete (if succinct) statement of his philosophy of translation, which I will summarize. First, though, we need to clear the air of a grand misperception.

The Truth About the Plowboy

Earlier I noted the occasion on which Tyndale said that he hoped to be instrumental in ensuring that the whole cross section of English society would be familiar with the Bible, even a hypothetical plowboy. Tyndale made those comments in reply to a priest who had raised the issue of what authority deserves to be normative in the church’s belief and practice. Some would argue that Tyndale also had translation philosophy in mind — specifically, that he wanted to translate for a grade-school reading level. But what does Tyndale’s statement actually mean?

A preliminary point is that in Tyndale’s own writing we do not hear about his famous plowboy. Instead, Tyndale speaks consistently of “laypeople,” who represented the entire cross section of British society.⁵ More importantly, it is likely that Tyndale himself was not the author of the plowboy reference but was instead echoing a comment from the famous Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), who had deeply influenced Tyndale during his years of self-education at Cambridge University. In the preface to his edition of the Greek New Testament that Tyndale used as the basis of his translation, Erasmus wrote, “I would wish that all women, girls even, would read [the New Testament]. . . . I long that the husbandman should sing portions of them to himself as he follows the plough, that the weaver should hum them to the tune of his shuttle.”⁶

We should note that the context of this statement by Erasmus is the same as it was for Tyndale in his reply to the priest — not a theory of Bible translation but the question of authority for belief and the need for the Bible to reach all segments of society. Neither Erasmus nor Tyndale spoke of a target audience for Bible translation (a concept that did not surface until the rise of dynamic-equivalent translation in the middle of the twentieth century). Tyndale’s loyalty — and that of his successors for five hundred years — was not to a target audience with minimal linguistic ability but to the words that the writers of the Bible actually used, whether hard or easy to grasp.

In summary, Tyndale was not an early proponent of dynamic-equivalent translation aimed at a grade-school audience.

Tyndale’s Philosophy of Translation

The misinterpreted plowboy statement is so entrenched in popular thinking that it comes as a shock to learn that Tyndale was firmly committed to a literal theory of translation. He believed that the task of a translator is to find the English words that best match the original words of the Bible. If no English equivalent word existed for a particular biblical term, Tyndale sometimes invented one (repent and atonement, for example). Overall, Tyndale added some 1,700 words to the English language, the same number Shakespeare added at the end of the same century.

Tyndale himself made it clear that he endorsed literal translation. Writing to fellow English Reformer John Frith, who was imprisoned in the Tower of London awaiting martyrdom, Tyndale wrote, “I call God to record against the day we shall appear before our Lord Jesus to give a reckoning of our doing, that I never altered one syllable of God’s word against my conscience.”⁷ Not a single syllable: Tyndale the translator was committed to precise lexical correspondence between the original Greek and the English translation.

Nor is this the only place where Tyndale asserted this theory of translation. In his religious treatise The Obedience of a Christian Man, Tyndale wrote that “the manner of speaking” in the original texts of the Bible is so compatible with English that “in a thousand places thou needest not but to translate it into English word for word” in order to achieve effects of “grace and sweetness, sense and pure understanding.”⁸

One more crucial passage from Tyndale tells us even more. In the prologue to his 1534 revision of his 1526 New Testament, Tyndale offered the dictum that “in many places, me thinketh it better to put a declaration [explanation] in the margin, than to run too far from the text [of the original]. And in many places, where the text seemeth at the first chop hard to be understood, yet the circumstances before and after [i.e., the context], and often reading together, maketh it plain enough.”⁹

Tyndale here plants his flag firmly against the practice of importing explanatory commentary or interpretation into the biblical text that is being translated. He obviously thought it was a good thing, not a bad thing, for a reader to wrestle with the biblical text, even if at first glance it is difficult to understand. Tyndale’s goal was transparency to what the biblical authors wrote, not transparency to the immediate understanding of an English reader.

Where can we find the influence of Tyndale’s philosophy of translation five hundred years later? We find it in the contemporary translations that articulate and follow a literal philosophy of translation. Examples are the New King James Version, the English Standard Version (ESV), and the Updated American Standard Version. The preface to the ESV correctly claims to be not simply in the King James lineage but in the Tyndale–King James mainstream tradition of English Bible translation.

“The saying ‘no Tyndale, no Shakespeare’ is true.”

Conversely, dynamic-equivalent translations (for example, the New International Version, the New Living Translation, and the Good News Translation) have departed from Tyndale’s theory and practice of Bible translation. Their prefaces run counter to what Tyndale advocated, and it is important that we keep the record straight in this commemorative year.

Tyndale’s Influence on the English Bible

Tyndale not only articulated a long-standing translation philosophy; he also bequeathed words and style that have influenced the Bible-reading public for five hundred years. In the following, I examine both the nature of Tyndale’s actual words and style, and the means by which these have lived on for five hundred years to the present day.

The misunderstanding about Tyndale’s plowboy statement has led many astray regarding the style in which Tyndale chose to express the content of the New Testament in English. Probably the dominant and incorrect view of Tyndale’s style is that it is colloquial and deliberately scaled down to the linguistic level of a ten-year-old. There are two avenues by which to refute this error.

One refutation comes from the relationship between Tyndale’s New Testament of 1526 (along with its 1534 revision in which Tyndale introduced four thousand changes) and the King James Version of 1611. The King James translators incorporated 83 percent of Tyndale’s New Testament verbatim. The remainder they tweaked. We know before the fact, therefore, that whatever descriptors we use for the KJV are also accurate for Tyndale’s prevailing vocabulary and style.

What exactly do detractors say about the King James style? They stigmatize it as being stilted. They claim that the King James translators desecrated language upward. If that is the case, then Tyndale’s translation is subject to the same strictures. But the claims are false.

The second way to answer the question of Tyndale’s style is to look at his translation itself. When we do, we can see the untruth of the common claim that Tyndale reduced the language of the New Testament authors to monosyllables and short sentences. Because Tyndale was committed to reproducing what the biblical authors actually wrote, his English style is as varied as the style of the New Testament writers.¹⁰

We need to remember that Tyndale himself was the single greatest force in moving the English language from Middle English to Modern English. In his “Letter to the Reader” appended to his 1526 New Testament, Tyndale expressed the wish that “the rudeness of the work now at the first time” not “offend” his readers.¹¹ This is his acknowledgment of the deficient state of the English language as it was beginning its transition from Middle English to Modern English. Tyndale’s translation of the Bible and then its dissemination throughout English society were the primary forces that enabled this transition. The saying “no Tyndale, no Shakespeare” is true.

The most obvious stylistic trait of Tyndale’s New Testament is its clarity. Passages in Tyndale’s New Testament flow seamlessly and are easily grasped. This clarity makes the rhetorically embellished passages as easy to read as the simple style of narrative sections. The following passage serves as representative of Tyndale’s style:

Blessed be God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which hath blessed us with all manner of spiritual blessings in the heavenly things by Christ, according as he had chosen us in him through love, before the foundation of the world was laid, that we should be saints and without blame in his sight. (Ephesians 1:3–4, spelling and punctuation modernized by the author)

Is this eloquent? Yes, it is what experts in rhetoric call the high or exalted style. Is it easily grasped? Also yes. Tyndale wrote for the plowboy but not to him in the sense of simplifying what the New Testament authors actually wrote.

The reason the quoted passage seems familiar to most readers of this essay is that Tyndale’s style and many of his words have been passed on in unbroken continuity from 1526 to the present day. The medium of that transmission was the King James Version. Once Tyndale had set the wheels of English Bible translation in motion, a succession of sixteenth-century English translations kept adding to the joint project of moving progressively toward the culminating King James Version. That translation, in turn, was synonymous with what the English-speaking world meant by “the Bible” for the next four hundred years. Through the centuries, readers of the English Bible have been reading Tyndale’s New Testament without knowing it.

Does Tyndale’s New Testament still speak in the words of the Bible you use? The answer depends on what translation you read. If you use a translation in the tradition of literal translation, the answer is yes. If you use a translation produced by translators who depart from the King James tradition, the answer is no.

Tyndale’s Influence on Bible Literacy

The most comprehensive influence of Tyndale’s New Testament over the past five hundred years is simply the fact that the English-speaking world has been able to read the Bible in its own language. We can credit Tyndale with breaking down the wall that had prevented people from access to a vernacular Bible in English. To understand the nature of this liberation, we need to know the following story of suppression, which today seems unbelievable.

“Through the centuries, readers of the English Bible have been reading Tyndale’s New Testament without knowing it.”

In 1408, church and government officials established an edict known as the Constitutions of Oxford. It prohibited translating any part of the Bible into English and teaching its content without permission from the church.¹² The famous case of the Coventry martyrs (as recorded in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs) illustrates how completely this edict was followed in England until the publication of Tyndale’s New Testament. During the very years that Tyndale was doing his translation work, a handful of parents were condemned and burned in Coventry for teaching their children the Lord’s Prayer and Ten Commandments in English.

On that occasion, a Mistress Smith momentarily escaped execution for lack of evidence, but as she was being escorted home from the site of execution by a summoner, the latter heard a rustling of paper in her sleeve. An inquiry into the source of the noise disclosed a copy of the forbidden Lord’s Prayer and Ten Commandments, so Mistress Smith was promptly led back to the place of execution and burned.¹³

It was Tyndale’s New Testament that ended this tyranny. Opening the door to distribution of the English Bible was Tyndale’s greatest legacy, but of course it required everything that we have noted about Tyndale’s 1526 New Testament to effect the change. Tyndale met all the requirements for this achievement. He subjected himself to a fugitive life on the European continent because he could not translate the Bible in his native land. There he laid down his life for the venture.

Not just any translation would have achieved the permanent revolution that Tyndale’s New Testament initiated. The effectiveness of an English Bible translation depends on the quality of its words and style, as well as the degree to which it matches what the biblical writers wrote. All that we have noted about the greatness of Tyndale’s New Testament gave the English Bible the jump start that ensured its success to the present day.

Read with Greediness

An irony of Tyndale’s life is that if he had been able to escape martyrdom for just two more years, he might have returned to England a hero. In 1538 King Henry VIII mandated that a copy of the English Bible be made available for people to read “in some convenient place” in every parish church in England. The most endearing picture of the eagerness with which the English Bible was embraced in the years of its early dissemination in England comes from a historian of the era named John Strype:

It was wonderful to see with what joy the book of God was received . . . all England over, among all the . . . common people; and with what greediness God’s word was read, and what resort to places where the reading of it was. Everybody that could, bought the book. . . . And even little boys flocked among the rest to hear portions of the Holy Scriptures read.¹⁴

It is fitting that we honor William Tyndale’s life and achievement in his own day, and also the influence of his translation work through five centuries. But that belongs to the past. The more important issue is the use we make of Tyndale’s legacy in our own lives today. Because of William Tyndale, we too can flock to the words of life and read them with greediness.