COLOGNE, Germany – Five hundred years ago, English evangelical William Tyndale fled for safety from the city of Cologne, Germany. Catholic authorities were eager to arrest him and stamp out his work. His crime? Translating the Greek New Testament into the English language.
It’s a goal he nearly achieved in 1525. Almost 22 chapters of Matthew’s Gospel had already come off the press when Tyndale was discovered by authorities. Chased out of Cologne, he fled to Worms, Germany, carrying with him this fragment of Matthew’s Gospel, known today as the “Cologne Fragment.” These were the first pages of the New Testament ever to be translated from the original Greek and printed in the English language.
The following year, in the city of Worms, Tyndale completed his work – printing the first complete English New Testament to be translated from the original Greek.
According to church historian Joseph Garner, vice president for academic affairs at Hannibal-LaGrange University (HLGU), Tyndale’s achievement shaped English Bible translation for the next 500 years.
Joseph Garner
“Tyndale’s translation was the first domino to fall that led to the transformation of both the English language and the English church,” Garner told The Pathway. “His careful rendering of Scripture from the Greek gave English-speaking Christians a vocabulary of faith that still shapes preaching, worship, and devotion today. The King James Version and nearly every English Bible since stand in his debt.”
Born in the early 1490s, Tyndale studied at Oxford University and as a young man became convinced that Christians couldn’t live by the truth of their faith without access to the vernacular Bible. Though he tried to gain support from church leaders to produce an English translation, the odds of his doing so on English soil were stacked against him.
“When Tyndale began his work, the Bible was locked into Jerome’s late fourth-century Latin Vulgate translation, accessible almost exclusively to clergy and scholars,” Garner said. “Since 1401 and the suppression of John Wycliffe and the Lollards, the translation of the Bible into English was banned by both the crown and the Roman church in England.”
Still, Tyndale was determined that every English man and woman should have God’s Word. Debating with a “learned man” who preferred the “pope’s law” to “God’s law,” Tyndale declared, “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.”
Even so, in 1524, he went into exile from England so that he could give the gift of God’s Word in English to the men and women of England. During the next decade, he not only translated the New Testament, but he also printed the first English translation of the Pentateuch (in 1530), as well as the Prophet Jonah. In 1534, he printed a revision of his New Testament. He also continued translating the historical books of the Old Testament, but he never had the chance to put them into print.
Malcolm Yarnell
Betrayed by a fellow Englishman in the city of Antwerp, in the Netherlands, Tyndale was arrested in 1535. The following year, on Oct. 6, 1536, he was strangled to death and burnt at the stake in modern-day Belgium. According to the martyrologist John Foxe, his dying prayer was that the king would allow the people of England to have the Bible in their own language.
Unbeknownst to Tyndale, God was already beginning to answer Tyndale’s prayer. In the years of Tyndale’s imprisonment and following his death, King Henry VIII of England allowed the circulation of English Bible translations. Though it wasn’t acknowledged at the time, the translations were largely the work of Tyndale, revised and completed by his friends. Passed along through these and later English translations, roughly 90 percent of Tyndale’s New Testament would, in 1611, be adopted by the translators of the King James Version.
Malcolm Yarnell, a historian of the English Reformation and research professor of theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, highlighted the broad impact of Tyndale’s work.
“Tyndale’s end goal—universal access to the Word of God—was the impetus that compelled northern Europe and North America not only to embrace the Protestant Reformation but to foster the Modern Missions Movement,” Yarnell told The Pathway. “The deep impact of Scripture upon the Western worldview, and the West’s beneficial influences upon the rest of the world, depend upon the work of Tyndale and believers like him.”
HLGU’s Garner added, “Tyndale’s life challenges modern believers to treasure the Word of God with renewed devotion. …
“His vision of an accessible and necessary Word continues to press the church toward the Great Commission: to translate, teach, and proclaim the gospel so that all may hear in the language of their nation.”
WORMS, Germany – In 1526, working with a printer in Worms, Germany, William Tyndale published the first English New Testament to be translated from the original Greek language. Shown here is the first page from the Gospel of Matthew, as reprinted by late Tyndale scholar David Daniell in a high quality 2008 facsimile edition of Tyndale’s 1526 New Testament. Tyndale’s 1526 translation of the Gospel of Matthew is also available in an audiobook format, read by linguist David Crystal in a reconstructed 16th-century accent. (Pathway photo)