Introduction

 William Tyndale (sometimes
spelled Tynsdale,Tindall, Tindill, Tyndall; c. 1492 – 1536) was
an English scholar who became a leading figure in
Protestant reform in the years leading up to his execution.
 He is remembered for his translation of the Bible into
English.
 Tyndale's translation was the first English Bible to draw
directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, the first English one
to take advantage of the printing press, and first of the new
English Bibles of the Reformation.
 Tyndale began a Bachelor of Arts degree at Magdalen Hall
(later Hertford College) of Oxford University in 1506 and
received his B.A. in 1512; the same year becoming a
subdeacon.

 He was made Master of Arts in July 1515 and was held to be a
man of virtuous disposition, leading an unblemished life.
 The M.A. allowed him to start studying theology, but the
official course did not include the systematic study of
Scripture.
 He was a gifted linguist, over the years becoming fluent in
French, Greek, Hebrew, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish,
in addition to his native English.
 Tyndale became chaplain to the house of Sir John Walsh at
Little Sodbury and tutor to his children in about 1521.

 His opinions proved controversial to fellow clergymen, and
around 1522 he was called before John Bell, the Chancellor of
the Diocese of Worcester, though no formal charges were laid.
 After the harsh meeting with Bell and other church leaders,
and near the end of Tyndale's time at Little Sodbury, John
Foxe describes an argument with a "learned" but
"blasphemous" clergyman, who had asserted to Tyndale that,
"We had better be without God's laws than the Pope's."
 Tyndale left for London in 1523 to seek permission to translate
the Bible into English.
 He requested help from Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall, a wellknown classicist who had praised Erasmus after working
together with him on a Greek New Testament. The bishop,
however, declined to extend his patronage, telling Tyndale
he had no room for him in his household.

 He then left England and landed on the continent, perhaps at
Hamburg, in the spring of the year 1524, possibly travelling
on to Wittenberg.
 At this time, possibly in Wittenberg, he began translating the
New Testament, completing it in 1525, with assistance from
Observant friar William Roy.
 In 1525, publication of the work by Peter Quentell, in
Cologne, was interrupted by the impact of anti-Lutheranism.
 It was not until 1526 that a full edition of the New Testament
was produced by the printer Peter Schoeffer in Worms, a free
imperial city then in the process of adopting Lutheranism.

 The book was smuggled into England and Scotland, and was
condemned in October 1526 by Tunstall, who issued warnings to
booksellers and had copies burned in public.
 Cardinal Wolsey condemned Tyndale as a heretic, his first
mention in open court as a heretic being in January 1529.
 In 1530, he wrote The Practyse of Prelates, opposing Henry VIII's
planned divorce from Catherine of Aragon, in favour of Anne
Boleyn, on the grounds that it was unscriptural and was a plot
by Cardinal Wolsey to get Henry entangled in the papal courts
of Pope Clement VII.
 Eventually, Tyndale was betrayed by Henry Phillips to the
imperial authoritiesseized in Antwerp in 1535 and held in the
castle of Vilvoorde near Brussels.

 He was tried on a charge of heresy in 1536 and condemned to
death, despite Thomas Cromwell's intercession on his behalf.
 Tyndale "was strangled to death while tied at the stake, and
then his dead body was burned". Tyndale's final words,
spoken "at the stake with a fervent zeal, and a loud voice",
were reported as "Lord! Open the King of England's eyes.“
 Within four years, at the same king's behest, four English
translations of the Bible were published in England, including
Henry's official Great Bible. All were based on Tyndale's
work.
Impact on the English Language

 In translating the Bible, Tyndale introduced new words into
the English language, and many were subsequently used in
the King James Bible:
 Jehovah (from a transliterated Hebrew construction in the
Old Testament; composed from the Tetragrammaton YHWH)
 Passover (as the name for the Jewish holiday, Pesach or
Pesah)
 scapegoat (the goat that bears the sins and iniquities of the
people in Leviticus, Chapter 16)
 As well as individual words, Tyndale also coined such
familiar phrases as:

 lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil
 knock and it shall be opened unto you
 twinkling of an eye (another translation from Luther)
 a moment in time
 fashion not yourselves to the world
 seek and you shall find
 ask and it shall be given you
 judge not that you not be judged
 the word of God which liveth and lasteth forever
 let there be light (Luther translated Genesis 1,3 as: Es werde
Licht, which would be word for word translated: It will be light)
 the powers that be
 my brother's keeper
 the salt of the earth
 a law unto themselves
 filthy lucre
 it came to pass
 gave up the ghost
 the signs of the times
 the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak (which is like Luther's
translation of Mathew 26,41)
 live and move and have our being
 fight the good fight

Controversy Over New
Words and Phrases

 The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church did not approve
of some of the words and phrases introduced by Tyndale,
such as "overseer", where the it would have understood as
"bishop," "elder" for "priest," and "love" rather than "charity.“
 Tyndale, citing Erasmus, contended that the Greek New
Testament did not support the traditional Roman Catholic
readings.
 More controversially, Tyndale translated the Greek "ekklesia,"
(literally "called out ones“) as "congregation" rather than
"Church."
 It has been asserted this translation choice "was a direct threat
to the Church's ancient—but so Tyndale here made clear, nonscriptural—claim to be the body of Christ on earth.

 To change these words was to strip the Church hierarchy of its
pretensions to be Christ's terrestrial representative, and to
award this honor to individual worshipers who made up each
congregation.
 Contention from Roman Catholics came not only from real or
perceived errors in translation but also a fear of the erosion of
their social power if Christians could read the bible in their
own language.
 Thomas More commented that searching for errors in the Tyndale
Bible was similar to searching for water in the sea, and charged
Tyndale's translation of Obedience of a Christian Man with having
about a thousand falsely translated errors.

 Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall of London declared that there were
upwards of 2,000 errors in Tyndale's Bible.
 Tunstall in 1523 had denied Tyndale the permission required under
the Constitutions of Oxford (1409), which were still in force, to
translate the Bible into English.
 In response to allegations of inaccuracies in his translation in the
New Testament, Tyndale in thePrologue to his 1525 translation
wrote that he never intentionally altered or misrepresented any of
the Bible in his translation, but that he had sought to "interpret the
sense of the scripture and the meaning of the spirit.
William Tyndale: The
Father of English Prose

 The King James Bible, since its publication in 1611, has had a profound
influence on the development of the English language, not only in the
words and phrases that it employed but also in the syntax and
grammatical usages that it rendered into the English vernacular.
 Modern literary and linguistic scholarship has certainly acknowledged
the debt the English language owes to the K.J.B. or Authorized Version
but very little credit seems to be given to the individual on whose work
over 80 percent of the A.V. relied, William Tyndale.
 Tyndale’s early translations (his first translation of the New
Testament was published outside of England in 1525) were based
on the premise that “…it was impossible to stablysh the laye people

eyes in their mother tonge, that they might se the precesse ordre
in any truth excepte the scripture were paynly layed before their
and meaninge of the text”.
 It was a belief for which he would eventually be asked to give his
life.
 William Tyndale’s influence, not only on the early translations of
the Bible into English, but also on the development of an Early
English Modern prose has been significant enough to earn him the
title of “The father of English Prose”.
 Tyndale was born in Catholic England in approximately 1492,
a time of growing political and religious unrest, not only in
England but also throughout most of Europe.

 The seeds of the Protestant reformation had been planted
only a few years earlier during the Great Schism (1378-1417)
during which time, two popes competed for the authority of
the Church and as representatives of God’s divine will.
 The schism greatly undermined the authority of the pope and
led the reformers to question, if the pope’s word was no
longer infallible, on what authority could the Christian faith
be built.
 The alternative authority that the reformers were looking for
was found in the Bible itself.
 In 1409 Archbishop Thomas Arundel had banned the reading
of the vernacular scripture and, as a result, the only scripture
used in religious ceremonies was the Latin Vulgate based on
St. Jerome’s translation.

 Not only was the scripture read in Latin which no one but
the educated clergy understood, the service itself was
performed in Latin.
 Tyndale, and other reformers, argued that the Church had
degenerated into an empty form and that mass had become,
for most participants, a meaningless ceremony.
 A number of other factors also played an important part in
the pivotal role that Tyndale was to play in the development
of the English language.
 Concomitant to the developments of the Protestant
reformation was the rise of academic humanism as
opposed to the scholasticism that had dominated the
universities and academia for some time.

 With respects to the impetus towards translating the Latin
Vulgate into English, the emphasis turned towards
translating texts within a historical context and a return to
the original language texts.
 This movement was resisted in the universities in a
manner similar to that of the Church as it eroded the
position of those in the universities whose authority lay
with the medieval scholastic curriculum.
 There was also an increased knowledge of the original
biblical languages.

 Much of the debate over the place of a vernacular scripture
that took place between the Catholic Church and Tyndale
was performed by Thomas More who fought vehemently
against Tyndale’s translations and their implied associations
with Martin Luther and the “heresies” of the reformation.
 More and the Church strongly opposed the translations into
English by individuals because so much of the translations
were open to interpretation, interpretations that could
significantly alter the teachings of the church.
 Much of this debate surrounds the nature of the English language
itself and the direction it was to take in the next few decades.

 In fact, England, in the 16th century was country of various
vernaculars and dialects and there was as of yet no fully accepted
English standard but here, Tyndale argues that, not only is
English adequate as a language as a vehicle for God’s word, it
was in fact superior to Latin.
 Tyndale also makes use of the strengths of native alliteration and
repetition.
 Mueller goes on further to argue that Tyndale’s elimination of
clausal subordination had far reaching consequences as “within
fifty years, the staple of prose compositions become no longer
asymmetric and recursive clausal conjunction but, rather,
sentence forms of a binary, symmetric, and even schematic cast”.
 The reasons for Tyndale’s influence over the development
of the English language, not only directly but also via the
A.V., are numerous.

 First, there was little other available reading material and
the Bible remained the chief written source of formal
English for many well into the 19th century.
 The A.V. had a profound influence not only on writers like
Milton, George Fox and John Bunyan, but also on 19th and
20th century writers like George Eliot, T.S. Eliot, Thomas
Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, etc.
 The OED cites Tyndale over 1700 times (this number should be
significantly higher if James Clark argues correctly that many of the

citations attributed to Miles Cloverdale are actually Tyndale’s) and he is
responsible for words such as ‘beautiful’ rather than the more common
‘belle’ or ‘fair’.
 Many of the phrases he uses appear to be of the popular, semi-proverbial
kind such as, “eat the poore out of house and harbour” and “kysse the
rodde”. He is also responsible for such time-honoured phrases as "let
there be light," (Genesis 1), "the powers that be," (Romans 13), "my
brother's keeper," (Genesis 4), "the salt of the earth," (Matthew 5), "a law
unto themselves," (Romans 2), "filthy lucre" (1 Timothy 3) and, "fight the
good fight"(1 Timothy 6).
The Fate of William
Tyndale

 Yet, for all of his effort, and perhaps as a profound
testament to the power of his linguistic ability, he was
strangled and burned at the stake in Brussels in 1536.
 But, if we are to accept, as the editors of The Oxford
Companion to the English Language suggest, that the 1611
translation of the Bible stands as a landmark in the
evolution of the English language and that its “verbal
beauty is unsurpassed in the whole of English
literature” then certainly most of that credit belongs to
William Tyndale.