William Tyndale was the first man to
ever print the New Testament in the English language. Tyndale was a
true scholar and a genius, fluent in eight languages. He was a
theologian and scholar who translated the Bible into an early form of
Modern English. He was the first person to take advantage of
Gutenberg's movable-type press for the purpose of printing the
scriptures in the English language. Besides translating the Bible,
Tyndale also held and published views which were considered
heretical, first by the Catholic Church, and later by the Church of
England which was established by Henry VIII.
William Tyndale (1494-1536) was a
Biblical translator and a martyr. He was born most probably at North
Nibley (near Gloucester), England, in 1494. He enrolled at Oxford in
1505, and grew up at the University. He received his Master's
Degreein 1515 at the age of twenty-one. He proved to be a gifted
linguist. One of Tyndale's associates commented that Tyndale was “so
skilled in eight languages (Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Spanish, French,
Italian, English and German, that wichever he speaks, you might think
it is his native tongue. This gift undoubtedly aided him in his
successful evasion of the authorities during his years of exile from
England. William Tyndale, having become attached to the doctrines of
the Reformation, and devoted himself to the study of the
Scriptures(around 1520), had much opposition and disputes with the
Roman Catholic Church and this led him to move to London (about
1523). In London he began to preach, and made many friends among the
laity, but none among church leaders. A clergyman hopelessly
entrenched in Roman Catholic dogma once taunted Tyndale with the
statement, “We are better to be without God's laws than the Pope's”
Tyndale was infuriated by such Roman Catholic heresies, and he
replied, “I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life
ere many years, I will cause the boy that drives the plow to know
more of the scriptures than you!”
Tyndale was unable to translate the
Scriptures into the commonly spoken English in England, so he set out
for the continent (about May, 1524), and appears to have visited
Hamburg and Wittenberg. The place where he translated the New
Testament, is thought to have been Wittenberg, under the aid of
Martin Luther. The printing of this English New Testament in quarto
was begun at Cologne in the summer of 1525, and completed at Worms,
and that there was likewise printed an octavo edition both before the
end of that year. William Tyndale's Biblical translations appeared in
the following order: New Testament, 1525-26; Pentateuch, 1530; Jonah,
1531.
His literary activity during that interval was extraordinary. When
he left England, his knowledge of Hebrew, if he had any, was of the
most rudimentary nature; and yet he mastered that difficult tongue so
as to produce from the original an admirable translation of the
entire Pentateuch, the Books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, First and
Second Samuel, First and Second Kings, First Chronicles, contained in
Matthew's Bible of 1537, and of the Book of Jonah, so excellent,
indeed, that his work is not only the basis of those portions of the
Authorized King James Version of 1611, but constitutes nine-tenths of
that translation, and very largely that of the English Revised
Version of 1885.
In addition to these he produced the following works. His first
original composition, A Pathway into the Holy Scripture, is
really a reprint, slightly altered, of his Prologue to the
quarto edition of his New Testament, and had appeared in separate
form before 1532; The Parable of the Wicked Mammon(1527);
and The Obedience of a Christian Man (1527-28). These
several works drew out in 1529 Sir Thomas More's Dialogue, etc.
In 1530 appeared Tyndale's Practyse of Prelates, and in 1531 his
Answer to the Dialogue, his Exposition of the First Epistle
of St. John, and the famous Prologue to Jonah; in 1532, An
Exposition upon the V. VI. VII. Chapters of Matthew; and in 1536, A
Brief Declaration of the Sacraments, etc., which seems to be a
posthumous publication. Joshua-Second Chronicles also was published
after his death.
All these works were written during those mysterious years, in
places of concealment so secure and well chosen, that neither the
ecclesiastical nor diplomatic emissaries of Wolsey and Henry VIII.,
charged to track, hunt down, and seize the fugitive, were able to
reach them, and they are even yet unknown. Under the idea that the
progress of the Reformation in England rendered it safe for him to
leave his concealment, he settled at Antwerp in 1534, and combined
the work of an evangelist with that of a translator of the Bible.
Tyndale was betrayed by a friend, Philips, the agent either of
Henry or of English ecclesiastics, or possibly of both. Tyndale was
arrested and imprisoned in the castle of Vilvoorden for over 500 days
of horrible conditions. He was tried for heresy and treason in a
ridiculously unfair trial, and convicted. Tyndale was then strangled
and burnt at the stake in the prison yard, Oct. 6, 1536. His last
words were, "Lord, open the king of England's eyes." This
prayer was answered three years later, in the publication of King
Henry VIII’s 1539 English “Great Bible”.
Tyndale's place in history has not yet been sufficiently
recognized as a translator of the Scriptures, as an apostle of
liberty, and as a chief promoter of the Reformation in England. In
all these respects his influence has been singularly under-valued.
The sweeping statement found in almost all histories, that Tyndale
translated from the Vulgate and Luther, is most damaging to the
reputation of the writers who make it; for, as a matter of fact, it
is contrary to truth, since his translations are made directly from
the originals, with the aid of the Erasmus 1516 Greek-Latin New
Testament, and the best available Hebrew texts. The Prolegomena in
Mombert's William Tyndale's Five Books of Moses show
conclusively that Tyndale's Pentateuch is a translation of the Hebrew
original.
Meursault
