William Tyndale (; sometimes spelled Tynsdale, Tindall, Tindill, Tyndall; c. 1494 – October 1536) was an English Biblical scholar and linguist who became a leading figure in the Protestant Reformation in the years leading up to his execution. He translated much of the Bible into English and was influenced by the works of prominent Protestant Reformers such as Martin Luther.
Tyndale's translations were the first English Scriptures to draw directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, the first English translation to take advantage of the printing press, the first of the new English Bibles of the Reformation, and the first English translation to use Jehovah ("Iehouah") as God's name. It was taken to be a direct challenge to the authority of the Catholic Church and of those laws of England maintaining the Church's position. The work of Tyndale continued to play a key role in spreading Reformation ideas across the English-speaking world.
In The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) Tyndale argued for Caesaropapism, the idea that the monarch rather than the Pope should control a country's Church. This was the first instance of advocating the divine right of kings in England (sometimes mistakenly attributed to the Catholic Church). The book came into the hands of King Henry VIII, providing a rationale for breaking the Church in England away from the Catholic Church in 1534. In 1530, Tyndale wrote The Practice of Prelates, opposing Henry's plan to seek the annulment of his marriage on the grounds that it contravened Scripture. This work made him enemy of both the State and the Church, therefore he fled England and sought refuge in the Flemish territory of the Catholic Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. In 1535 Tyndale was arrested and jailed in the castle of Vilvoorde (Filford) outside Brussels. The following year he was convicted of heresy and executed by strangulation, after which his body was burnt at the stake.
Tyndale's translation choices of biblical phrases were substantially also adopted by subsequent English editions.
Tyndale lived and worked during the era of Renaissance humanism and the revival of Biblical scholarship, which were both aided by both the Gutenberg Revolution and the ensuing democratisation of knowledge; for example, the publication of Johann Reuchlin's Hebrew grammar in 1506. Notably, Erasmus compiled, edited, and published the Koine Greek scriptures of the New Testament in 1516. Luther's translation of the Christian Bible into German appeared between 1522 and 1534.
Partial Old English translations had been made from the 7th century onwards, and by the 14th century contemporary vernacular translations were available in most other major European languages. However the religious foment and violent rebellion of the Lollards resulted in heresy being treated as sedition under English law, which bore the death penalty. Lollardy was associated by authorities with the possession and public readings of Wycliffite Bibles in the newly emerged Middle English; manuscripts with Wycliffite material were destroyed; the possession of Wycliffite material could be used as information in investigations and inquisitions though not used as a proof of heresy.
By the early 16th century, the Wycliffite translations were becoming less and less comprehensible as the English language changed from Middle English to Early Modern English. Classical and Koine Greek texts became widely available to the European scholarly community for the first time in centuries, as it welcomed Greek-speaking scholars, philosophers, intellectuals, and the manuscripts they carried to Catholic Europe as refugees following the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
The Tyndale family also went by the name Hychyns (Hitchins), and it was as William Hychyns that Tyndale was enrolled at Magdalen Hall, Oxford. Tyndale's brother Edward was receiver to the lands of Lord Berkeley, as attested to in a letter by Bishop Stokesley of London. William Tyndale's niece Margaret Tyndale was married to Protestant martyr Rowland Taylor, burnt during the Marian Persecutions.
Tyndale may have been born around 1494 in Melksham Court, Stinchcombe, a village near Dursley, Gloucestershire. A conjecture is that Tyndale's family had moved to Gloucestershire at some point in the 15th century, probably as a result of the Wars of the Roses. The family may have originated from Northumberland via East Anglia. Tyndale is recorded in two Victorian genealogies which claim he was the brother of Sir William Tyndale of Deane, Northumberland, and Hockwold, Norfolk, who was knighted at the marriage of Arthur, Prince of Wales to Catherine of Aragon. If this is true then Tyndale's family was thus descended from Baron Adam de Tyndale, a tenant-in-chief of Henry I.
After schooling at Katharine Lady Berkeley's School, Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire Tyndale began studies at Magdalen Hall (later Hertford College) of Oxford University in 1506 and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1512, the same year being ordained a subdeacon. He was made Master of Arts in July 1515 and was held to be a man leading an unblemished life. The Master of Arts degree qualified him to begin preparation for the advanced degree of Doctor of Divinity, involving a systematic course of theological studies though not systematic biblical studies in a modern sense. Tyndale later lampooned this curriculum in scathing terms:
They have ordained that no man shall look on the Scripture until he is modeled in heathen learning eight or nine years and armed with false principles, with which he is clean shut out of the understanding of the Scripture.
He was a gifted linguist and became fluent over the years not only in Latin and Greek but also in Hebrew, as well as in French, German, Italian and Spanish. Between 1517 and 1521, he studied at the University of Cambridge. While Erasmus had been the leading teacher of Greek at Cambridge from August 1511 to January 1512, this did not coincide with Tyndale's residence there.
Tyndale became chaplain at the home of Sir John Walsh at Little Sodbury in Gloucestershire and tutor to his children around 1521. His opinions proved controversial to fellow clergymen, and the next year he was summoned before John Bell, the Chancellor of the Diocese of Worcester, although no formal charges were laid at the time. After the meeting with Bell and other church leaders, Tyndale, according to John Foxe, had an argument with a "learned but blasphemous clergyman", who allegedly asserted: "We had better be without God's laws than the Pope's", to which Tyndale allegedly responded: "I defy the Pope and all his laws; and if God spares my life, ere many years, I will cause the boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost!"
Tyndale left for London in 1523 to seek sponsorship and permission to translate the Bible into English. He applied to join the household of the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, a well-known humanist who had worked with Erasmus, his friend of his, on the second edition of his Latin/Greek New Testament. The bishop, however, declined to fund Tyndale, on the grounds that his household was already full with scholars. Tyndale preached and studied "at his book" in London for some time, relying on the help of cloth merchant Humphrey Monmouth. During this time, he lectured widely, including at St Dunstan-in-the-West at Fleet Street in London.
In the spring of 1524 Tyndale left England for continental Europe, perhaps staying first in Hamburg, before possibly traveling on to Wittenberg. There is an entry in the matriculation registers of the University of Wittenberg mentioning the name "Guillelmus Daltici ex Anglia", and this has been taken to be a Latinisation of "William Tyndale from England". Tyndale began translating the New Testament at this time, possibly in Wittenberg, completing it in 1525 with assistance from Observant Friar William Roy.
In 1525 the publication of the work by Peter Quentell in Cologne was interrupted by the impact of anti-Lutheranism. A full edition of the New Testament was produced in 1526 by printer Peter Schöffer the Younger in Worms, a free imperial city then in the process of adopting Lutheranism. More copies were soon printed in Antwerp. The work was smuggled from continental Europe into England and Scotland by putting pages in between other legal books. The translation was condemned in October 1526 by Bishop Tunstall, who issued warnings to booksellers, bought up all the available copies, and had them burned in public. Marius notes that the "spectacle of the scriptures being put to the torch... provoked controversy even amongst the faithful." Cardinal Wolsey condemned Tyndale as a heretic, first stated in open court in January 1529.