9

William Tyndale’s Bible

The prediction of the Lollards, that Wycliffe’s Bible would live on, was not a vain prophecy. Early in the reign of Henry VIII, the new king was still promising the Pope that he would burn any “untrue translations.” By these he meant Wycliffe’s Bible which, despite all the efforts of the court and the Church, was still relentlessly circulating in the land in hand-copied editions.

Henry VIII set his powerful and efficient Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, to hunt down heretical books. Wolsey, aware that Martin Luther had shaken the Roman Catholic Church in 1517 with the demands he had nailed on the church door at Wittenberg, and as anxious as his master to please the Pope, instituted a nationwide search. On May 12, 1521, a bonfire of confiscated heretical works was made outside the original St. Paul’s Cathedral. The flames, it was said, burned for two days. The great book-burning was clearly a foretaste of what could and would happen to those who insisted on challenging the Pope’s authority.

This was the year in which William Tyndale began his public preaching on St. Austen’s Green and set out on the path which was to bring about a radical change both in the English language and in English society.

It is not always easy fully to comprehend or even imagine what was at stake. It was a great power battle. The reach of the Roman Catholic Church across many countries, states, principalities and peoples was unique. It was wealthy and a sought-after ally in war. It demanded obedience through its monopoly of the one true faith. Its parish priests covered almost every acre of ground, heard confessions, had the power to absolve sins, enforced attendance at church, the paying of Church taxes and conformity with the Church’s rulings on all matters of public and of private morality; even sex was a Church matter. Its great cathedrals, splendid artefacts, dazzling robes, processions and festivals provided a backdrop of glamour and excitement to what was very often a bleak and meagre existence. Above all, and key, the Church had unique access to God and so to eternal life. Only through the Roman Catholic Church could anyone contact God and have any chance of resurrection.

Wycliffe, Luther and Tyndale challenged that. They wanted ordinary people to have direct access to God, and a Bible in the language of the people was the way to make that happen. The battle over language became outright rebellion against the Roman Catholic Church as the gatekeeper to God, the claim to be His sole representative on earth, whose earthly laws all Christians must obey every bit as much as they obeyed the laws of heaven. This had proved intolerable to different groups over the centuries and now the river of protest was swelling. The rebellion was led by deeply religious men and women. They too believed in the virgin birth, in the divinity of Christ, above all in the Resurrection. They were light years away from atheism or even agnosticism. They wanted the souls of the people to be saved but not through orders and sermons handed down from a central Latinate control in Rome for whose authority they found no evidence in the Bible. And to the rebels, the fate of the soul was the most vital matter in life: it was worth dying for.

Centuries later there would be those who would feel much the same about liberty, but even they could not have been more zealous, even fanatical, more totally convinced of the rightness of their cause as men such as William Tyndale were of theirs. After all, Tyndale was doing no less than serve the one true God, the maker of all things, the Creator, the Almighty, the giver and taker of life, the judge of all men and women, the harvester of the good, the slayer of evil. There could be no greater service in life than to do His work.

To Tyndale, English was, in effect, the way in which God could best reach the people of that language and the way in which they could best reach Him. The fight for the English Bible was a battle for salvation through the scriptures. To a priest who challenged him, Tyndale replied, “Ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth a plough to know more of the scriptures than thou dost.”

Like Wycliffe, Tyndale was an Oxford classical scholar and like Wycliffe he wholly contradicts the idea that such a scholar, who was also, as Tyndale was, an ordained priest, was fated to be a mild, placeseeking conformist. Tyndale took risks and lived a life comparable to that of any twentieth-century revolutionary “hero,” and met an end worse than most of them.

It is interesting that the large household in Gloucestershire in which he was tutor was owned by a wealthy family, a new breed of successful wool merchants who called themselves “Christian Brethren,” the polite and politically safer name for Lollards. They built a private chapel in their garden dedicated to St. Adeline, the patron saint of weavers, and they appear to have been happy secretly to fund Tyndale’s plans. This quality of support so early in his life must have given Tyndale any extra encouragement he might have needed.

But like Wycliffe, he appears to have been a man totally driven by an idea. In 1524, at the age of thirty, William Tyndale left England to pursue his work outside the repressive spy-state set up by Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey. He would never return.

He met Erasmus and later Luther, the two key men in the movement towards what became Protestantism. He settled in Cologne and began single-handedly to translate the New Testament not from Latin but from the original Greek and Hebrew. It was this, no doubt, coupled with Tyndale’s genius for language, which made his translations so telling and memorable.

Two years later, six thousand copies had been printed abroad — evidence of the substantial nature of the patronage Tyndale must have received from the wool merchants of Gloucestershire, and of the speed and efficiency of print. The new Bibles were packed and sent to the coast ready to be smuggled into England. Yet again English comes to England from across the sea, this time written English, some of the most sublime ever put on paper.

But Henry VIII and Wolsey’s spies informed them of this invasion. It now seems quite extraordinary, but the whole country was put on alert. In order to prevent the word of God in English landing in the land of the English, naval ships patrolled the coastal waters, boats were stopped and searched, men were arrested and a great many Bibles were intercepted. The action taken was indistinguishable from being on a war footing, and to Henry VIII and Wolsey it was just that. Latin was the only word of God allowed by the state and now the state came out in full armed force to defend its most loyal ally, the Church.

At first tens and then hundreds got through the lines. The Bishop of London then tried another tack: he sought to buy the entire print run through an intermediary.

“O he will burn them,” Tyndale is supposed to have said when he heard of this. “I am the gladder,” he went on, “for these two benefits will 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.” And that is what happened. The bishop bought and burned the books and Tyndale used the money to rework, prepare and print a better version, as it were at the Church’s expense.

Tyndale’s aim was simple: “I had perceived by experience,” he wrote, “that it was impossible to stabilise lay people in any truth unless the scripture were to be plainly set before their eyes in their mother tongue so that they might see the process, order and meaning of the text.” He did this in a plain, conversational style as in this passage from Genesis:

But the serpent was sotyller [subtler] than all the beastes of the felde which ye Lorde God had made and sayd vnto the woman, Ay syr [sure] God hath sayd ye shall not eate of all maner trees in the garden. And the woman sayd vnto the serpent, of the frute of the trees in the garden we may eate, but of the frute of the tree that is in the myddes of the garden (sayd God) se that we eate not, and se that ye touch it not; lest ye dye. Then sayd the serpent vnto the woman: tush ye shall not dye.

But the glory of Tyndale is in his soaring poetic which is yet always earthed, you feel, in the truth as in the Beatitudes from the Gospel According to St. Matthew:

Blessed are the povre in sprete: for theirs is the kyngdome off heven.
Blessed are they that morne: for they shalbe comforted.
Blessed are the meke: for they shall inherit the erth.
Blessed are they which honger and thurst for rightewesnes:
for they shalbe filled.
Blessed are the mercifull: for they shall obteyne mercy.
Blessed are the pure in herte: for they shall se God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shalbe called
the chyldren of God.
Blessed are they which suffre persecucion for rightwenes sake:
for theirs ys the kyngdome off heven.
Blessed are ye when men shall reuyle you and persecute you and shall
falsly say all manner of yvell saynges against you ffor my sake.
Reioyce and be glad for greate is youre rewarde in heven. For so
persecuted they the prophets which were before youre dayes.
Ye are the salt of the erthe.

It is impossible to over-praise the quality of Tyndale’s writing. Its rhythmical beauty, its simplicity of phrase, its crystal clarity have penetrated deep into the bedrock of English today wherever it is spoken. Tyndale’s words and phrases influenced between sixty and eighty percent of the King James Bible of 1611 and in that second life his words and phrases circled the globe.

We use them still: “scapegoat,” “let there be light,” “the powers that be,” “my brother’s keeper,” “filthy lucre,” “fight the good fight,” “sick unto death,” “flowing with milk and honey,” “the apple of his eye,” “a man after his own heart,” “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” “signs of the times,” “ye of little faith,” “eat, drink and be merry,” “broken-hearted,” “clear-eyed.” And hundreds more: “fisherman,” “landlady,” “sea-shore,” “stumbling-block,” “taskmaster,” “two-edged,” “viper,” “zealous” and even “Jehovah” and “Passover” come into English through Tyndale. “Beautiful,” a word which had meant only human beauty, was greatly widened by Tyndale, as were many others.

It is too fanciful to believe that the words themselves were so powerful and illuminating that Henry VIII and Wolsey redoubled their efforts to kill off the man and all his works, but these English words do have an instant memorability and authority that must have shaken the Latinate establishment. Tyndale was not only bringing the word of God to the people, he was also, within that process, bringing in words which carried ideas, described feelings, gave voice to emotions, expanded the way in which we could describe how we lived. Words which tell us about the inner nature of our condition; words which, as in the beatitudes, express as never before or since the great loving dream of a moral life which applies to everyone and challenges every ruling description of society from the beginning until today. Writer after writer, in the UK, in the USA, in Australia, on the Indian subcontinent, in Canada, in Africa and the Caribbean, has absorbed Tyndale’s rhythms, appropriated and played with his words and been enriched by the opportunities his language provided, the vocabulary for thought.

Before long England was ablaze for Tyndale’s Bible, this time on fire to read it. Thousands of copies were smuggled in. In Tyndale’s own happy phrase, “the noise of the new Bible echoed throughout the country.” Produced in a small pocket-sized edition that was easily concealed, it passed through cities and universities into the hands of even the humblest men and women. The authorities, especially Sir Thomas More, still railed at him for “putting the fire of scripture into the language of ploughboys” but the damage was done. The English now had their Bible, legal or not. Eighteen thousand were printed: six thousand got through.

Tyndale spent his life on the run. Constantly hounded by Catholic spies, he moved secretly around the Protestant-sympathising lands of northern Europe. In 1529, off the coast of Holland, his ship was driven on to the rocks and the entire manuscript of his new translation of the Old Testament was lost. Yet in the following year he is printing it in Antwerp.

In the begynnynge God created heven and erth.
The erth was voyde and emptie and darcknesse was vpon the
depe and the spirite of God moved vpon the water.
Than God sayd: let there be lyghte and there was lyghte.

It was in Antwerp that Tyndale became friendly with two Englishmen. They were hired assassins. They trapped him and took him to Vilvorde Castle, where he was imprisoned in the dungeon. They had got their man and though the Bible was out and circumstances in the politics of the Church were changing dramatically, the vengeance of Henry VIII would not be denied.

In his last letter, Tyndale asked that he might have “a warmer cap, for I suffer greatly from the cold . . . a warmer coat also for what I have is very thin; a piece of cloth with which to patch my leggings. And I ask to have a lamp in the evening, for it is wearisome to sit alone in the dark. But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency that the commissary will kindly permit me to have my Hebrew Bible, grammar and dictionary, that I may continue with my work.”

And continue, for a short while, he did, bringing us phrases, poignantly, heart-breakingly, like “a prophet has no honour in his own country,” “a stranger in a strange land,” “a law unto themselves,” “we live and move and have our being” and “let my people go,” and there would have been yet more, but in April 1536 Tyndale was found guilty of heresy by a court in the Netherlands. The way they chose to kill him was to strangle him, to cut him off at the voice, which they did on 6 October 1536.

Finally this sublime master of language, this heroic Christian scholar and the begetter of so much of our English language, was burned at the stake. His last words were: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!”



Two years before Tyndale’s execution, Henry VIII, who had earlier been given the title “Defender of the Faith” by Pope Leo X for denouncing Luther’s ideas, had left his wife Catherine and secretly married his pregnant mistress Anne Boleyn. A new Pope, Clement VII, threatened him with excommunication. In 1535, Miles Coverdale, using Tyndale’s text wherever possible, published a complete Bible dedicated to the king, the first legal Bible in English. That was a year before Tyndale’s execution. Needing allies, Henry entered negotiations with some Lutheran princes in Germany in 1536, the very year of Tyndale’s execution, but there is no record of him giving a thought to the man whose words would now help him seal a hold on a new Protestant England. In 1537, the Matthew Bible — an amalgam of Coverdale’s and Tyndale’s — was allowed to be printed in England. In 1539 we have the Great Bible — the official version.

After centuries of suppression, the walls came tumbling down and three Bibles were approved and published inside six years. And it went on: the Geneva Bible in 1560, the first in Roman type; the Bishops’ Bible in 1568, a revised version of the Great Bible; and the Douai-Rheims Bible of 1609–10.

The English language flowed into religion. It had already returned to the court and into the state and begun to be the language of a vivid and vigorous national literature. Now with the split from Rome, it conquered the last and highest bastion, the Church.

It was a principle of Protestantism that the Bible be available to everyone. In 1530 Sir Thomas More had complained bitterly about the shame of the Bible in English in the language of ploughboys. But the Great Bible of 1539 came with an introduction by More’s successor, Cranmer, which commended it to all: it was to be placed in every church in the land. A translation reads:

Here may men, women; young, old; learned, unlearned; rich, poor; priests, laymen; lords, ladies; officers, tenants and mean men; virgins, wives; widows, lawyers, artificers, husbandmen, and all matter of persons of what estate or condition soever they be learn all things, what they ought to believe, what they ought to do, as well as concerning Almighty God as themselves and all other.

It was unconditional surrender. It was defecting en masse to the side of the enemy. It was purging the past out of memory. It was now the King’s Bible’s English.

Where the medieval Catholic Church and Henry VIII most violently up into the 1530s had kept the Bible from the people, Henry’s new Church set out to get the Bible to as many as possible. It has had an incalculable influence on the spread of our language. For centuries it was heard week in week out, sometimes day in day out, by almost all English-speaking Christians wherever they were, and its precepts, its images, its proverbs, its names, its parables, its heroes, its promises, its words and rhythms, sank deep shafts into the minds of the men and women who heard it. It went to the heart of the way we spoke, the way we described the world and ourselves. Its English bound the English together.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century there were so many competing versions that seven hundred fifty reformers from within the Church of England requested James VI of Scotland, who had become James I of England, to authorise a new translation. Fifty-four translators were chosen from the Church and the universities to produce an edition which would be submitted to the bishops. The work took about five years and it cannot go unremarked that this tremendous endeavour makes the achievement of Tyndale appear all but superhuman.

To go back to the Beatitudes, Tyndale writes:

When he sawe the people he went up into a mountayne and when he was set, his disciples came to hym and he opened hys mouthe, and taught them, sayinge, “Blessed are the povre in sprite: for theirs is the Kyngdom of heven . . .”

In the Authorised, the King James Version, it reads:

And seeing the multitudes, he went vp into a mountaine: and when he was set, his disciples came vnto him. And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poore in spirit: for theirs is the kingdome of heauen . . .

Tyndale had the final say.

The fifty-four translators made very little attempt to update his language, which was now eighty years old. Even though by 1611, English had undergone further revolution, the King James translators would still use “ye” sometimes for “you,” as in “ye cannot serve God and Mammon,” even though very few said “ye” in common speech any more. They used “thou” for “you,” “gat” for “got,” “spake” for “spoke” and so on. Either they were too struck by the beauty and power of Tyndale’s prose to want to interfere with it, or this was a deliberate act of policy. They may have chosen to keep archaic forms. They made the Bible feel ancient, mysteriously spiritual, out of the past, imbued with deeply rooted traditional authority.

We are told that the men who made the final drafts read them aloud over and over again to make sure that they had the right rhythm and balance, matters which Tyndale, a preacher as well as a scholar, knew about well. The English Bible has often been called a preacher’s Bible. Written to be spoken, written to spread the word in the language of the land, a cause for which Wycliffe and Tyndale and hundreds of other English Christians had lived and died.

In the beginning was the Word, & the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him;
And without him was not anything made that was made.
In him was life, and the life was the light of men.
And the light shineth in darknesse,
And the darknesse comprehended it not.
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among vs.

English at last had God on its side. The language was authorised by the Almighty Himself.