William Tyndale’s Gift to the World

Father, make us willing to join Jesus and William Tyndale on the road of sacrifice, that the face of Christ might be clear for all the world to see. In Jesus’s name I pray, amen.

The road to sacrifice in the life of William Tyndale led to the first ever translation into English of the Greek New Testament. It cost him his life. That was 1526, five hundred years ago this year, when he finished the New Testament. Before that time, the Bible for ordinary people in England was virtually unavailable unless you could read Latin.

John Wycliffe, 140 years earlier with his friends, translated the Bible into English from the Latin Vulgate, which had been used for a thousand years. There was no printed Greek Testament available — that was first published in 1516. And he had no printing press available. So, the only English Bibles available in the fourteenth century were those rare, handwritten copies from the Latin Vulgate.

But you were taking your life in your hands to possess or read or quote the English Bible. It is almost incomprehensible to us how viciously opposed the Roman Catholic Church was to the translation of the Scriptures into English. Laws were put in place that meant you could be burned alive for simply reading the Bible in English.

The dramatist John Bale (born 1495) “as a boy of eleven watched the burning of a young man in Norwich for possessing the Lord’s Prayer in English. . . . John Foxe records . . . seven Lollards [the followers of John Wycliffe] burned at Coventry in 1519 for teaching their children the Lord’s Prayer in English.”¹

Tyndale’s Enemy

Thomas More (famous for the movie A Man for All Seasons) was the Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII. He was thoroughly Roman Catholic and radically anti-Reformation, anti-Luther, and anti-Tyndale. More had a “near-rabid hatred” for Tyndale and published nearly three quarters of a million words against him.²

Tyndale’s closest friend, John Frith, was arrested in London, tried by Thomas More, and burned alive July 4, 1531, at the age of 28. John Tewkesbury was converted by reading Tyndale’s defense of justification by faith alone. He was arrested, whipped in Thomas More’s garden, had his brow squeezed with small ropes until blood came out of his eyes, and then was sent to the Tower of London, where he was racked till he was lame. Finally, they burned him alive. Thomas More “rejoiced that his victim was now in hell, where Tyndale ‘is like to find him when they come together.’”³

Why? Why this extraordinary hostility against translating the New Testament into English, especially from Thomas More, who vilified Tyndale repeatedly in his denunciation of the Reformers he burned? There were layers of arguments. One layer was this: If the Bible is in English, then each man will become his own interpreter, and many will go astray into heresy and be condemned. So, to save their eternal souls, we will burn people at the stake who translate the Bible or teach the doctrine of the Reformation.

“You were taking your life in your hands to possess or read or quote the English Bible.”

But there were deeper reasons why the Roman Church opposed the English Bible. Thomas More’s criticism of Tyndale boils down mainly to the way Tyndale translated five words. He translated presbuteros as elder instead of priest. He translated ekklēsia as congregation instead of church. He translated metanoeō as repent instead of do penance. He translated exomologeō as acknowledge or admit instead of confess. And he translated agapē as love rather than charity.

David Daniell comments, “He cannot possibly have been unaware that those words in particular undercut the entire sacramental structure of the thousand-year church throughout Europe, Asia and North Africa.”⁴ And with the doctrinal undermining of these ecclesiastical pillars of priesthood and penance and confession, the pervasive power and control of the church collapsed. England would not be a Catholic nation. The Reformed faith would flourish there in due time because of the English Bible, because of Tyndale, because Reformation doctrine (especially justification by faith alone) and Bible translation were inseparable.

Tyndale’s Work

That’s the volatile backdrop against which William Tyndale lived his short life and did his amazing work. What did he do? He had been a Roman Catholic priest, but as he read the newly published Greek New Testament, he was radically converted to the truth of justification by grace alone through faith alone on the basis of Christ alone for the glory of God alone based on the infallible Scriptures alone.

Now what? What would he do? He would sing one note for the rest of his short Christian life. In 1524, he escaped from England and went to the continent, and there he would do all of his translation work, and there he would die. He never went home again.

Thomas Cromwell, the king’s adviser, sent an emissary to try to persuade Tyndale to come home. In a letter to Cromwell on June 19, 1531, the emissary wrote, “I find him always singing one note.”⁵ That one note was this: Will the king give his official endorsement to a vernacular Bible for all his English subjects? If not, Tyndale will not come. If so, Tyndale will give himself up to the king and never write another book.

This was his driving passion: to see the Bible translated from the Greek and Hebrew into ordinary English available for every person in England to read. John Foxe tells the story that, while Tyndale was still in England, one day an exasperated Catholic scholar at dinner with Tyndale said, “We were better be without God’s law than the Pope’s.” In response to that, Tyndale spoke his famous words: “I defy the Pope and all his laws. . . . If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow, shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.”⁶

By 1526, Tyndale finished the English translation of the Greek New Testament in Germany, and began to smuggle it into England in bales of cloth. By October of 1526, the book had been banned in London, but the print run was at least three thousand, and the books were getting to the people.

In 1534, Tyndale published a revised New Testament, having learned Hebrew in the meantime (probably in Germany), which helped him understand the Old and New Testament connections better. David Daniell calls this 1534 New Testament “the glory of his life’s work.”⁷ If Tyndale was “always singing one note,” this was the crescendo of the song of his life: the finished and refined New Testament in English.

Tyndale’s Impact

For the first time ever in history, the Greek New Testament was translated into English. And for the first time ever, the New Testament in English was available in a printed form. Before he was martyred in 1536, Tyndale had translated into clear, common English not only the New Testament but also the Pentateuch, Joshua to 2 Chronicles, and Jonah.

All this material became the basis of the Great Bible issued by Miles Coverdale in England in 1539, and the basis for the Geneva Bible published in 1557 — “the Bible of the nation,” which sold over a million copies between 1560 and 1640.⁸

But we don’t get a clear sense of the greatness of what Tyndale died for without some comparisons. We think of the dominant 1611 King James Version as giving us the pervasive language of the English Bible. But David Daniell clarifies the situation:

William Tyndale gave us our English Bible. The sages assembled by King James to prepare the Authorized Version of 1611, so often praised for unlikely corporate inspiration, 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, which was as far as he was able to get before he was executed outside Brussels in 1536.⁹

One of the things that makes that significant for us is that there is a direct lineage of translations from Tyndale to the King James Version, to the English Revised Version (1885), to the American Standard Version (1901), to the Revised Standard Version (1952), to the English Standard Version (2001). This year marks the 25th anniversary of the ESV, which many of us love. And whom do we have to thank? Mainly, William Tyndale.

Tyndale’s Words

It is simply astonishing how many of Tyndale’s five-hundred-year-old words we still read and use in daily life. Here is a sampling of English phrases we owe to Tyndale.

• “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3).
• “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9).
• “The LORD bless thee, and keep thee: The LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: The LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace” (Numbers 6:24–26 KJV).
• “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).
• “There were . . . shepherds abiding in the field” (Luke 2:8 KJV).
• “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4 KJV).
• “Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name” (Matthew 6:9 KJV).
• “The signs of the times” (Matthew 16:3).
• “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41).
• “He went out and wept bitterly” (Matthew 26:75). Those two words, “wept bitterly,” are still used by almost all modern translations (NIV, NASB, ESV, NKJV). It has not been improved upon for five hundred years, in spite of weak efforts like one recent translation, “cried hard.” Unlike that phrase, Daniell says, “the rhythm of his two words carries the experience.”¹⁰
• “A law unto themselves” (Romans 2:14 KJV).
• “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
• “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels” (1 Corinthians 13:1 KJV).
• “Fight the good fight” (1 Timothy 6:12).

“The list of such near-proverbial phrases is endless.”¹¹ Five hundred years after his great work, “newspaper headlines still quote Tyndale, though unknowingly, and he has reached more people than even Shakespeare.”¹²

This was not merely a literary phenomenon; it was a spiritual explosion. Tyndale’s Bible and his writings were the kindling that set the Reformation on fire in England.

Tyndale’s Treasure

How did that happen? I’ll mention two things: one natural and one supernatural. God always uses natural forces and supernatural forces. Tyndale was educated in an atmosphere of conscious craftsmanship. His giftedness with language did not come out of nowhere. He was educated at Oxford. And one of the texts being used in those days was Erasmus’s book On the Copiousness of Words. The aim was to train students in the infinite possibilities of varied verbal expression. One of the exercises was to give “no fewer than one hundred fifty ways of saying ‘Your letter has delighted me very much.’”¹³ It’s not surprising that this is the kind of educational world that gave rise to William Shakespeare (who was born in 1564) and William Tyndale.

But there was another kind of force at work in the making of William Tyndale. God raised him from spiritual death, took away his spiritually blind eyes, revealed to him the true condition of the human heart, and opened his eyes to see the glory of salvation by grace through faith.

“What drove Tyndale was not a desire to reveal his literary skills but a desire to reveal the treasure of the gospel.”

What drove Tyndale was not a desire to reveal his literary skills but a desire to reveal the treasure of the gospel. This is what lay hidden behind the Latin language of the Vulgate and the Roman system of penance and merit. The Bible must be translated for the sake of the liberating, life-giving gospel. Bible translation and Bible truth were inseparable for Tyndale, and in the end it was the truth — especially the truth of justification by faith — that ignited Britain with Reformed fire and brought the death sentence to this Bible translator.

Tyndale’s Road of Sacrifice

The road of sacrifice was incredibly painful. The price Tyndale paid that we might have the Bible in English was enormous. He fled his homeland in 1524 and was killed in 1536. He gives us some glimpse of those twelve years as a fugitive in Germany and the Netherlands.

My pains . . . my poverty . . . my exile out of mine natural country, and bitter absence from my friends . . . my hunger, my thirst, my cold, the great danger wherewith I am everywhere encompassed, and finally . . . innumerable other hard and sharp fightings which I endure.¹⁴

These sufferings entered their last chapter when Tyndale was betrayed by his friend Henry Phillips and was arrested and taken to prison near Brussels. He was there for eighteen months. Listen to one of his last letters from prison in September 1535. It was addressed to an unnamed officer of the castle.

I beg your lordship . . . to send me . . . a warmer cap; for I suffer greatly from cold in the head, and am afflicted by a perpetual catarrh, which is much increased in this cell; a warmer coat also, for this which I have is very thin; a piece of cloth too to patch my leggings. . . . I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening; it is indeed wearisome sitting alone in the dark. But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency to . . . 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.¹⁵

We don’t know if his requests were granted, but a year later he was formally condemned as a heretic, and in early October 1536 he was tied to the stake, strangled by the executioner, and then afterward consumed in the fire. His last words were “Lord! open the King of England’s eyes!”¹⁶ He was 42 years old, never married and never buried.

Tyndale’s One Note

In just a moment, we’re going to sing a beautiful hymn, and like all hymns it is rooted in the book Jesus wrote and Tyndale translated. The third verse says,

Sometimes they strew His way,
and His sweet praises sing;
resounding all the day
hosannas to their King.
Then “Crucify!” is all their breath,
and for His death they thirst and cry.

Henry VIII and Thomas More thirsted and cried for the death of William Tyndale, the way the mobs thirsted and cried for the death of Jesus. Both Jesus and Tyndale died willingly when they could have escaped. Jesus died to give us absolutely everything that we as undeserving sinners enjoy now and for eternity. Tyndale died to give us the Bible.

Do you love the word of God like that? If so, you should sing. Perhaps it should be the one note of your life.