This year is the 500^th anniversary of the publication of William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament into English. He then began working on the Old Testament, but was killed before he could complete it. Wycliffe and his followers had already translated the whole Bible in the fourteenth century, but this and all other translations of parts of the Bible, such as the tenth century translation of the Gospels by the Anglo-Saxons, had used Jerome’s Latin Bible, commonly known as the Vulgate. This, translated from the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New, had become the standard Bible in Western Christendom. But the new scholarship of the Renaissance introduced the systematic study of the biblical text itself, alongside its long-standing interpretation in the context of faith. It was an approach spearheaded by Erasmus who, in 1516, published a Greek New Testament based on a careful examination of the earliest Greek texts that he could find. Using his new Greek text, Erasmus also published a fresh translation into Latin, which highlighted issues with the Vulgate – and thus, of course, by implication, with all translations made from it. When Martin Luther took the revolutionary step of translating the Bible into German, he translated  the New Testament directly from Greek, using Erasmus’s modern edition. Luther’s translation was published in 1522. Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples then did the same for French, in 1524.

 Tyndale, born in Gloucestershire c.1494, studied at Oxford and then at Cambridge where, from August 1511 to January 1512, Erasmus had famously taught Greek. Around 1521 Tyndale became chaplain in the household of Sir John Walsh in Little Sodbury, Gloucestershire, and while there he began to translate the New Testament into English, basing his work on Erasmus’s scholarly Greek edition and using Luther’s translation as a guide. Like others who were inclined to reform, he believed that everyone should be able to read or listen to the Bible in their own language. But there was a problem. Since the early fifteenth century there had been a law in England forbidding the publication of the Bible in English without the permission of a bishop, so Tyndale made application to Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, evidently anticipating that he might be sympathetic since he was a friend of Erasmus and had helped him with his Greek New Testament. Howwever,Tunstall refused, perhaps anxious about the growing impetus for reform. Without episcopal permission, it would have been illegal to publish his translation in England, so Tyndale went to Germany and continued his work in Wittenberg, where in 1517 Luther had in effect launched the Reformation. He then went to Cologne, hoping for publication there, but difficulties meant that he moved on to Worms, where publication was completed in 1526. Copies were smuggled into England along the trade routes between England and Germany, but there was a concerted campaign to confiscate and burn them and now only three copies of his 1526 edition are known to exist, two of them in England. An improved text was issued in 1534. Tyndale was arrested, strangled and burnt at the stake near Brussels in October 1536.

Tyndale’s New Testament was the first to be translated into English from Greek and the first to have been printed. More significantly still, it was heavily used by the translators of the King James Bible in 1611. This means that most of the words and expressions in our everyday speech that come from the New Testament aren’t original to the King James Bible, but are those of Tyndale.   

Joyce Hill