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The Tyndale Bible ( TYN) generally refers to the body of biblical translations by William Tyndale into Early Modern English, made . Tyndale's biblical text is credited with being the first English-language Biblical translation to work directly from Greek language and, for the Torah, Hebrew Bible texts, although it relied heavily upon the Latin Vulgate and German Bibles. Furthermore, it was the first English biblical translation that was mass-produced as a result of new advances in the art of printing.
The term "Tyndale's Bible" is not strictly correct, because Tyndale never published a complete English language Bible. Before his execution, Tyndale had translated the New Testament, the Pentateuch, and (now lost) the historical books of the Old Testament. Of the Old Testament books, the Pentateuch, Book of Jonah, and a revised version of the Book of Genesis were published during Tyndale's lifetime. His other Old Testament works were first used in the creation of the Matthew Bible and also greatly influenced subsequent English translations of the Bible.
The remaining parts of the Old Testament, including the Historical books, the Psalms and Wisdom material, Prophets and Deuterocanonicals were completed by Myles Coverdale, who supplemented Tyndale's translations with his own to produce the first complete printed Bible in English in 1535.
A partial edition was put into print in 1525 in Cologne of which there is only one fragment left, in the British Library. But before the work could be completed, Tyndale was betrayed to the authorities and forced to flee to Worms, where the first complete edition of his New Testament was published by Peter Schöffer the Younger in 1526, of which there are only 3 extant copies left. These can be found in the collections of St Paul's Cathedral, London, St Paul's Cathedral the British Library, and the Württembergische Landesbibliothek The Hide and Seek Bible in Stuttgart. The later editions added translations of Martin Luther's introductions to the biblical books.
Tyndale's translation of the Pentateuch was published at Antwerp by Merten de Keyser in 1530. His English version of the Book of Jonah was published the following year. This was followed by his revised version of the Book of Genesis in 1534. Tyndale translated additional Old Testament books including Joshua, Judges, First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings and First and Second Chronicles, but they were not published and have not survived in their original forms. When Tyndale was executed, these works came to be in the possession of one of his associates, John Rogers.
Tyndale used numerous sources when carrying out his translations of both the New and Old Testaments. He also made use of Greek and Hebrew grammars.
After his death in 1536, Tyndale's works were revised and reprinted numerous times. They were influential in the creation of the Matthew Bible which was published in 1537, and are reflected in more modern versions of the Bible, such as the King James Version.
The Catholic Church had long proclaimed that the only true Church was the Catholic Church. The word church in Catholic teaching could only be used of the Catholic Church, and there was no other organized religion in England at that time. Some radical reformers preached that the true church was the Church invisible, that the church is wherever true Christians meet together to preach the word of God. To these reformers, the Catholic Church was unnecessary, and its very existence proved that it was in fact not the "true" Church. When Tyndale translated the Greek word ἐκκλησία () as congregation, he was thereby undermining the entire structure of the Catholic Church.
Many of the reform movements believed in the authority of scripture alone. To them it dictated how a "true" church should be organized and administered. By changing the translation from church to congregation Tyndale was providing ammunition for the beliefs of the reformers. Their belief that the church was not a visible systematized institution but a body defined by believers, however organized, who held a specifically Protestant understanding of the Gospel and salvation was now to be found directly in Tyndale's translation of Scripture.
Tyndale's use of the word congregation conflicted with the Catholic Church's doctrine that the Laity and the clergy were two separate classes within the Church, and the Catholic teaching of the Sacrament of Ordination. If the true church is defined as a congregation, the common believers, then the Catholic Church's claim that the clergy were of a consecrated order different than the average Christian and that they had different functions within the Church no longer held sway.
Tyndale's translation of the Greek word Presbyter to mean elder instead of priest also challenged the doctrines of the Catholic Church.
In particular, it undermined the Catholic Mass and its nature as a sacrifice. The role of the priest in the Catholic Church was to offer the sacrifice of Christ's body and blood in the ritual of the Mass, to bless, to conduct other religious ceremonies, to read and explain the scripture to the people, and to administer the other sacraments. In these ways they are different from the common believers.
In many reform movements a group of elders would lead the church and take the place of the Catholic priests. These elders were not a separate class from the common believers; in fact, they were usually selected from amongst them. Many reformers believed in the idea of the priesthood of all believers, which meant that every Christian was in fact a priest and had, for example, the right to read and interpret scripture. Tyndale's translation challenged the claim of scriptural basis for Catholic clerical authority.
Catholic doctrine was also challenged by Tyndale's translation of the Greek μετανοεῖτε () as repent instead of do penance. This translation conflicted with the Catholic Sacrament of Confession.
Tyndale's translation of scripture backed up the views of reformers like Luther who had taken issue with the Catholic practice of sacramental penance. Tyndale believed that it was through Sola fide that a person was saved. Christ had, by the giving of the Holy Spirit, given the power to forgive sins to his disciples in John 20:20-23.
Tyndale's position on Christian salvation differed from the views of the Catholic Church, which followed the belief that salvation was granted to the faithful who maintained the State of Grace by living in charity, faith and hope, and participating in the Church's seven Sacraments in the light of the Church's teaching. Tyndale's translation challenged the belief that a repentant person should still do penance for their sins after they were forgiven by God. According to Tyndale's New Testament translation and other Protestant reformers, a believer could repent with a sincere heart, and God would forgive without an intent of submission to some formal restitution.
Tyndale's translation of the Bible challenged the Catholic Church in many other ways. For example, Tyndale's translation of the Bible into a vernacular language made it available to the common English-speaking person. Tyndale wanted everyone to have access to scripture and gave the common people the ability to read it for themselves but with a decidedly Protestant orientation in the choice of words used and in its annotations, which were suffused with Tyndale's Protestant beliefs.
The greatest challenge that Tyndale's Bible caused the Catholic Church is summed up by a later story about Tyndale's reason for translating the Bible: to "cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more scripture than the clergy of the day", many of whom were poorly educated. (See Plowboy trope.) By this, Tyndale sought to undermine the Catholic Church's authority regarding the access to and interpretation of scripture, which he saw as detrimental. To Tyndale, a Roman Catholic priesthood was not needed as an intermediary between a person and God.
As well as individual words, Tyndale also is reported as having coined many familiar phrases, however, many of the claimed expressions turn out to have antecedents in the Middle English Bible translations or the German.
Many of the popular phrases and Bible verses that people quote today are in the language of Tyndale. An example of this is Matthew 5:9, "Blessed are the peacemakers." Such Germanic compound words as "peacemaker" are hallmarks of Tyndale's prose, and follow Middle English word-formation principles more than Modern English.
Phrases sometimes attributed to Tyndale but with very similar antecedents include:
Tyndale used ester for () in his New Testament, where Wycliffe had used pask. When Tyndale embarked on his Old Testament translation, he realised that the anachronism of ester could not be sustained; and so coined the neologism passover, which later Bible versions adopted, and substituted for ester in the New Testament as well. Its remnant is seen as Easter once in the King James Version in Acts 12:4 and twice in the Bishops' Bible, John 11:55 as well as Acts 12:4.
Tyndale was accused of translation errors. Thomas More commented that searching for errors in (the first edition of) the Tyndale Bible was similar to searching for water in the sea and charged Tyndale's translation of The Obedience of a Christian Man with having about a thousand false translations. Bishop Tunstall of London declared that there were upwards of 2,000 errors in Tyndale's 1525/1526 Bible, having already in 1523 denied Tyndale the permission required under the Constitutions of Oxford (1409), which were still in force, to translate the Bible into English. Tyndale in the Prologue to his 1525 translation wrote that he never intentionally altered or misrepresented any of the Bible but that he had sought to "interpret the sense of the scripture and the meaning of the spirit."
While translating, Tyndale followed Erasmus's 1522 Greek edition of the New Testament. In his preface to his 1534 New Testament ("WT unto the Reader"), he not only goes into some detail about the Greek tenses but also points out that there is often a Hebrew idiom underlying the Greek. The Tyndale Society adduces much further evidence to show that his translations were made directly from the original Hebrew and Greek sources he had at his disposal. For example, the Prolegomena in Mombert's William Tyndale's Five Books of Moses show that Tyndale's Torah is a translation of the Hebrew original. His translation also drew on the Latin Vulgate and Luther's 1521 September Testament. Of the first (1526) edition of Tyndale's New Testament, only three copies survive. The only complete copy is part of the Bible Collection of Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart. The copy of the British Library is almost complete, lacking only the title page and list of contents. Another rarity is Tyndale's Pentateuch, of which only nine remain.
The translators of the Revised Standard Version in the 1940s noted that Tyndale's translation, including the 1537 Matthew Bible, inspired the translations that followed: The Great Bible of 1539; the Geneva Bible of 1560; the Bishops' Bible of 1568; the Douay-Rheims Bible of 1582–1609; and the King James Version of 1611, of which the RSV translators noted: "It the kept felicitous phrases and apt expressions, from whatever source, which had stood the test of public usage. It owed most, especially in the New Testament, to Tyndale".
Joan Bridgman comments on the Contemporary Review that, "He Tyndale is the mainly unrecognized translator of the most influential book in the world. Although the Authorised King James Version is ostensibly the production of a learned committee of churchmen, it is mostly cribbed from Tyndale with some reworking of his translation."
It has been suggested that around 90% of the King James Version (or at least of the parts translated by Tyndale) is from Tyndale's works, with as much as one third of the text being word-for-word Tyndale.
However, historians such as Richard Marsden have cautioned that much scriptural language is simple and "offers little scope for variation by translators," and note that Tyndale himself was not working from scratch with a tabula rasa.
Many of the English versions since then have drawn inspiration from Tyndale, such as the Revised Standard Version, the New American Standard Bible, and the English Standard Version. Even the paraphrases like the Living Bible have been inspired by the same desire to make the Bible understandable to Tyndale's Plowboy trope..
The Tyndale Bible also played a key role in spreading Reformation ideas to England which had been reluctant to embrace the movement. By including many of Martin Luther's commentaries in his works, Tyndale also allowed the people of England direct access to the words and ideas of Luther, whose works had been banned in England.
William Maldon's account of learning to read to directly access the Tyndale Bible testified to the sometimes violent opposition to the translation's use.
See also
Notes
Sources
Martin Luther (2025). 080066311X, Muhlenberg Press. 080066311X
Further reading
External links
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