Few people have shaped the English language as much as William Tyndale. He risked and lost his own life for the desire that any ordinary reader, without Latin or Greek, could read the Bible in their own words, in their own language.
Born around 1494 in Gloucestershire, England, Tyndale studied at Oxford and later at Cambridge. He became one of the most gifted linguists of his generation, mastering Greek, Hebrew, and several modern European languages.
While working as a tutor for the Walsh family in Little Sodbury, Gloucestershire, he became involved in a debate with a local clergyman who defended the pope’s authority above Scripture. It was in this context that, according to John Foxe’s account, he declared he would make the boy who plowed the field know more of the Scriptures than that clergyman.
Convinced that the people needed Scripture in their own language, he traveled to London and asked Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall for support to translate the New Testament from Greek. Faced with refusal, he realized there was no place in England for this work.
In 1524, he left England and lived in exile on the European continent. There he completed the translation of the New Testament from the original Greek, printed in Worms in 1526 and later smuggled into England hidden in bales of cloth.
The authorities reacted harshly: copies were bought and publicly burned, and Tyndale was condemned as a heretic. Even so, he continued revising the New Testament and advanced in translating the Pentateuch, always on the run between cities such as Cologne, Worms, and Antwerp.
A man of firm convictions, Tyndale was also described by contemporaries as difficult and inflexible. He clashed with other reformers, such as George Joye, over revisions made to his own text without his authorization. He also engaged in a harsh public confrontation with the Catholic statesman Thomas More, who accused him of heresy; the dispute stretched across several works published by both sides.
In 1535, he was betrayed by an acquaintance, Henry Phillips, and arrested near Antwerp. He spent about eighteen months in the prison of Vilvoorde Castle, near Brussels, where he continued studying Hebrew, until he was condemned for heresy tied to Reformation ideas.
Executed in October 1536, his last words, according to the chronicler John Foxe, were a plea that the eyes of the King of England would be opened. His translation became the foundation of the King James Bible and of nearly every English Bible published since.
