TRINITY · 6 OCTOBER Priest, Translator & Martyr
William Tyndale
Priest, Translator & Martyr · Father of the English Bible · c. 1494–1536
Tyndale — TIN-dull · Vilvoorde — VIL-vord · Cologne — koh-LONE · Worms — VORMS · Coverdale — KUV-er-dale · Antwerp — ANT-werp
O God, who by thy servant William didst put the scriptures into the hands of every English-speaking person who could read, and into the ears of every one who could not; Grant that the Word which he died to translate may never be silenced in our hearing, and that his last prayer — Lord, open the King of England’s eyes — may be answered in us; through Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh.
William Tyndale (TIN-dull) was strangled and burned at Vilvoorde (VIL-vord) in the Low Countries on 6 October 1536, having never been allowed to return to the England he had spent his life serving. His last words, spoken at the stake, were: Lord, open the King of England’s eyes. Three years later, by royal decree, an English Bible based substantially on his translation was placed in every parish church in England. Henry VIII never knew that this was what Tyndale had prayed for. The prayer was answered; the man who prayed it was already dead. This is how the tradition works, and why martyrdom is not waste: the seed falls into the ground and dies, and what comes up is the harvest that the martyr was killed for trying to plant. Tyndale is the father of the English Bible, the man who gave the language of scripture to the English-speaking world, and he is in this series alone — as John of Damascus and Thomas à Kempis are alone — because what he achieved is singular and cannot be paired without diminishing it. He did one thing, supremely, and died for it.
He was educated at Oxford and Cambridge, ordained a priest, and possessed from the beginning an extraordinary facility with languages — he was fluent in French, Greek, Hebrew, German, Italian, Spanish, and Latin — combined with an absolute conviction that the scriptures must be available in English to every person in England, however humble. When he sought permission from the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, to undertake the translation, he was refused. He went to the continent, settled briefly in Cologne (koh-LONE) and then in Worms (VORMS), and in 1526 printed the first complete New Testament in English and had it smuggled into England in bales of cloth. The authorities burned every copy they could find. Tyndale printed more. He translated the Pentateuch and much of the Old Testament before his arrest in Antwerp (ANT-werp) in 1535, betrayed by an English Catholic agent named Henry Phillips. He was imprisoned in the castle of Vilvoorde for sixteen months, continued to work during his imprisonment, and was condemned for heresy. His New Testament alone went through eighteen editions in his lifetime, and when the King James translators sat down in 1604 they used Tyndale’s text as their primary source: scholars estimate that between eighty and ninety per cent of the King James New Testament is Tyndale’s wording, lightly revised. Every time an English-speaking person has heard In the beginning was the Word, or the word of the Lord endureth for ever, or the signs of the times, or fight the good fight, or the salt of the earth, or let there be light — they have heard William Tyndale.
His great quarrel with Thomas More (MOR) — the two most gifted prose writers of early Tudor England, locked in a pamphlet war that fills several volumes — was at its heart a dispute about whether the Church or the individual Christian is the primary bearer of the scriptures. More insisted that the Church gave the Bible its authority and must govern its interpretation; Tyndale insisted that the scripture governs the Church, not the Church the scripture, and that a translation accessible to every ploughboy was therefore not a threat to the faith but its fullest expression. He was right, in the sense that the subsequent history of the English-speaking world has vindicated him beyond any reasonable argument. But More was not entirely wrong either, and the tension between the two positions — the scripture as the Church’s book, given to the individual through the community, versus the scripture as the individual’s direct access to God — is a tension that runs through the whole of Anglican history and has never been entirely resolved, nor perhaps should be. The argument between Tyndale and More is the argument that the Anglican tradition has been having with itself ever since, and both voices are needed for the argument to be conducted honestly.
His feast falls on 6 October in Trinity-tide, sharing the week with Francis of Assisi — which is entirely fitting, for both men stripped themselves of everything the world offers and went out with nothing but the Word. Tyndale’s poverty was literal: he spent twelve years on the continent in exile, sometimes destitute, sustained by the patronage of English merchants in Antwerp and by the absolute conviction that what he was doing was necessary and that no power on earth should stop him. His last prayer at Vilvoorde — Lord, open the King of England’s eyes — is the most Anglican of all martyrs’ last words: not a prayer for his own soul or a curse on his persecutors or a theological statement, but a practical, specific petition for the one thing that would allow the work to continue. Three years later it was answered. The King’s eyes were opened. The Bible was placed in every church. Every collect in the archive we have been building — every sentence Cranmer shaped, every prayer offered in the Lauds service, every meditation we have written — stands on the foundation that William Tyndale laid at the cost of his life. The English Bible is the ground beneath all Anglican prayer, and he is the man who dug it.
O Almighty God, who by thy servant William Tyndale didst put the scriptures into the hands of thy people in the tongue they were born to, and didst seal that gift with his death at Vilvoorde; Grant that we may never take for granted the Word we hold so lightly, nor forget the price at which it was purchased; and may the prayer he died praying — that the eyes of England might be opened — be answered in us this day; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.