By John Bradshaw
The course of religious history has been profoundly altered by great men like Luther, Calvin, Knox, Huss, and Jerome—men who were willing to put truth even before their own lives. But none gave more to the English Reformation than William Tyndale. Banished from his homeland and relentlessly persecuted, he left the English-speaking world a legacy that even today influences the lives of millions.
In Tyndale’s day, the Scriptures were inaccessible to the common people of England for several reasons. First, the reading of the Bible was against papal law. Second, there was no accessible English translation. Wycliffe had translated the Bible into English in the 1300s from the only source then available—Jerome’s corrupted Latin Vulgate. But papal clergymen had done their best to destroy it, and Wycliffe’s English had become obsolete. While Bibles in German and French were appearing, nothing was yet available in the English of Tyndale’s day. The task fell to Tyndale.
Born around 1490 in Gloucestershire, England, William Tyndale studied the sacred Scriptures at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. After leaving university, Tyndale worked for Sir John Walsh, a wealthy landowner back in Gloucestershire. An important man, Sir John often entertained local church dignitaries in his home, and it was not long before Tyndale—who had begun preaching in nearby St. Adeline’s Church and to outdoor crowds in nearby Bristol—incurred the wrath of these ecclesiastics. Local priests labeled him a heretic, threatening to ostracize any who dared to listen to his Bible-based sermons. They vehemently denounced his belief that justification was by faith, and that neither Mary nor the saints interceded with God for sinners.
Sir John’s dining room became the scene of many animated debates. Tyndale stood firmly on Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, while the clerics appealed to tradition and church authority. On one occasion, a learned divine sent to convert Tyndale exclaimed, “We were better to be without God’s laws than the pope’s.”1 Tyndale replied, “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scripture than you do.”2
The Word of God was the basis of salvation to Tyndale, and he longed to translate it into the language of his countrymen. “Without the Bible,” he said, “It is impossible to establish the laity in the truth.”3 Arriving in London in early 1526, a wealthy merchant sympathetic to Tyndale’s goals enabled him to begin translating the Bible into his mother tongue.
Persecution soon made it impossible for Tyndale to continue his task in London and escape martyrdom, forcing his flight to Hamburg, Germany. He took with him only his Greek New Testament and ten pounds given to him by friends.
Tyndale had declared, “The interpretation of the gospel, without the intervention of councils or popes, is sufficient to create a saving faith in the heart.”4 Aided by a former Franciscan friar, he worked tirelessly, rapidly translating and dispatching to London the gospels of Matthew and Mark. But once again, persecution forced him to flee, this time to Cologne.
The faithful translator—fluent in English, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Dutch, and German—had not long been in Cologne when John Cochleas, one of the most violent enemies of the Reformation, arrived, determined to deliver Tyndale to the flames. Again a fugitive, Tyndale escaped to Worms, a Protestant stronghold where Martin Luther was then living.
Despite the constant danger to his life, by the end of 1526 he completed the translation of his first two editions of the New Testament in English. A most interesting twist of history then provided for their printing. Upon learning that the Bishop of London sought to buy and then destroy Tyndale’s Bibles as they entered England, a friend of Tyndale’s “helped” the bishop secure the entire shipment as it arrived by sea from Europe. While the delighted bishop destroyed the “heretical” Scriptures, the vast sum he paid for the Bibles was returned to Tyndale to finance the production of more and better-quality editions of the New Testament!
And so it was that the Word of God, presented by Erasmus to the learned in 1516, was given to the common people by Tyndale in 1526. Thomas Garrett, a humble curate with an earnest belief in the gospel, sold Tyndale’s works to laymen and priests alike, and the Scriptures were rapidly spread throughout the country. Garrett, however, died at the stake.
Today, the English Bible is the most widely read English book in history.
Tyndale went on to produce a total of nine editions over a period of about ten years. Constantly in danger of torture and death, he sacrificed all he had to ensure that the people of England could study God’s Holy Word for themselves. By making the Bible accessible to the English, he achieved more than he ever could have in the pulpit. But as the sun rose on the Protestant Reformation and filled the world with the light of truth, night fell on the man “whose history is lost in his work, and whose epitaph is the Reformation.”5 In May of 1535, he was betrayed into the hands of papal spies and delivered a prisoner to the Castle of Vilvorde, near Antwerp, Belgium.
Confined in a windowless dungeon, Tyndale suffered from cold and sickness for the next year and a half. On October 6, 1536, he was taken from prison and tied to a stake. His last prayer was, “Lord! open the King of England’s eyes.”6 Then his executioners strangled him and reduced his body to ashes. His sufferings ended and his pen was permanently stilled. But the Lord soon answered his last prayer. By 1538, under the guise of the “Thomas Matthew Bible,” much of Tyndale’s Old and New Testaments were placed by king’s order in every parish church in the country and were allowed for use by private individuals.
Thus it was that by one man’s vision and selfless determination, the eyes of a nation were opened to read God’s truths of love and liberty. Not even flames were able to prevent him from witnessing his faith to millions down through the annals of time. As much as 75 percent of the King James Version’s Old Testament and 85 percent of its New Testament read today exactly as they did when they left the pen of William Tyndale.
Tyndale once said, “The hour of the Lord is come, and nothing can hinder the Word of God, as nothing could hinder Jesus Christ of old from issuing from the tomb.”7 Such faith in God is what the Reformation was built on. Such faith, combined with divine power, opened to millions the precious message of a crucified, risen, and sin-pardoning Savior. And such faith will again be shown as the Word of God once more lights up this dark earth through the last generation of this world’s history.
English: 244
Chinese (Mandarin): 45
Spanish: 32
Hindi:* 12
Urdu:* 12
*Nearly identical Indian languages, but use different scripts, known collectively as Hindustani
“The Bible into World Languages,” Patterns of Evidence, patternsofevidence.com, Mar. 24, 2023.
Anderson, Annals of the English Bible (London, 1845), p. 19, quoted in Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy, 1911 ed., p. 246.
Ibid.
D’Aubigné, History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, b. 18, ch. 4, quoted in White, The Great Controversy, p. 246.
D’Aubigné, History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, b. 18, ch. 8.
James Anthony Froude, History of England, vol. 2, chap. 6, p. 18.
John Foxe, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, p. 119.
See reference 4.
John Bradshaw was an editorial assistant at Last Generation magazine when he wrote this article. He is now the speaker/director for It Is Written, an international Christian television ministry dedicated to sharing insights from God’s Word with people around the world.