William Tyndale

William Tyndale (born c. 1490–94, near Gloucestershire, England—died October 6, 1536, Vilvoorde, near Brussels, Brabant) was an English biblical translator, humanist, and Protestant martyr.

Tyndale was educated at the University of Oxford and became an instructor at the University of Cambridge, where, in 1521, he fell in with a group of humanist scholars meeting at the White Horse Inn. Tyndale became convinced that the Bible alone should determine the practices and doctrines of the church and that all believers should be able to read the Bible in their own language.

Because of the influence of printing and a demand for Scriptures in the vernacular, William Tyndale began working on a New Testament translation directly from the Greek in 1523. After church authorities in England prevented him from translating the Bible there, he went to Germany in 1524, receiving financial support from wealthy London merchants. His New Testament translation was completed in July 1525 and printed at Cologne. Again under pressure, this time from the city authorities, Tyndale fled to Worms, where two more editions were published in 1525. The first copies were smuggled into England in 1526, where they were at once proscribed.

When the New Testament was finished, Tyndale began work on the Old Testament. The Pentateuch was issued in Marburg in 1530, each of the five books being separately published and circulated. Tyndale continued to work on the Old Testament translation but was captured in Antwerp before it was completed. Condemned for heresy, he was executed by strangulation and then burned at the stake at Vilvoorde in 1536.

At the time of his death, 18,000 copies of his New Testament had been printed; however, only two complete volumes and a fragment remain today, at London’s British Library. Tyndale’s greatest achievement was the ability to strike a felicitous balance between the needs of scholarship, simplicity of expression, and literary gracefulness, all in a uniform dialect. The effect was the creation of an English style of Bible translation, tinged with Hebraisms, that was to serve as the model for future English versions for nearly 400 years, beginning with the King James Version of 1611.