Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Priest, Martyr, & Biblical Translator
October 6 · d. 1536
also known as William Tindal
William Tyndale was the scholar who first translated the Bible into English from the Hebrew and Greek, and died for it. Born in Gloucestershire about 1494, he was strangled and burned at Vilvoorde, near Brussels, in 1536. So much of his wording passed into the King James Version that he is remembered as the father of the English Bible. His feast is October 6.
William Tyndale was an English priest and scholar, born in Gloucestershire about the year 1494, who set his heart on one thing: that the ordinary people of England should be able to read the Bible in their own tongue. He knew Greek and would learn Hebrew, and he had seen how little of the Scripture the common people were allowed to hear.
The story turns on a dinner in Gloucestershire, when Tyndale was a young tutor. He fell into an argument with a learned churchman who valued the pope's law above God's, and answered him with words the church has never forgotten. As Foxe reports it, Tyndale said that "if God spared him life, ere many years he would cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture" than the learned man did. There was his whole life's work: the plough-boy in his field with the word of God in his hands.
To do it he had to leave England, for to translate the Bible without the church's leave could send a man to the fire. Tyndale crossed to the Continent and lived the rest of his life on the run. In the cities of the Rhine he saw his English New Testament through the press, and in 1526 it was smuggled home in bales of cloth. The bishops bought the copies and burned them; the money paid to print more. Learning Hebrew as he went, he pressed on and gave England the first five books of Moses in its own plain speech.
He moved from lodging to lodging, hunted, until he found shelter among the English merchants of Antwerp. There a smooth young Englishman named Henry Phillips won his trust, then walked him out into the arms of officers waiting in the street. Tyndale was taken to the castle of Vilvoorde, near Brussels, and held there in the cold for close to a year and a half. From that cell he wrote asking for a warmer cap and coat, and above all for his Hebrew Bible, that he might go on translating.
In the autumn of 1536 they brought him out to die, tied him to the stake, strangled him, and burned his body. Foxe records that at the end he cried with a loud voice, "Lord! open the King of England's eyes." It was the prayer of a man who loved even the king who had let him burn, and it was answered: within four years the same King Henry ordered an English Bible set up in the churches, built largely on Tyndale's own words. He never held that book, but the plough-boy did, and the God who opens the eyes of kings was not hindered by a fire.
How we know Tyndale is a rare thing among the saints: the record is thick, contemporary, and largely his own. His translations survive in print, dated and datable, the primary witness to his work, and his controversial books carry his voice and his convictions. And one letter survives in his own hand, written from the prison at Vilvoorde in the winter of 1535, asking the governor of the castle for warmer clothing against the cold, and for his Hebrew Bible, grammar, and dictionary so that he could keep working; in J. I. Mombert's translation it closes, "I shall be patient, and submit to the will of God, to the glory of the grace of Jesus Christ my Lord."
For the memorable sayings the great source is John Foxe, whose Acts and Monuments (first English edition 1563), the book generations of English Protestants knew as the Book of Martyrs, is the church's own record of its martyrs' words and deaths. Foxe wrote a generation after Tyndale died, gathering testimony with an unmistakable purpose, to honor the martyrs and to indict those who killed them; a modern reader weighs his reports with that purpose in view. It is Foxe who preserves the plough-boy vow and the dying prayer, and while neither can be checked against an eyewitness transcript, both are wholly in character with the man the documents show, and the church has received them as his. He also relays, harder to verify, that Tyndale's keepers at Vilvoorde were won to his faith by his conduct in prison.
The outline of the life is secure. Born in Gloucestershire about 1494 and educated at Oxford and Cambridge, Tyndale was tutoring at Little Sodbury when the dispute with the learned churchman is placed. Refused support by Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall of London, he sailed for the Continent in 1524. His New Testament, the first ever printed in English from the Greek, was completed at Worms in 1526; the Pentateuch followed in 1530. He was betrayed by Henry Phillips and seized at Antwerp in 1535, condemned as a heretic under imperial law, and put to death at Vilvoorde in October 1536, strangled and then burned. His feast is kept on October 6, though the exact day of his execution is not certainly recorded. David Daniell, his standard modern biographer, reckons that the greater part of the King James New Testament, and much of the first half of its Old Testament, stands in Tyndale's words.
Tyndale is commemorated on October 6 in the Church of England and across the Anglican Communion, and in a number of Lutheran and other Protestant calendars, as translator and martyr. His true monument is the English Bible itself: the cadences of the King James Version, and of the countless Bibles that descend from it, are in large part his, so that he is honored as the father of the English Bible. He is remembered too in the language at large, for phrases he coined to carry the Scripture into English, among them "let there be light," "the powers that be," and "the salt of the earth." He is often depicted with a book and at the stake, and the great Victorian statue of him stands on the Thames Embankment in London.
The New Testament (Tyndale's translation)(English, 1526)
The first English New Testament printed from the Greek, completed at Worms in 1526; the foundation of the English Bible and the primary witness to Tyndale's life's work.
Public domain: 1526 New Testament, facsimile and text at the Internet Archive
The Pentateuch (Tyndale's translation)(English, 1530)
The first five books of Moses in English from the Hebrew, printed 1530; carried substantially into the King James Version.
Public domain: Tyndale's Pentateuch, ed. J. I. Mombert (1884), at the Internet Archive
The Obedience of a Christian Man(English, 1528)
Tyndale's major treatise, arguing that the Christian's duty is obedience under God and that Scripture should be open to all; his mind and voice in his own English.
Public domain: 1548 edition at the Internet Archive
The Parable of the Wicked Mammon(English, 1528)
Tyndale's exposition of justification by faith, and one of the books the bishops sought to suppress.
Public domain: 1561 edition at the Internet Archive
Acts and Monuments (the Book of Martyrs), on William Tyndale(English, 1563)
The church's own record of Tyndale's sayings and death, written a generation later with a martyrological purpose; the source for the plough-boy vow and the dying prayer.
Public domain: CCEL, Foxe's Book of Martyrs
William Tyndale: A Biography(English, 1994)
The standard modern life, learned and warmly sympathetic; the natural first book for a reader who wants the whole story with the scholarship behind it.
Public domain: Borrowable at the Internet Archive
William Tyndale(English, 1937)
The standard biography for sixty years before Daniell, still valuable for its detail; borrowable at the Internet Archive.
Public domain: Borrowable at the Internet Archive
Primary sources. Tyndale's own translations are the first witness to his life: his 1526 New Testament and his 1530 Pentateuch, the foundation of the English Bible, together with his prologues. His two chief prose works, The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) and The Parable of the Wicked Mammon (1528), give his mind and his voice, and are freely readable in public-domain editions at the Internet Archive. His single surviving letter, written from Vilvoorde prison in 1535, is the most personal document he left. For his sayings and his death, John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (the Book of Martyrs) is the church's own memory, to be read as the martyrology it is; it is freely available at CCEL.
Recommended modern biography. David Daniell's William Tyndale: A Biography (Yale University Press, 1994) is the standard modern life, learned and warmly sympathetic to its subject, and the natural first book for any reader who wants the whole story with the scholarship behind it; it superseded J. F. Mozley's older study and remains the definitive account.
Further reading. J. F. Mozley's William Tyndale (1937) held the field for sixty years and is still valuable, borrowable at the Internet Archive. Brian Moynahan's God's Bestseller: William Tyndale, Thomas More, and the Writing of the English Bible (2002) is a vivid narrative account of the manhunt and the martyrdom for the general reader.
Online resources. The Christian History Institute and CCEL both carry accessible introductions and primary texts; Foxe's account of Tyndale is at CCEL, and Tyndale's prison letter is transcribed and translated at bible-researcher.com.
British (Received Pronunciation): Gloucestershire /ˈɡlɒs.tər.ʃər/
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12
Almighty God, you gave your servant William Tyndale boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.