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Who Was William Tyndale?

Josh Currie

“Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!”

These are the last recorded words of William Tyndale, spoken as the flames that would quench his life gathered around him. Within a year, Henry VIII, the king who had allowed Tyndale’s execution for the crime of translating the Bible into English, would approve the first official Bible translation into English. Based on much of Tyndale’s translation work, this “Great Bible” would be published in 1539 and chained to every pulpit in England.

Four English sovereigns later, in 1611, another king, James I of England, authorized the text of the translation we know as the King James Version (KJV). This Bible once again relied heavily on the translations Tyndale had endured exile, a continental manhunt, and ultimately martyrdom to produce just a generation earlier.

What changed in England in the 75 years between Tyndale’s execution and the publication of the KJV? It can only be credited to the work of the Spirit who had been revealed again to the English through the scripture Tyndale gave his life to translate.

Who was William Tyndale?

William Tyndale was born in Stinchcombe, England in 1494. This was the Age of Discovery and soon one of Reformation. John Wycliffe, the Lollards, and Erasmus had already sown seeds of a spiritual change in the English church, but in Tyndale’s day the Mass was still conducted in Latin and the Latin Vulgate was ensconced as the only version of the Bible sanctioned by the church. It was a language relatively few in England understood.

Compelled by boyhood stories of English Bible translation, William’s life was, as Melvyn Bragg says, “bound to the renewal of that ancient English aim: English for the English.” He ate and drank scripture and translation, longing to see God’s word in his mother tongue.

In God’s providence, the Tyndale family’s success in the wool trade permitted William to receive an excellent education. By the time his studies at Cambridge were complete, he had earned a reputation as a gifted linguist and for holding views considered to be controversial by the Catholic Church.

What Did William Do?

When the church refused to support Tyndale’s efforts to translate the New Testament, he traveled to Cologne, Germany, where Luther’s Reformation had at least opened the possibility of such a radical project being completed.

But his new continental home wasn’t much more hospitable than England to Tyndale’s New Testament. His printer was raided just as the first pages were being completed. Tyndale fled to Worms. From there his discreet, pocket-sized translation would be smuggled into England where it was instantly banned and Tyndale made out to be an enemy of the church.

With a manhunt for Tyndale now in earnest, he retreated to Marburg to begin his translation of the Old Testament. He moved again, this time to Antwerp, where he completed the Pentateuch. Then disaster struck en route to Hamburg. Tyndale’s ship was wrecked. Although his life was spared, Tyndale's papers were lost.

Meanwhile the hunt for Tyndale was closing in. Several of his friends and others who had been found in possession of his New Testament were executed by the state.

Finally, back in Antwerp, Tyndale was turned in by a fellow Englishman, Henry Phillipps, who had been paid by the church to befriend and betray William Tyndale. He was arrested and imprisoned in the Castle Vilvoorde in 1534. But even then Tyndale’s mission had not reached its end. It is said that his jailer and the jailer’s family all came to know Jesus through Tyndale’s ministry.

Hounded by the very church he sought to revive, William Tyndale was brutally executed outside Vilvoorde in 1536.

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him. (John 12:24–26)  

Tyndale’s Missionary Legacy

Missionary’s first national conference in 2024 will commemorate the 500th anniversary of the first publication of William Tyndale’s English New Testament. It’s worth asking how our mission of educating and inspiring local churches to obey the great commission encompasses celebrating the work of someone who did not serve on the mission field.

While it’s true that William Tyndale was not a missionary, he lived at a time when the church had lost its sense of mission. Although vernacular translation was characteristic of the church’s earliest expansion, by Tyndale’s day the language of the of the church and its Bible was hopelessly obscure to most European Christians. Once upon a time the church had sent  missionaries to the unreached language groups in Europe and to Tyndale’s own England. The churches which those missionaries planted thrived because of the word of God that the missionaries brought with them. That word was translated by the missionaries and preached in the native language. But those days were no more. The Catholic Church had grown distracted, inert, but Tyndale and men like him throughout Europe knew that the church was not finished. They knew that spiritual revitalization would not come from the Pope or from a King, but from the word of God. And Tyndale knew that this cause might demand his life.    

Tyndale’s legacy is an English one––his influence on the English tongue extends through Shakespeare and the KJV to this day––but it is even more so a Christian one. His service as a Bible translator and as a martyr for the gospel had a profound effect on the generations that followed. Tyndale recovered for the church the possibility of clear understanding of God’s word that had been lost. This was not a new invention. Of course, the Latin Vulgate was itself a translation like so many others that had fueled the fire of Christianity which spread throughout the world after Christ’s ascension.

Although Protestant missions work to unreached language groups would take time to reach its flourishing in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, this would not have been possible without Tyndale’s critical reconnection of the church with the heart of the Great Commission. Through Tyndale’s labors that which had invigorated the mission of the church in the beginning would rejuvenate the church’s mission once more.

May it do so once again.

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