Before the 1520s there was an English Bible, but it was a manuscript Bible translated from Latin, and owning it without permission was dangerous (see John Wycliffe and the first English Bible). The first English New Testament translated directly from the Greek, and the first to be printed, was the work of one man, William Tyndale. He did most of it in exile, in hiding, and he was put to death for it.

Tyndale’s story has been told many times, sometimes with more heat than accuracy. This article keeps to what can be known, and notes where the familiar story depends on a single early source.

A scholar from Gloucestershire

Tyndale was born around 1494, probably in Gloucestershire, in the west of England. He studied at Oxford, where he took his BA in 1512 and his MA in 1515. Later tradition, going back to the martyrologist John Foxe, says he then spent time at Cambridge; that is possible, but there is no firm record of it. He was a gifted linguist, and he learned Greek well at a time when few in England could read it.

In the early 1520s he worked as tutor to the children of Sir John Walsh at Little Sodbury Manor, near Bristol. Foxe tells a famous story from these years. In an argument with a churchman who said it was better to be without God’s law than the pope’s, Tyndale is said to have replied:

If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the scripture than thou dost.

The words come from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (first English edition 1563), written about forty years later. They may have been polished in the retelling, but they capture what Tyndale wanted: scripture in the language of ordinary people, read by ordinary people.

No room in England

To translate and print the Bible in English, Tyndale needed a patron. In 1523 he went to London and asked Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London and a respected scholar of Greek, to support him. Tunstall turned him down. Since the Constitutions of Oxford (drafted in 1407 and issued in 1409), it had been forbidden to make or own an English translation of scripture without a bishop’s approval, and the bishops had become more anxious still once Luther’s ideas began to reach England.

Tyndale concluded, as he later wrote, that there was no place to do the work in all England. In 1524 he left for Germany. He may have visited Wittenberg, where Luther’s German New Testament had appeared in 1522, though the evidence is indirect.

Cologne, then Worms

In 1525 Tyndale and his assistant, William Roye, began printing an English New Testament in Cologne. Before it was finished, an opponent of the Reformation, Johannes Cochlaeus, learned of the work and alerted the city authorities, and the print shop was raided. Tyndale and Roye escaped with some of the printed sheets. A single incomplete copy of this first attempt survives in the British Library: the Cologne fragment, containing a prologue and part of Matthew.

They moved up the Rhine to Worms, where the printer Peter Schoeffer completed a small, plain, pocket-sized New Testament in 1526. It was translated from Erasmus’s Greek New Testament (see From manuscripts to printed Bibles), with help from Erasmus’s Latin and Luther’s German. Copies were smuggled into England in bales of cloth and other cargo.

The authorities tried to stop it. Tunstall preached against it, and copies were publicly burned at St Paul’s Cross in London in 1526. Agents bought up copies abroad to destroy them, which, by a well-known irony, helped pay for further printings. How many copies of the 1526 edition were printed is not known; figures of 3,000 or 6,000 are often given but are estimates. Only three copies are known to survive: a complete copy in the British Library, a nearly complete copy found in 1996 in the Württemberg State Library in Stuttgart, and a damaged, incomplete copy at St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

Words that caused a storm

Tyndale’s translation was not only illegal; some of its word choices were seen as an attack on the church itself. Four were especially controversial:

  • For the Greek ekklesia, he wrote congregation rather than “church.”
  • For presbyteros, he wrote senior (later elder) rather than “priest.”
  • For agape, he wrote love rather than “charity.”
  • For metanoeo, he wrote repent rather than “do penance.”

Each of these can be defended from the Greek, and modern translations commonly follow Tyndale on most of them. But in the 1520s they were not neutral. “Repent” instead of “do penance” seemed to deny the sacrament of penance; “congregation” and “elder” seemed to undercut the authority of the church and its priesthood. Tyndale’s marginal notes and prologues, which drew openly on Luther, made the polemical purpose clearer still.

The most formidable critic was Thomas More, the humanist scholar and later Lord Chancellor. In his Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529) he argued that Tyndale’s choices were deliberate mistranslations designed to spread heresy. Tyndale answered in An Answer unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue (1531), and More replied at enormous length in his Confutation (1532–33). Both men wrote with a harshness that is uncomfortable to read today. Historians still differ on how to judge the exchange: some see More defending the unity of the church against real danger, others see Tyndale defending the plain sense of the Greek. Both were sincere, and both died for their convictions. More was executed in 1535 for refusing to accept Henry VIII as head of the English church.

You can see the difference at 1 Corinthians 13:13, where the King James Version later returned to the older word: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” A modern translation such as the World English Bible reads, like Tyndale, “The greatest of these is love.”

Hebrew and the Old Testament

Having finished the New Testament, Tyndale learned Hebrew, rare enough among English scholars at that time, and began on the Old Testament. His translation of the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, was printed in Antwerp in 1530, under a false imprint naming “Marlborow in the land of Hesse.” The book of Jonah followed in 1531. In 1534 he published a thoroughly revised New Testament, which many scholars regard as his finest work.

Tyndale’s prose was plain, rhythmic and close to speech. He tended to use short, native English words and to keep the word order and directness of the Hebrew and Greek where English allowed. Many phrases still familiar in English first appeared, or first took their lasting form, in his translations, among them “let there be light,” “the powers that be” and “the salt of the earth.” Some of his renderings are more homely than later translators liked. In Genesis 3:4 his serpent tells Eve, “Tush, ye shall not die,” where the World English Bible has “You won’t really die.”

Betrayal and death

From about 1534 Tyndale lived in Antwerp, in the house of the English merchants, where he had some protection. In May 1535 he was betrayed by Henry Phillips, a young Englishman who had won his trust, and arrested by officers of the Holy Roman Emperor. Who paid or encouraged Phillips has never been established with certainty.

Tyndale was imprisoned for about a year and a half in the castle of Vilvoorde, near Brussels. A letter in his hand survives from his imprisonment, asking for warmer clothing, a lamp in the evenings, and his Hebrew Bible, grammar and dictionary. He was tried for heresy, condemned, and in early October 1536 strangled and his body burned. Foxe reports his last words as a prayer: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” As with the ploughboy saying, we have it only from Foxe, but it is consistent with what we know of him.

The irony that followers of Tyndale have long noted is that within a few years Henry VIII’s government was authorising English Bibles that were largely Tyndale’s work (see From Coverdale to Geneva: the English Bibles before 1611).

Tyndale inside the King James Version

Tyndale’s wording passed through Coverdale’s, Matthew’s, the Great and the Geneva Bibles into the King James Version of 1611 (see The King James Version). The King James translators were told to follow the Bishops’ Bible and consult earlier versions; in practice a great deal of Tyndale survived.

How much? In a 1998 study, Jon Nielson and Royal Skousen compared samples of the texts and estimated that about 84 percent of the King James New Testament, and about 76 percent of the Old Testament books Tyndale translated, is his wording. Such figures depend on how one counts, and others have given different estimates, but the broad conclusion is widely shared: much of the language people think of as “King James English” was Tyndale’s first.

Tyndale and Open Word Bible

Open Word Bible shares some of Tyndale’s aims. It translates from the Hebrew and Greek rather than from another translation, and it wants scripture to be readable by anyone, which is why it offers a Readable level as well as a Literal and a Balanced one (see Literal, Balanced, Readable: three levels, one meaning).

Tyndale’s controversies also show why the project records its reasoning. “Love” or “charity,” “repent” or “do penance,” “congregation” or “church”: each is a decision about meaning, and readers deserve to see the alternatives and the reasons rather than receive the result alone. The decisions in Open Word Bible are drafted with AI assistance and are waiting for named human reviewers; none of them is yet marked reviewed. But they are all open to inspection and challenge, and the text is free for anyone to use.

Sources

  • Daniell, David. William Tyndale: A Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
  • Daniell, David. The Bible in English: Its History and Influence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
  • Daniell, David, ed. Tyndale’s New Testament. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
  • Daniell, David, ed. Tyndale’s Old Testament. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
  • Mozley, J. F. William Tyndale. London: SPCK, 1937.
  • Nielson, Jon, and Royal Skousen. “How Much of the King James Bible Is William Tyndale’s? An Estimation Based on Sampling.” Reformation 3 (1998): 49–74.
  • Norton, David. The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
  • More, Thomas. A Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529). In The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 6. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.
  • Foxe, John. Acts and Monuments (“Foxe’s Book of Martyrs”). London: John Day, 1563, and later editions.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article quotes a historic translation.