Proponent of the Bible – William Tyndale aka William Hutchins/Hychins

Early Years:

Tyndale was born around 1495 in Gloucestershire in southwest England.  At about age fifteen he was enrolled at Oxford where he devoted himself to the study of the Bible.  He received his Bachelor’s degree in 1512 and his Master’s in 1515.

Somewhere around 1520, William Tyndale returned back in his childhood stomping grounds of Gloucestershire where he was employed as the tutor to the family of Sir John Walsh. He began to preach a message of church reformation which landed him in trouble with the local church authorities. This forced him to move to London, late in the year 1523.  Here his preaching again excited the church leadership.  Knowing he would never be allowed to translate and publish his Bible, he determined that he must leave England.

Life and Works:

In May of 1524, Tyndale left England for Hamburg.  Over the next year he translated the New Testament.  He then moved to Cologne to have it printed.  However, after printing only 3000 copies of the first 10 sheets in quarto¹, Tyndale was discovered and forced to flee.  Taking the sheets thus far printed, he moved to Worms, which was a Protestant stronghold.  In Worms he could safely complete his work. Tyndale finished publishing the quarto edition and also an edition in octavo².  The latter edition was pocket-sized.

Copies of Tyndale’s Bible were smuggled into England.  The Catholic Church authorities in England unrelenting sought them out so they could be confiscated and destroyed.  There are only three copies of the first edition of Tyndale's New Testament still in existence. But the rarity belies its impact.  As Tyndale was influenced by the Wycliffe Bible, the fifty-four biblical scholars who translated the King James Version of the Bible drew significantly on the Tyndale translation. A 1998 study published in Reformation, the academic journal of the Tyndale Society, estimates “that nearly 84 percent of the New Testament and close to 76 percent of the portions of the Old Testament that Tyndale translated have been transmitted to the KJV just as he left them.”³

Final Years:

In 1530, Tyndale wrote The Practyse of Prelates, opposing Henry VIII's planned divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Henry asked the Spanish emperor Charles I to have the writer apprehended and returned to England.  However the Charles responded that formal evidence was required before extradition.  A series of responses and counter-responses between Tyndale and Sir Thomas More,⁴ the Lord Chancellor of England, ensued. Thinking that the state of the Reformation in England made it safe for him to come out of hiding, he settled in Antwerp in 1534.  A year later, Tyndale was betrayed by a friend, imprisoned and tried on a charge of heresy.  He was found guilty, tied to a stake, strangled, and his body was then burned on October 6, 1536.   Tyndale’s final words were reported to be “Lord! Open the King of England's eyes!”

After the death of Tyndale, Miles Coverdale translated those portions of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha which Tyndale had not lived to translate himself.  With Royal Permission, the Tyndale/Coverdale translation was published in 1537 but named the "Matthew Bible" to spare the government embarrassment.

End Notes:

1.  A quarto sized book or pamphlet is made of complete sheets of paper on which 8 pages of text is printed. When folded twice, it produces four leaves. Each leaf represents one fourth of the original sheet.  A quarto is larger than an octavo.

2.  An octavo sized book or pamphlet is made of complete sheets of paper on which 16 pages of text is printed. When folded three times, it produces eight leaves. Each leaf represents one eighth of the original sheet.  An octavo is smaller than a quarto.

3.  Jon Nielson and Royal Skousen, "How Much of the King James Bible is William Tyndale's? An Estimation Based on Sampling", Reformation, vol. 3 [1998], pg. 73)

4.  As a side note, Sir Thomas More, Tyndale’s literary nemesis, was beheaded by King Henry VIII fifteen months before Tyndale was executed.