Introduction

Telling the story of William Tyndale is a bit like telling the story of an obscure, but endearing relative in a family tree of which little is known. Although most commonly remembered for his role in the history of Biblical translation, much more is known of Tyndale's undying legacy than his own self-discovery. Without his work, one could argue that an English Bible would have still been the result of an English Reformation, but history has shown that all subsequent translators looked back at his efforts with great dependence. There is, therefore, a great demand to understand the background of such a man whose written triumph would lay the foundations of our English Bible for centuries to come.

Due to the many unknown details of his early life, a great portion of this text will highlight some of the characters, communities, and politics that would have theoretically shaped Tyndale's experience. Between his estimated birth in 1494 and his departure from an English harbor in 1524, thirty years of humanistic literature had passed through the hands of students and farmers across England. Conservative scholars and politicians became increasingly obsessed with the heretical German Reformation abroad and the impact it might have on naïve citizens of their island. For becoming the English version of Martin Luther, William Tyndale would lose his life to the betrayal of a dinner guest.


The English Judas

After ten years as an outlaw of England, Tyndale was finally betrayed by his methodical Judas on May 21, 1535. Henry Phillips had been invited to dine with the great translator just a few blocks from his office. The young Phillips had gained Tyndale's affection for several reasons. They shared a common love for language, literature, and the beauty of England, which they both considered home. Neither man was married or had children of whom they might identify the joys and troubles of parenting. For all intensive purposes, Tyndale was convinced that they were cut from the same cloth. He was completely unaware that his new companion was a petty thief, a sly beggar, and a closet Catholic who had secretly enrolled at the dogmatic and "hardline" University of Louvain the previous December. 1

Thomas Poyntz, whose home in Antwerp was the location of that evening's dinner, had suspected a problem from the beginning. He expressed great concern regarding the moral nature of Phillips' business in an area that had "no bishop and no university." The city of Antwerp was indeed a Dutch "Metropolis" for its time, but it seemed that Phillips was out of place among the many merchants and traders that he claimed to know. 2 Poyntz had it right. While walking with Tyndale to dinner, Phillips led his escort into a trap of soldiers who quickly brought him to the Castle of Vilvoorde. 3

According to John Foxe, famed author of the Book of Martyrs, Vilvoorde was "eighteen English miles from Antwerp." Authorities offered Tyndale an "advocate," but he was content to speak on his own behalf. 4 Unsure about the length of his stay, Tyndale wrote, "If I am to remain here through the winter," that someone should gather for me "a warmer cap," "a warmer coat," and "a piece of cloth too to match my leggings." Conditions were understandably poor, but surviving the cold season was not his primary concern. "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 kindly permit me to have the Hebrew bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew dictionary, that I may pass the time in that study." 5 As the weeks and months wore on, the experience of an imprisoned William Tyndale carried the faint image of an imprisoned Apostle he had spent so many years reading and translating:

"The cloak that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, but specially the parchment… At my first answering, no man assisted me… make speed to come before winter." 6

Unknown to Tyndale was that Poyntz had been appealing to Thomas Cromwell for the release of his friend. Cromwell had even gone so far as to discuss the matter with King Henry VIII of England. Henry was, by 1535, softening to the need for an English Bible and certainly could have intervened if he had felt it worthy to the cause of his own purposes. But Tyndale was not imprisoned on the island, nor did the king have much authority in the Catholic regions where papal rule was still considered law. In the mind of King Henry, the life of William Tyndale was expendable. There were plenty of other scholarly translators capable of doing the same job. The priorities of England were not worth the expense of one man. Henry Phillips appeared once again in Flanders, Belgium to push for an execution and on the morning of October 6, 1536, Tyndale became an unyielding martyr. 7 As the flames caught his feet and the rope strangled his throat, listeners could hear the words of a dying prayer: "Lord, open the King of England's eyes!" 8


When I was a Child, I Spake as a Child…
II Corinthians 13:11 – Tyndale, 1534

Some forty-two years before his death, Tyndale's journey began with a respectable family in Gloucestershire, England. Other than living in view of "Welsh hills," little is known of his early life before the age of twelve when he arrived at Magdalen College in Oxford. 9 The very beauty and architecture of Oxford makes it quite easy to imagine the Tyndale college experience.

More than a century earlier, John Wycliffe, a professor of divinity at had referred to the institution as "the Vineyard of the Lord." It was here that he became a "vehement critic" of the Catholic Church and continued to teach until 1381, when he was banned for encouraging an English translation of untouchable Latin Scriptures. 10 Although he died in 1384, his followers, known as Lollards, quickly completed the Wycliffe Bible through an underground translation of the Latin Vulgate. By 1408, an Oxford council "specifically forbade translations of the Scriptures into English and held that the possession of an English Bible must be approved." 11 Approved or not, translating the Bible into English was not a priority for the clergy.

Every local student knew that "violation of the law was considered heresy… punishable by being burned at the stake." Between 1506 and 1519, while Tyndale was a student, at least 22 Lollards were burned alive for their involvement with the forbidden Bible. 12 Public executions were often performed as a morality lesson for the citizens of England and the young Tyndale would have become very familiar with the cause and effect of owning, handling, or translating Scripture into English without the approval of London clergy. Even in the rural areas outside of London, "secret fellowships" had grown among "country preachers" who "expounded from the illegal English text." 13

Although Tyndale would have graduated from Oxford at some point between 1512 and 1514, Foxe writes that he "removed from thence to the University of Cambridge, where he likewise made his abode a certain space." 14 Quite simply, Tyndale found "conservative" Oxford to be intolerable and turned his attention toward the more open-minded and liberal environment at Cambridge. Timing proved to be everything when word spread of Luther's Reformation in 1516. As early as 1521, Cambridge scholars and teachers were gathering in what became known as "Little Germany," an English group of Lutheran sympathizers. Included in this elite body were Tyndale, Miles Coverdale, future translator to King Henry VIII, and two founders of Anglican religious thought, Thomas Cranmer and Matthew Parker. 15

Back on the campus of Oxford, two influential scholars of Renaissance humanism were developing a bond of noticeable friendship that stood firmly against any and all Lutheran teaching. The first, Desiderius Erasmus, had attended a campus lecture by John Colet in 1499 during his earliest visit to England. Colet was an instructor of New Testament Greek and managed to explain Paul's Epistles in a "direct and personal way" without the traditional method of symbolic assumption. Such an examined presentation of the classical language convinced Erasmus that humanistic ideals could be applied to the study of Scripture. He believed that it was necessary to "purify" the Church from its many "obscurities and superstitions" and thus began his own fifteen-year odyssey of Greek study. While teaching at the University of Cambridge around 1514, Erasmus very likely crossed paths with a budding young theologian named William Tyndale. 16

The second humanist of considerable mention was Thomas More. In 1492, John Morton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, saw potential in the young lad and sent him to Oxford. There he found company with the likes of Colet, Erasmus, and others who had begun a solid debate over the teaching of humanism in the classroom. More proved to be quite the lawyer and social politician earning his law degree in 1502, marrying in 1504, and becoming a member of Parliament soon after. 17

Within a few years of his rise to English popularity, More received an essay by Erasmus entitled, The Praise of Folly. Its opening preface is a testimony to their relationship: "Upon my soul, nothing in life has ever brought me more pleasure than your friendship." In fact, the entire "notion" of Folly had been based around a random thought during a trip to England. The family name, More, was "close to Moria, the Greek word for folly" and Erasmus felt that his good friend would find that this "joke would be for folly" and Erasmus felt that his good friend would find this humor "agreeable" since he seemed to "enjoy jests of this sort." 18

Such humor between these European titans of humanistic theology proved that early on, both men were sensitive to the need for change in the church. More had even earned himself a far more extensive reputation beyond the British island when, in 1516, he published his masterful work of literature called Utopia. 19 And while Germany was bubbling over with religious toleration, Erasmus published the first edition of his own climactic masterpiece, the 1516 Novum Instrumentum, later to be known as Novum Testamentum. This was the foundational Greek New Testament that would be the eventual basis of Luther's German translation and Tyndale's English translation. 20 Between "Little Germany" at Cambridge, the insightful politics of Thomas More, and the linguistic research of Erasmus, Tyndale had little reason to fear the coming of great changes in England. He did not, however, realize the significance of his own role in what would become known as the English Reformation.


…But as Soon as I was a Man…

After leaving Cambridge sometime between 1518 and 1520, Tyndale settled for a couple of years in the "manor-house of Little Sodbury" where he became a "tutor to the children of Sir John Walsh." He spent every Sabbath "preaching in the neighboring parishes" and socializing with ecclesiastical authorities of the region. Perhaps taking a page from an Erasmus lecture, he found himself refuting the "mean superstitions" of ignorant clerics who knew little or nothing about the Scriptures. As an educated man with no foresight on his own future or purpose, Tyndale pressed the local clerics to the point that they found him irritable and verging on heresy. The most common discussion recorded from this period had a "learned man" declaring, "It were better for us to be without God's laws, than without the Pope's!" To which Tyndale replied with emphatic necessity, "I defy the Pope, and all his laws; and if God spare my life, ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than you do!" 21

It became evident to Tyndale that if he, a man raised near the hills of Welsh farmland, could read and understand Scripture more clearly than the priests and the bishops, then any child in England could and should be able to do the same. By almost every standard of the day, this was an imaginary novelty that went much farther than any religious leader would think to permit. Perhaps the only notable exception was Thomas Cranmer of "Little Germany" fame. He had finally adjusted the Cambridge program of divinity so as to reflect Biblical knowledge over traditions of the Church. Cranmer felt that it would only be a "shame" for any Professor of Divinity to be "unskilled" in the Scriptures, "wherein the knowledge of God and the grounds of divinity lay." 22

However, most were not as progressive as Cranmer. On May 14, 1521, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey prohibited the reading or owning of "any books that proclaimed the doctrines of the Reformation." 23 King Henry had even gone so far as to refute the teachings of Martin Luther when he published A Defense of the Seven Sacraments later that July. 24 In no uncertain terms, Wolsey, King Henry, and many others in London believed that the common 'ploughboy' would ultimately be misled from church order if they were able to read Scripture and Protestant theology without the guidance of papal understanding. If Tyndale was to fulfill his pledge of putting the Bible into the hands of common men, he needed support from those who would seldom consider giving it.


…I Put Away Childishness

With great ambition and a zealous agenda, Tyndale arrived in London around July 1523. Walsh, who fully supported the tutor of his children, sent him with a "letter of introduction" to meet with Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London. 25 Due to more pressing matters of state, Tunstall was unable to find time to deal with the "obscure young man from Gloucestershire" until September. His firmness indicated a clear head and tolerant understanding of good intentions, but what Tyndale was asking was simply out of the question. Brian Moynahan, one of the modern biographers of William Tyndale along with David Daniell, writes of the Tunstall response:

"The bishop of London was one of the most powerful men in the country. Tyndale, an unknown minor cleric whose last post was as a child's tutor, had asked if he could live in this awesome person's palace. Once installed, Tyndale had said, he intended to do something that had been punishable by death for more than a hundred years. Tunstall might have ridiculed his plan, or had him flung into his Episcopal dungeons for heretical intent. Instead, he was remarkably civil." 26

The eager translator proved himself rather careless in his attack on the bishop, calling him a "ducking hypocrite." 27 Surely the good sense of any elder statesman in Tunstall's position would have reacted the same. The Bishop of London was a good friend of Erasmus and knew that his Testamentum provided an incredible opportunity for the very thing that Tyndale wanted to accomplish. 28 But the bishop lacked any practical urgency for his people to have access to the Scriptures. Such delay and hesitation, combined with Tyndale's vocal impatience, soon brought out the worst and most venomous side of Tunstall's other good friend, now knighted by the crown as Sir Thomas More.

On the opening page of More's Utopia almost ten years earlier, Tunstall had been praised as "a man doubtless out of comparison… his virtue and learning be greater and of more excellency than that I am able to praise them." 29 By slandering the bishop, Tyndale gained the backhanded wrath of More and the increased outrage of the bishop himself. It became apparent that no one would verbally or financially support the work of an English translation. Men who were once seekers of change were now vessels of hate.

If anyone might have sympathized with the plight of Tyndale, it was Erasmus. Born sometime before 1470, Erasmus had already become a wiser "man of cool calculation rather than burning conviction." 30 Unlike More, Erasmus had a strong "distaste for dogmatic theology" and was, after all, the man whose Greek text Tyndale would invest most of his labor in the coming years. 31 Fortunately, Erasmus was not a resident of England and made his home in Rotterdam of the Low Countries. As the militaristic anger of More and Tunstall rose against the desperate translator, Tyndale set sail for the safe harbor of Hamburg, Germany in April of 1524. 32 He would never return to England again.


Conclusion

The remaining twelve years between Hamburg and the flames of execution were an elusive game of cat-and-mouse. When the English New Testament was finally completed in early 1526, both More and Tunstall turned to burning books and killing men. Any evidence of good humor and reasonable compassion had been replaced by the blood of martyrs and the ashes of parchment. Embittered by Reformation and the open sins of King Henry, they became enemies of the very truth they had once tried to preach.

Traveling with the shadow of death around every corner, Tyndale found little comfort in the towns and villages he stayed. Each day in hiding made his enemies more enraged. By trying to put the Word of God into the hands of common men, he had become an English outlaw. Still, it was the Word that gave him hope and it was the Word that lit his path of survival in the shadows of heresy.

"Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path…I am afflicted very much: quicken me, O Lord, according unto thy word." 33