The Most Read Author

Who's the most read writer in the history of the English language? William Shakespeare? Geoffrey Chaucer? Charles Dickens? Nope. The answer is William Tyndale--the man who first printed the New Testament in English.

In the Beginning . . .

William Tyndale was born into a well-connected family in Gloucestershire, England, just before the turn of the 16th century. We don't know much about his early life, but we know that he received an excellent education, studying for some 10 years under Renaissance humanists at Oxford.

By the time he left Oxford, around 1521, Tyndale had mastered Greek, Latin, and several other languages (contemporary accounts say he spoke eight). He had also become both an ordained priest and a dedicated proponent of church reform--a "protestant," before that word existed. All he needed now was a vocation. He found one, thanks in part to Desiderius Erasmus.

Sources of the Word

Erasmus, one of Europe's leading intellectual lights, had caused a stir in 1516 by publishing a brand-new Latin translation of the New Testament--one that departed significantly from the Vulgate, the "common" Latin translation the Catholic church had used for a millennium. Knowing that many readers saw the Vulgate as the immutable Word of God, Erasmus decided to publish his source text--a New Testament in Greek, compiled from sources older than the Vulgate--in a column right next to his Latin translation.

It was a momentous decision. For the first time, European scholars trained in Greek gained easy access to biblical "originals." Now they could make their own translations straight from the original language of the New Testament. In 1522, Martin Luther did just that, translating from the Greek into German. Around the same time, William Tyndale decided to publish an English-language Bible--one so accessible that "a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the scripture" than a priest.

One problem: the Catholic church in England had forbidden vernacular English Bibles in 1408, after handwritten copies of a translation by John Wyclif (an earlier Oxford scholar) had circulated beyond the archbishop's control. Some of the manuscripts survived and continued to circulate, but they were officially off-limits. Translating the Bible into English without permission was a serious crime, punishable by death.

The Word Made English

Undeterred, Tyndale tried to win approval for his project from the bishop of London. When that didn't work, he found financial backers in London's merchant community and moved to Hamburg, Germany. In 1525, he met briefly with Martin Luther in Wittenberg. Then he went to Cologne to begin printing his new translation. When authorities in Cologne shut him down, Tyndale fled to Worms. There, in 1526, he finally completed the first-ever printed New Testament in English.

It was a small volume, an actual "pocket book," designed to fit into the clothes and life of that ploughboy. That made it fairly easy to smuggle. Soon Bible runners were carrying contraband scriptures into England inside bales of cloth. For the first time, English readers encountered "the powers that be," "the salt of the earth," and the need to "fight the good fight"--all phrases that Tyndale turned. For the first time, they read, in clear, printed English, "Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen."

Infuriated, the bishop of London confiscated and destroyed as many copies of Tyndale's New Testament as he could. Meanwhile, English authorities called for Tyndale's immediate arrest for heresy. Tyndale went into hiding, revised his New Testament, and--after learning Hebrew--began translating the Old Testament, too. Before long, copies of a small volume titled The First Book of Moses Called Genesis started showing up on English shelves.

Spreading the Word

Tyndale never finished his Old Testament. He was captured in Antwerp in 1535 and charged with heresy. The next year, he was executed by strangulation and burned at the stake. Yet others picked up his work, and Tyndale's version of the Word lived on. In fact, practically every English translation of the Bible that followed took its lead from Tyndale--including the 1611 King James Version. According to one study, 83 percent of that version's New Testament is unaltered Tyndale, even though a team of scholars had years to rework it.

The reason is simple. Tyndale's English translation was clear, concise, and remarkably powerful. Where the Vulgate had Fiat lux, et lux erat, Wyclif's old version slavishly read "Be made light, and made is light." Not exactly stirring. But Tyndale's translation of the same passage is still familiar to nearly every reader of English: "Then God said: 'Let there be light,' and there was light." Subsequent English writers may have been more original, but none wrote words that reached more folks than these.

Steve Sampson
December 8, 2005

-- Source: Knowledge News