WILLIAM TYNDALE

WILLIAM TYNDALE

The Man Who Gave Us the English Bible

William Tyndale was born in England in the early 1490s. When he was a student at Cambridge University in the early 1520s, "Lutheran ideas" were a hot topic, so Tyndale probably developed many of his Protestant convictions at this time.

After leaving the university, Tyndale joined the household of Sir John Walsh at Little Sodbury Manor in Gloucestershire, apparently as a tutor for the two Walsh boys. The Walshes were well known for their hospitality to both nobility and clergy, and Tyndale engaged in many theological discussions around their table. He was shocked at the clerics’ ignorance of Scripture and determined that he was going to translate the Bible into English so that every man, woman, and child could read God’s Word for themselves.

At that time it was illegal to translate the Scriptures into English without official approval. (Churches used the Latin Vulgate, which the people didn’t understand.) Unable to get permission for his project, Tyndale left England to do his translation work in Europe.

In 1526, the first complete English New Testament came off the printing press in Worms, Germany. Anne Boleyn was given a copy and showed it to King Henry VIII. Henry, however, rejected it, saying there was no need for an English Bible "at present." If and when it was done, he said, it should be done by respected scholars within the Church, not a renegade priest who had skipped the country.

In 1535 Tyndale was betrayed while staying at the home of a sympathetic merchant in Antwerp, Belgium. However, even while Tyndale sat in prison, a fellow Oxford scholar, Miles Coverdale, completed an English translation of the Bible, largely based on Tyndale’s work. Only months after Tyndale was burned at the stake, King Henry put his stamp of approval on the Bible, and by 1539 every parish church was required to make copies available to its people.