William Tyndale

Life

Tyndale was born in Gloucestershire in western England; his birth year is generally given as around 1494. He studied at the University of Oxford and is also believed to have spent time at Cambridge. In the early 1520s, while serving as a tutor in the household of a gentry family in Gloucestershire, he entered into disputes with members of the clergy. According to a well-known anecdote, he declared during this period that he would cause "a boy that driveth the plough" to know more of the Scriptures than his opponent did.

At the time, translating the Bible into English without authorization was prohibited in England. In 1523 Tyndale asked Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London, to sponsor his translation, but he was refused. The following year he went to the Continent, and he never returned to England. In 1535 he was betrayed by an Englishman in Antwerp, arrested, and imprisoned in Vilvoorde Castle near Brussels. In October of the following year he was condemned as a heretic, strangled, and then burned at the stake. His last words are traditionally reported as "Lord, open the King of England's eyes."

Ministry and Achievements

• Translation of the New Testament: Printing began in Cologne in 1525 but was halted by the authorities; the work was completed at Worms in 1526. Whereas earlier English translations had been manuscripts rendered from the Latin Vulgate, Tyndale's was the first printed English New Testament translated directly from the original Greek. Copies were smuggled into England and read there, while the authorities confiscated and burned them. He published a revised edition in 1534.
• Translation of the Old Testament: Having learned Hebrew, he published the Pentateuch in 1530 and went on to translate the book of Jonah and other portions. He did not complete the entire Old Testament.
• Writings: His works include The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528). He emphasized the authority of Scripture and salvation through faith, and he is regarded as having been influenced by Martin Luther.
• Vocabulary: He is known to have coined or popularized English words such as "Passover," "atonement," and "scapegoat."

His translation passed through Matthew's Bible, the Great Bible, and the Geneva Bible to become the foundation of the 1611 King James Bible. A substantial portion of the King James New Testament is known to follow Tyndale's wording directly.

Influence on the Korean Church

Tyndale had no direct connection with the Korean church. However, the British and American missionaries who came to Korea had been formed in the English Bible tradition that led to the King James Bible, and Tyndale's translation stands at the beginning of that tradition. In the Korean church, his conviction that ordinary people should read the Bible in their own language is often presented alongside the spirit of Korean Bible translation. In discussions of the history of Bible translation and distribution, he is frequently cited as "a man who gave his life to translate the Bible."

Assessment

Protestants honor him as a martyr of the Reformation and regard him as a pioneer in rendering the Bible into the language of ordinary people. His contemporary Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, denounced him as a heretic. More argued that Tyndale's rendering of "church" as "congregation" and "priest" as "elder" constituted deliberate mistranslation intended to undermine the institutions of the church. Tyndale replied that these renderings were faithful to the meaning of the original Greek. Critics also charged that the marginal notes (commentary placed in the margins beside the text) in his translations were polemical. Today, across denominational lines, it is widely acknowledged that his translation exerted a profound influence on the history of English Bible translation and on English prose style.