Who was William Tyndale?
William Tyndale (ca 1494 – 1536), an Oxford scholar, translated the New Testament from its original Greek into English for everyone to read. He worked at a time when, in England, to own a Bible in anything but Latin was punishable by torture and death. Very few people knew any Latin at all. With the exception of the popular narratives portrayed in mystery plays, much of the content of the Bible was unknown. In his native Gloucestershire, a cleric had told Tyndale that ‘We were better without God’s law than the Pope’s’, to which he famously replied that if God spared his life, before many years he would ‘cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of Scripture than thou dost.’ Though forced to work abroad, alone and in poverty and danger, Tyndale succeeded. His printed pocket-size New Testaments, smuggled into Britain from 1526, were eagerly read and heard, even by ploughboys. When no other Englishman knew Hebrew, Tyndale learned the language in Germany, and his Old Testament tr
William Tyndale was a 16th-century scholar and church reformer who translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into the modern English of the day which then was published and distributed widely. In 1535, Tyndale was imprisoned in Holland for a year, then tried for heresy and burned at the stake. Much of Tyndale’s work eventually found its way into the King James Version of the Bible which was published in 1611.
He was a scholar and theologian who was born in Gloucestershire at the end of the 15th century. Tyndale was educated at Oxford and then at Cambridge. An impressive scholar, fluent in eight languages, he was ordained as a Christian priest in around 1521. Tyndale returned to Gloucestershire to serve as chaplain and tutor to Sir John Walsh and his family. This work enabled him to continue his study of religious texts. During that time he translated a tract by Desiderius Erasmus, a Dutchman whose writings argued for personal faith: a direct relationship between the individual and God, not one mediated and controlled by the Church hierarchy. When Tyndale shared such controversial views in debate with local clergy, it was just a matter of time before he came to the attention of the Church authorities. He was called to appear at the bishop’s court before William of Malvern, Chancellor of Worcester Diocese (which before 1541 included Gloucestershire (the county of Tyndale’s origin). Thanks to
What influence could a poor scholar of 500 years ago have on the English-speaking world today? The answer is, much! In this paper I will endeavor to answer the two questions above, with emphasis given in the second question to Tyndale’s influence on all subsequent versions of the Bible (after his). Contrary to popular legend, Tyndale was not the son of paupers or beggars, but the son of a rather well to do clothes merchant who lived in the land of Gloucestershire, England. Sailors, travelers, and traders came to the region from countries such as Germany, France, Italy, and India. They came for the “white wool of the Cotswold sheep” (Daniell, 1994, p.14), bringing their culture and their language to young William’s town. This is crucial for understanding where Tyndale’s knack for languages originated. Indeed, as one of his recent biographers has pointed out, other masters of the English language came from places “on the edges of other cultures and other tongues”(Daniell, 1994, p. 13) in
Do you know who William Tyndale was? Learn all about this great man with this William Tyndale lens. Tags: bible translators, christians, william tyndale This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
