The death of William Tyndale
William Tyndale (c. 1494 to 1536) was an English scholar, priest, and Bible translator who translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into English so ordinary people could read God's Word for themselves. His work laid the foundation for later English Bible translations, including the King James Version.
Three key facts about Tyndale:
He translated the first printed English New Testament directly from the original Greek into English.
He was executed for his beliefs in 1536 after being condemned for translating and distributing the Bible in English.
His translation shaped the English language, with much of his wording later appearing in the King James Bible and remaining familiar to readers today.
In short: William Tyndale was a courageous reformer whose passion for making Scripture accessible transformed Bible translation and left a lasting legacy on Christianity and the English language.
Escape to Europe
It is a dangerous thing, as witnesseth blessed St. Jerome, to translate the text of the Holy Scripture out of one tongue into another, for in the translation the same sense is not always easily kept. . . . We therefore decree and ordain, that no man, hereafter, by his own authority translate any text of the Scripture into English or any other tongue . . . and that no man can read any such book . . . in part or in whole.1
Together these statutes meant that you could be burned alive by the Catholic Church for simply reading the Bible in English. Let that sink in. The dramatist John Bale (1495–1563), “as a boy of 11, watched the burning of a young man in Norwich for possessing the Lord’s Prayer in English. . . . John Foxe records . . . seven Lollards burned at Coventry in 1519 for teaching their children the Lord’s Prayer in English.”2
The Burning Fury of More
William Tyndale hoped to escape this condemnation by getting official authorization for his translation in 1524. But he found just the opposite and had to escape from London to the European continent, where he did all his translating and writing for the next twelve years.
He lived as a fugitive the entire time until his death near Brussels in 1536. He watched a rising tide of persecution and felt the pain of seeing young men burned alive who were converted by reading his translation and his books. His closest friend, John Frith, was arrested in London and tried by Thomas More and burned alive July 4, 1531, at the age of twenty-eight. Richard Bayfield ran the ships that took Tyndale’s books to England. He was betrayed and arrested, and Thomas More wrote on December 4, 1531, that Bayfield “the monk and apostate [was] well and worthily burned in Smythfelde.”3
Three weeks later, the same end came to John Tewkesbury. He was converted by reading Tyndale’s Parable of the Wicked Mammon, which defended justification by faith alone. He was whipped in Thomas More’s garden and had his brow squeezed with small ropes until blood came out of his eyes. Then he was sent to the Tower, where he was racked till he was lame. Then at last they burned him alive. Thomas More “rejoiced that his victim was now in hell, where Tyndale ‘is like to find him when they come together.’”4
Four months later, James Bainham followed in the flames in April 1532. He had stood up during the mass at St. Augustine’s Church in London and lifted a copy of Tyndale’s New Testament and pleaded with the people to die rather than deny the word of God. That virtually was to sign his own death warrant. Add to these Thomas Bilney, Thomas Dusgate, John Bent, Thomas Harding, Andrew Hewet, Elizabeth Barton, and others—all burned alive for sharing the views of William Tyndale about the Scriptures and the Reformed faith.5
Why So Much Hatred?
Why this extraordinary hostility against the English New Testament, especially from Thomas More, who vilified Tyndale repeatedly in his denunciation of the Reformers he burned? Some would say that the New Testament in English was rejected because it was accompanied by Reformation notes that the church regarded as heretical. That was true of later versions, but not of the first 1526 edition. It did not have notes, and this is the edition that Bishop Tunstall burned in London.6 The church burned the word of God. They burned the Bible in public. That shocked Tyndale.
There were surface reasons and deeper reasons why the church opposed an English Bible. The surface reasons were the claims that the English language is rude and unworthy of the exalted language of God’s word, and when one translates, errors can creep in, so it is safer not to translate. Moreover, if the Bible is in English, then each man will become his own interpreter, and many will go astray into heresy and be condemned; and it was church tradition that only priests are given the divine grace to understand the Scriptures. What’s more, there is a special sacramental value to the Latin service that people cannot understand but through which grace is given. Such were the kinds of things being said on the surface. (The death of William Tyndale)
But there were deeper reasons why the church opposed the English Bible: one doctrinal (justification, which we will see in the last months of Tyndale’s life) and the other ecclesiastical (the papal, sacramental structure of the Roman Catholic Church). The church realized that they would not be able to sustain certain doctrines biblically because the people would see that they are not in the Bible. And the church realized that their power and control over the people, and even over the state, would be lost if certain doctrines were exposed as unbiblical—especially the priesthood and purgatory and penance.
The Bible Must Not Be Available for Interpretation
Thomas More’s criticism of Tyndale boils down mainly to the way Tyndale translated five words. He translated "presbuteros" as "elder" instead of priest. He translated "ekklesia" as "congregation" instead of "church." He translated metanoeo as repent instead of do penance. He translated "exomologeo" as "acknowledge" or "admit" instead of "confess." And he translated agape as love rather than charity. Daniell comments, “He cannot possibly have been unaware that those words in particular undercut the entire sacramental structure of the thousand-year church throughout Europe, Asia, and North Africa. It was the Greek New Testament that was doing the undercutting.”7 And with the doctrinal undermining of these ecclesiastical pillars of priesthood and penance and confession, the pervasive power and control of the church collapsed. England would not be a Catholic nation. The Reformed faith would flourish there in due time.
The Sorrows and Sufferings of a Young Fugitive
What did it cost William Tyndale under these hostile circumstances to stay faithful to his calling as a translator of the Bible and a writer of the Reformed faith?
He fled his homeland in 1524 and was burned at the stake in 1536. He gives us some glimpse of those twelve years as a fugitive in Germany and the Netherlands in one of the very few personal descriptions we have, from Stephen Vaughan’s letter in 1531. He refers to
. . . my pains . . . my poverty . . . my exile out of mine natural country, and bitter absence from my friends . . . my hunger, my thirst, my cold, the great danger wherewith I am everywhere encompassed, and finally . . . innumerable other hard and sharp fightings which I endure.8
All these sufferings came to a climax on May 21, 1535, in the midst of Tyndale’s great Old Testament translation labors. We can feel some of the ugliness of what happened in the words of David Daniell: “Malice, self-pity, villainy, and deceit were about to destroy everything. These evils came to the English House [in Antwerp], wholly uninvited, in the form of an egregious Englishman, Henry Philips.”9 Philips won Tyndale’s trust over some months and then betrayed him. John Foxe tells how it happened:
So when it was dinner-time, Master Tyndale went forth with Philips, and at the going forth of Poyntz’s house, was a long narrow entry, so that two could not go in a front. Mr. Tyndale would have put Philips before him, but Philips would in no wise, but put Master Tyndale before, for that he pretended to show great humanity. So Master Tyndale, being a man of no great stature, went before, and Philips, a tall comely person, followed behind him: who had set officers on either side of the door upon two seats, who, being there, might see who came in the entry: and coming through the same entry, Philips pointed with his finger over Master Tyndale’s head down to him, that the officers who sat at the door might see that it was he whom they should take. . . . Then they took him, and brought him to the emperor’s attorney, or procurer-general, where he dined. Then came the procurer-general to the house of Poyntz, and sent away all that was there of Master Tyndale’s, as well his books as other things: and from thence Tyndale was had to the castle of Filford, eighteen English miles from Antwerp, and there he remained until he was put to death.10
The Cold and Final Castle
Vilvoorde Castle is six miles north of Brussels and about the same distance from Louvain. Here Tyndale stayed for eighteen months. “The charge was heresy, with not agreeing with the holy Roman Emperor—in a nutshell, being Lutheran.”11 A four-man commission from the Catholic center of Louvain was authorized to prove that Tyndale was a heretic. One of them named Latomus filled three books with his interactions with Tyndale and said that Tyndale himself wrote a “book” in prison to defend his chief doctrinal standard: Sola fides justificat apud Deum—Faith Alone Justifies before God. This was the key issue in the end. The evil of translating the Bible came down to this: Are we justified by faith alone?
Following God’s call in accomplishing the spread of his saving gospel is often very costly.
These months in prison were not easy. They were a long dying, leading to death. We get one glimpse into the prison to see Tyndale’s condition and his passion. He wrote a letter in September 1535, when there seems to have been a lull in the examinations. It was addressed to an unnamed officer of the castle. Here is a condensed version of Mozley’s translation of the Latin:
I beg your lordship, and that of the Lord Jesus, that if I am to remain here through the winter, you will request the commissary to have the kindness to send me, from the goods of mine which he has, a warmer cap; for I suffer greatly from cold in the head, and am afflicted by a perpetual catarrh, which is much increased in this cell; a warmer coat also, for this which I have is very thin; a piece of cloth too to patch my leggings. My overcoat is worn out; my shirts are also worn out. He has a woolen shirt, if he will be good enough to send it. I have also with him leggings of thicker cloth to put on above; he has also warmer night-caps. And I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening; it is indeed wearisome sitting alone in the dark. But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency to be urgent with the commissary, that he will kindly permit me to have the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew dictionary, that I may pass the time in that study. In return may you obtain what you most desire, so only that it be for the salvation of your soul. But if any other decision has been taken concerning me, to be carried out before winter, I will be patient, abiding the will of God, to the glory of the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ: whose spirit (I pray) may ever direct your heart. Amen W. Tindalus12
We don’t know if his requests were granted. He did stay in that prison through the winter. His verdict was sealed in August 1536. He was formally condemned as a heretic and degraded from the priesthood. Then in early October (traditionally October 6), he was tied to the stake and then strangled by the executioner, then afterward consumed in the fire. Foxe reports that his last words were, “Lord! Open the King of England’s eyes!”13 He was forty-two years old, never married, and never buried.
He Will Ease Your Pain or Shorten It
His closing words to us are clear from his life and from his writings. Following God’s call in accomplishing the spread of his saving gospel is often very costly. I will let Tyndale speak in his own words from his book. The Obedience of a Christian Man:
If God promise riches, the way thereto is poverty. Whom he loveth he chasteneth, whom he exalteth, he casteth down, whom he saveth he damneth first, he bringeth no man to heaven except he send him to hell first. If he promise life he slayeth it first, when he buildeth, he casteth all down first. He is no patcher, he cannot build on another man’s foundation. He will not work until all be past remedy and brought unto such a case, that men may see how that his hand, his power, his mercy, his goodness and truth hath wrought all together. He will let no man be partaker with him of his praise and glory.14Let us therefore look diligently whereunto we are called, that we deceive not ourselves. We are called, not to dispute as the pope’s disciples do, but to die with Christ that we may live with him, and to suffer with him that we may reign with him.15For if God be on our side: what matter maketh it who be against us, be they bishops, cardinals, popes or whatsoever names they will.16
So let Tyndale’s very last word to us be the last word he sent to his best friend, John Frith, in a letter just before Frith was burned alive for believing and speaking the truth of Scripture:
Your cause is Christ’s gospel, a light that must be fed with the blood of faith. . . . If when we be buffeted for well-doing, we suffer patiently and endure, that is acceptable to God; for to that end we are called. For Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that we should follow his steps, who did no sin.
Hereby have we perceived love, that he had laid down his life for us; therefore we ought also to lay down our lives for the brethren. . . . Let not your body faint. . . . If the pain is above your strength, remember, Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, I will give it you. And pray to our Father in that name, and he will ease your pain, or shorten it. . . . Amen.17
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Notes:
Brian Moynahan, God’s Bestseller: William Tyndale, Thomas More, and the Writing of the English Bible—A Story of Martyrdom and Betrayal (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), xxii.
William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. David Daniell (London: Penguin, 2000), 202.
Brian Moynahan, God’s Bestseller: William Tyndale, Thomas More, and the Writing of the English Bible—A Story of Martyrdom and Betrayal (New York: St. Martin’s (2002), 260.
Ibid., 261.
The list and details are given in Daniell, William Tyndale, 183–84.
Ibid., 192–93.
Ibid., 149.
Ibid., 213.
Ibid., 361.
Ibid., 364.
Ibid., 365.
Ibid., 379.
Ibid., 382–83. “Contemporaries noted no such words, however, only that the strangling was bungled and that he suffered terribly.” Moynahan, God’s Bestseller, 377.
Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, 6.
Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 6.
From Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
This article is adapted from 27 Servants of Sovereign Joy: Faithful, Flawed, and Fruitful by John Piper.
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