THE MAN WHO GAVE ENGLISH ITS BIBLE
WILLIAM TYNDALE
In 1536, outside the walls of Vilvoorde castle near Brussels, William Tyndale was strangled and his body burned. He had spent the last dozen years of his life as a fugitive for one offense, translating the Bible into the English that farmers and tradesmen actually spoke. His reported last words, a prayer that the King of England's eyes be opened, were answered within a few years, when Henry VIII authorized an English Bible built largely on Tyndale's own text.
Tyndale told a learned opponent that he would make a boy who drove the plough know more scripture than the cleric did. The church's position was that vernacular scripture invited heresy and that interpretation belonged to the clergy. Tyndale, an Oxford and Cambridge scholar who had mastered Greek and Hebrew, believed ordinary people could read for themselves. Unable to work in England, he fled to Continental Europe, and his New Testament, printed at Worms in 1526, was smuggled into England in bales of cloth and burned publicly by the bishops who found it.
Working directly from Greek and Hebrew rather than the Vulgate, he produced plain, rhythmic prose that favoured short Anglo-Saxon words and natural speech. Scholars have estimated that the King James Version of 1611 retains the large majority of his New Testament wording, and the same holds for much of the Old Testament he completed. He also coined or popularized phrases that now sit in everyday English: "let there be light," "the powers that be," "a law unto themselves," "the salt of the earth." The Coverdale Bible, the Great Bible, and the Geneva Bible all drew on his foundation.
An English Bible in common hands fed literacy, private reading, and the habit of questioning authority against the written word, forces that ran through the Reformation, Puritan England, and the wider Anglophone world. It also helped fix the rhythms of English prose itself, from Shakespeare's era onward. Tyndale paid for it with his life, and the cost makes him the founding figure of English-language scripture; the radical who made the English Bible possible, whose words millions still speak without knowing where they came from.
365 men who changed the world.
Kamikun John, Author 366 days of wisdom.
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