William Tyndale

What He Did

In the early sixteenth century, England was a Christian country whose people could not read their own Scriptures. The Bible existed in Latin, the language of the educated clergy. Ordinary Englishmen, including most parish priests, could not read it. They received what the church told them it said.

This was, for many, fine. For William Tyndale, it was intolerable.

Tyndale was a Cambridge-trained linguist with a mother-tongue gift. He believed that the gospel could not be obeyed unless it could be read by the people to whom it was addressed. He sought authorization from the Bishop of London to produce an English translation. The bishop refused. Tyndale realized the project would not be done legally.

So he did it illegally.

He fled to the European Continent in 1524. He worked in hiding, moving between cities — Hamburg, Cologne, Worms, Antwerp — staying ahead of English agents who were sent to find him. He printed the first complete English New Testament in 1526. Copies were smuggled into England in bales of cloth and barrels of grain. The bishops bought them up and burned them publicly. Tyndale used the money the bishops paid for confiscated copies to fund the printing of corrected, improved editions.

He kept going. He translated portions of the Old Testament — the Pentateuch, Jonah, parts of the historical books. He wrote theological works. He turned out, year after year, the words ordinary Englishmen had not been allowed to read.

In 1535, he was betrayed in Antwerp by Henry Phillips, an English agent who had befriended him for that purpose. He was arrested, imprisoned at Vilvoorde Castle near Brussels for sixteen months, tried for heresy, and condemned.

On a day in October 1536, he was tied to a stake in the courtyard of Vilvoorde. As an act of relative mercy, he was strangled before the fire was lit. According to the historian John Foxe, his last words were a prayer:

Three years later, in 1539, Henry VIII authorized the Great Bible — the first English Bible legally permitted in every English parish church. It was drawn substantially from Tyndale's translation. Within seventy-five years, the King James Version of 1611 was published; modern scholars estimate roughly 75 percent of its English is Tyndale's.

Every English-speaking Christian who has ever read a Bible has read William Tyndale.

Why It Belongs Here

Tyndale's standing was not loud. It did not happen in an arena. It happened at a desk, in a series of rented rooms, over twelve years, doing slow scholarly work that he knew was going to get him killed.

That is the kind of standing most Christian men never consider, because they are looking for a moment of obvious heroism. Tyndale's heroism was the daily decision to keep going to the desk. He did it for over a decade. The arena, when it came, was almost an afterthought. The work was the standing.

“Forever, O Lord, Your word is settled in heaven.” Psalm 119:89

Tyndale believed this. He believed that the Word of God, once available to ordinary men, would do its own work. He did not need to be alive to see it. He needed to get the Word into the language. The rest belonged to God.

His prayer for the king's eyes was answered three years later. Tyndale never saw it. He did not need to.

The man who plants the orchard he will never eat from is, in a real sense, the most masculine kind of laborer there is. He works for sons he will not meet. He builds for a kingdom he will not enter on this side of glory. Tyndale planted an orchard the entire English-speaking church has been eating from for five hundred years.

He died for words. The words outlived empires.