Five hundred years ago, William Tyndale produced an extraordinary gift to the world: his English translation of the New Testament. It has rightly been called “a treasure of English-speaking culture”. The old adage “No Tyndale, no Shakespeare” is probably spot on.

But Tyndale would be surprised if we were to rejoice in his impact upon English language and culture only. No, it is the immeasurable spiritual impact of his work for which we ought chiefly to praise God.

Tyndale’s story begins around 1494, when he was born in the English county of Gloucestershire. The first record of this talented young man places him as a member of Magdalen Hall at Oxford in 1512. After completing his BA, he was incepted MA in 1515, which took place the same year he was ordained deacon and priest.

His reading of theology occurred around the same time that the publication of Erasmus’ Novum instrumentum caused shockwaves around Europe. At a time when the Roman Catholic Church was trying to clamp down on people reading the Bible in any language other than Latin, Erasmus challenged the Church to look at the Greek text of Scripture.

For instance, he demonstrated that when Jesus came preaching in Galilee that the time had come and the kingdom of God was near (Mark 1:15), the meaning of the next phrase was not “do penance and believe” but “repent and believe the good news”!

It is in this context that we can understand why Tyndale was appalled that the theology syllabus at pre-Reformation Oxford did not include Scripture, and also why he took small groups of students under his wing and privately taught them the original languages of the Bible.

Tyndale headed home to Gloucestershire and became tutor to Sir John and Lady Walsh at Little Sodbury Manor. Through his teaching, they grew in Reformed religious convictions and perhaps encouraged Tyndale’s preaching ministry. It was not long before Tyndale was hauled before the Church authorities for his biblical preaching in nearby Bristol. He got off lightly, with shouts and threats.

Seeing Tyndale’s trajectory, a reform-minded friend warned him that continuing this way would cost him his life. But that did not deter Tyndale. He soon encountered a “learned man” who thought “we were better off without God’s law than the pope’s.” Famously, Tyndale quipped back: “if God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough, shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.”

This desire to see the Scriptures shared with all and savoured by sundry shaped the rest of Tyndale’s life and ministry. He sought the patronage of the academically able Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall of London in 1523, but to no avail. He was shut out of Tunstall’s intellectual circle and went over the seas, never to return to England. By 1524, we find him in Germany, matriculating at the University of Wittenberg in May and perhaps meeting Martin Luther.

The first New Testament in English

The following year in Cologne, Tyndale translated and published his first English portions of God’s word. Being linked with “the arch-heretic Luther”, Tyndale was exposed and chased out of town to Worms. The print run was only half completed and ended at Matthew 22, and there only exists one “Cologne Fragment” today, which is housed in the British Library.

Tyndale arrived in the Lutheran city of Worms in 1526. In relative peace and quiet, he was able to complete the first-ever full translation of the New Testament in English from the original Greek. It was octavo (pocket-sized, like the rest of Tyndale’s books published in his lifetime) and had no printed marginalia and apparatus.

It was smuggled in bales of cloth all the way down the Rhine and into English and Scottish ports. And it was an immediate hit – loved by the people and hated by the prelates! The seed of God’s word was scattered and sown, and perhaps, in a quiet fulfilment of Tyndale’s boast, a few plough boys schooled their village priests in the Scriptures around Bristol.

Bishop Tunstall opposed Tyndale’s New Testament vigorously, calling it “that pestiferous and most pernicious poison dispersed throughout all our diocese of London in great number”. In fact, he arranged the burning of Tyndale’s translation on October 27, 1526, and preached at the occasion – attacking Tyndale for translating from Greek and not the church’s authorised Latin.

Nevertheless, copies of this hugely popular New Testament kept rolling off the continental printing press and were shipped into England. The situation escalated as Archbishop William Warham of Canterbury requested all his bishops to share the cost of purchasing every possible copy of Tyndale’s New Testament so they could be thrown to the flames.

Such large-scale book buying and burning has led to the apocryphal story of Tyndale’s joy. Apparently, he was happy for the books to go to the flames, for he could now use the money to further his work on the Old Testament, too!

William Tyndale did go on to translate parts of the Old Testament, and the sole copy of his Hebrew Pentateuch survives at the British Library. Tyndale’s long-held goal of helping people understand the Bible led him to pen A Pathway Into the Holy Scripture in 1530. It was designed to complement his translations.

The preface states his amazement that anyone would speak against the Scriptures being translated into the vernacular. For Tyndale, it was of the utmost importance to present the gospel of Jesus Christ to all people: “Euangelion (that we call the gospel) is a Greek word and signifies good, merry, glad, and joyful tidings that make a man’s heart glad and make him sing, dance, and leap for joy.”

He went on to write other very important works. Some people asked why he would bother to do so, since they would burn those works, too. “I answer, in burning the New Testament they did none other thing than that I looked for,” wrote Tyndale, “nor more shall they do if they burn me also. If it be God’s will, it shall so be.”

In 1528, he declared the doctrine of justification by faith alone in The Parable of the Wicked Mammon. Later that year, he published The Obedience of the Christian Man, which argued for the supreme authority of the Bible in the church and the supreme authority of the King in the realm (this was, understandably, a favourite of Henry VIII). In 1530, Tyndale produced The Practice of Prelates, which not only lambasted Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (“Wolfsee”) and the Roman hierarchy but also attacked Henry VIII’s aspirations for annulling his marriage to Katherine of Aragon (this was, understandably, not a favourite of Henry VIII’s!).

He also wrote on the important reformation topic of the Lord’s Supper in his posthumously published A Brief Declaration of the Sacraments (1548). Remarkably, Tyndale’s position aligns fairly neatly with that of Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, which was enshrined in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion.

In this productive and provocative decade of ministry after leaving England, Tyndale had poured himself out. He spoke to his friend Stephen Vauhan of his poverty, cold and thirst, and he told his friend John Frith that though his body was weary, his soul was not faint.

Lives changed before Tyndale’s death

His works had been declared heretical and though surrounded by danger, Tyndale worked in relative safety, housed in Antwerp under the patronage of an evangelical friend. However, in 1535, he was deceived by an untrustworthy gambler, Henry Phillips. Like Judas, this betrayer handed over Tyndale to the authorities for money (what Tyndale translated as “filthy lucre” in 1 Tim 3:3).

Those who arrested Tyndale were shocked and moved to pity by his simple means. They took him to Vilvoorde Castle (outside Brussels), where he was kept for the next sixteen months. As the winter approached, he requested two comforts: his warmer clothes, which had been confiscated, and his Hebrew Bible, grammar and dictionary.

While we know nothing of his translation work there, we know something of his conversion work – for the gaol keeper, the keeper’s daughter, and others in the gaoler’s household came to faith in Christ. Perhaps his translation of the conversion of the Philippian gaoler came to mind once or twice (Acts 16:34: “he with all his household believed on God”).

After being interrogated by the procurer-general for his “Lutheran” heresy, Tyndale was condemned as a heretic in August 1536. He was probably degraded from holy orders on the same day. Then on October 6 a stake, brushwood and logs were prepared in the open space outside Vilvoorde Castle. Tyndale was brought out, a chain placed around his neck, and he cried out, “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes”. He was not burned alive – a mark of his distinction as a scholar. He was strangled first, and his body burned later.

Within a month of his burning, his dying prayer was answered by God. A fellow Englishman, John Rogers, compiled a translation of the whole Bible; two-thirds of it was Tyndale’s own work. It was authorised by King Henry VIII, and the sale of this work led to the publication of the Great Bible in 1539, which was to be placed in every church across the land (a copy is on display at our St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney).

The subsequent Geneva and Bishops’ bibles harked back to the Tyndale translation, and the near-timeless King James Version (1611) of the Bible was around 83 per cent drawn from Tyndale. Similarly, our modern NIV and ESV versions also owe an enormous debt to him.

“Its importance cannot be overestimated,” says his best contemporary biographer David Daniell. “The great change that came over England from 1526, the ability of every ordinary man, woman, and child to read and hear the New Testament in English, accurately rendered, was Tyndale’s work.”

The brilliance of Tyndale’s translation

The British Library currently has Tyndale’s 1526 New Testament on display, along with other rare books and manuscripts from this period, including Anne Boleyn’s personal copy of the 1534 edition of Tyndale’s New Testament. In it, you would see familiar phrases like “the spirit is willing”, “fight the good fight”, “the powers that be”, “eat, drink and be merry”, “signs of the times”, “under the sun”, “my brother’s keeper”, “the apple of his eye”, “go the extra mile”, “the parting of the ways”, “flowing with milk and honey”, “let there be light”, “the salt of the earth”, and of course, “blessed are the peace-makers”. These are merely the tip of the iceberg of Tyndale’s translation genius – all which have shaped our English-speaking culture for the past 500 years.

But we must remember that the simplicity and brilliance of Tyndale’s translation was so that we might know the meaning of the Bible. In it, you would see that “congregation”, “elder”, “love” and “repent” replaced “church”, “priest”, “charity” and “do penance”. These reflect Reformation concerns to return to biblical teaching on the nature of church, ministry, the Christian life and salvation. But above all, Tyndale translated so we might know Christ.

“Verily, verily, I say unto you,” said Jesus in John 5 (Tyndale used no verse numbers), “He that heareth my words, And believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into damnation: but is scaped from death unto life.” Or, as he simply put the Apostle Paul’s words in Ephesians 2: “For by grace ye are made safe through faith”.

William Tyndale’s dying prayer was to have King Henry VIII’s eyes opened to the importance of translating the Bible into the English language. But truly, the more profound purpose of Tyndale’s prayer was to have the spiritual eyes of human hearts opened to behold the Lord Jesus Christ through his word, the Bible.

How important is it, therefore, to have the Bible as the ultimate authority for our doctrine and arbiter for our theological disagreements? How important is it, therefore, to have our church services saturated with multiple readings of Scripture? How important is it to cherish the Bible in our own private homes and personal spiritual lives? The answer to these questions is the same: it is immensely important to value the Holy Scriptures in these, and many more, ways.

So, let us praise God for the work and witness of William Tyndale, 500 years on. And let us pray that the Lord would open more eyes to see the importance of the Bible, and so be regularly refreshed in the good news; the gospel of Christ Jesus that Tyndale reminds us, is “good, merry, glad, and joyful tidings that make a man’s heart glad and make him sing, dance, and leap for joy”.

The Rev Dr Mark Earngey is head of Church History and lectures in Christian Doctrine at Moore College.