A legacy even bigger than Luther’s
Melvyn Bragg tells the astonishing story of William Tyndale, the brains behind the King James Bible
In 1517 in Germany, Luther set Christianity on fire.
His Ninety-five Theses, which attacked the Roman Catholic Church with an unprecedented radicalism, violence and scholarship, threatened to destroy the authority and wealth of a religious system which had become an empire since the time of Constantine. His arguments turned the Church’s
raison d’être to dust. His followers rose up in riots; there were slaughters which were to last for centuries.
Meanwhile, in 1517 England, William Tyndale had set himself – against the law – to go back to the original Greek New Testament and translate it into English accessible to the illiterate and literate. By an unanticipated consequence his translation made him, according to medieval historian Ian Mortimer, “the only writer in the English language more influential than Shakespeare”.
In the course of doing this, Tyndale became the most feared man in Henry VIII’S England. After fleeing for the Continent in 1524, he was pursued in exile by the intelligence systems of his own country, the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor.
Tyndale’s influence was to supersede that of Luther. There is no question that the brutal and scholarly volcanic eruption that came from the German monk was key to the Reformation. But once it spread to other countries, they were to have their own champions. And once Protestantism spread around the world, via two accidents of Empire – British and American – it was the English version of the Scriptures in the King James Bible which prevailed and led to global Protestantism.
The English version was Tyndale’s. Ninety-three per cent of the King James Bible is from his translation. In the Reformation’s 500th anniversary year, Tyndale deserves as much, if not more recognition than his German contemporary. He had an unlikely background for such a revolutionary spirit. His family were wealthy wool merchants in the West Country. He was educated at Oxford, was a patriot and a monarchist but he could not believe that the King was so “unkind” to his people that he did not let them read God’s word in their own language. Vernacular translations were all over Europe by the 1520s: in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Czechoslovakia. England stood truculently alone: stuck with St Jerome’s Latin of 381, which was held to be so sacred, so untouchable, that it must never be criticised.
Erasmus, Luther and Tyndale thought it was inadequate. For Henry VIII, its exclusivity gave it authority and its limited readership gave it a status even greater than Magna Carta.
In England, many from the mercantile gentry and the artisan class, like Tyndale, were critical of the Catholic Church and their clergy’s laxness, some of whom could not even recite the Lord’s Prayer.
Tyndale would have nothing to do with anything not in the Scriptures: so no pope, no pilgrimages, and above all no sale of indulgences – the Church’s biggest money-spinner.
Tyndale had vowed that he would teach “a ploughboy to know the Bible as well as any bishop”, leading him to write a Bible to be read aloud as well as alone. When his New Testament arrived in London in mid-1520, sent from Tyndale on the Continent, it was welcomed by the people but feared by the Church. The Bishop of London bought 3,000 copies and burned them in front of the old St Paul’s. Yet they were still smuggled in and widely read.
Soon, people replaced books in the flames. From the end of the 1520s, the fires began to turn on those thought to be Protestants. London became a network of informers. The skies of the city were polluted with the smoke of human flesh. Yet it seemed that nothing could stop the influence of this turbulent Protestant priest.
Tyndale was subjected to a vicious attack by Sir Thomas More (later Saint Thomas). Henry VIII enlisted this brilliant scholar to destroy Tyndale’s reputation. More took on this task as a duty and pursued it with the scarcely credible cruelty and malice of a zealot.
It was reported that he had a Tree of Truth in his gardens. Suspects would be tied to it and whipped, often by More himself. They would be taken to the Tower and tortured. You could be arrested for knowing Tyndale, having been seen with him, quoting him or, worst of all, having Tyndale’s bible.
Lord Chancellor More’s fear for a Protestant future was total. “If Tyndale’s Testament be taken up,” he wrote “then shall false heresies be preached, then shall the sacrament be set at naught … then shall Almighty God be displeased, then shall He withdraw His grace and let all run to ruin … then will rise up rifling and robbery, murder and mischief and plain insurrection … then shall all laws be laughed to scorn …” To More, and his fellow Catholics, the failings, indulgences, corruptions and excesses of the Church were a small price to pay for its delivery of the truth, faith and its promise of eternal salvation.
Tyndale’s radicalism was in his translation. For example, from the Latin Vulgate, the English translation of the place of worship was “the church”. In Tyndale’s view, from the Greek, the word “Eklesia” was not “church” but “congregation” – not a building or earthly property but an assembly of people of souls equal under God. And he translated “Presbyteros” not as “priest” but as “elder”– Christians, he said, needed no such intermediary; Christ was the only intermediary between themselves and God. In those two words, Tyndale sent a wrecking ball through centuries of authority.
Hiding in Germany and Belgium, Tyndale knew that to set foot on English soil – despite politic promises of Thomas Cromwell and the rumoured sympathy of Anne Boleyn – would be to face, under Henry VIII and Thomas More, a public trial and death. He was afraid of neither. But what would it serve?
Messages were sent and Stephen Vaughan, a sympathetic diplomat, met him in woods outside of Antwerp. Tyndale made Vaughan an extraordinary offer. He would return to England and face any trial, and accept execution, provided that the King authorised a translation of the bible into English. It need not be his on which he had laboured a lifetime, but any translation at all. Vaughan took the request back to London … but there was no reply.
Betrayed by a fellow Englishman in Antwerp, Tyndale was finally captured by guards of the Holy Roman Emperor, imprisoned for 16 months in a medieval castle outside Brussels, stripped of his status as a priest, tormented by 17 interrogators, and abandoned in a damp underground cell.
On October 6 1536, he was paraded through the streets – and burned.
By then, King Henry VIII had commissioned a bible in English. It was his last cruel blow to Tyndale that his was not considered. The Coverdale Bible, the Matthew Bible and others in the 16th century followed up to the King James in 1611. What they have in common is that all of them plagiarised Tyndale’s work. In Shakespeare, there are over 1,300 references to Tyndale’s words which are reproduced in the plagiarised Bibles the Bard would have heard.
The English version of Protestantism, fed at its source by Tyndale, became the quarry in which millions found truth in their faith. His words provoked democracy, enriched liberty and literature, and are a magnificent global cultural achievement.
Melvyn Bragg’s William Tyndale: A Very
Brief History (SPCK Publishing) is out now