William
Tyndale was born in Slymbridge in about 1496. After being educated
at Magdalen Hall, Oxford,
he became a chaplain. While studying at Oxford he became very interested
in the ideas of John
Wycliffe
and the Lollards. Tyndale became convinced that the church had become
corrupt and selfish.
Like
Wycliffe, Tyndale thought it was important that people had the opportunity
to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. Tyndale wanted to
translate the Bible into English but at that time Henry
VIII and
the English church were very much against the idea.
In
1524 Tyndale went to Hamburg where he met Martin
Luther and the following year moved to Cologne where he managed
to arrange for his translation of the Bible to be printed in English.
The translation owed much to the work of Desiderius
Erasmus. During the next few years 18,000 copies of this bible
were printed and smuggled into England.
In 1530 Henry
VIII gave
orders that all English Bibles were to be destroyed. People caught
distributing the Tyndale Bible in England were burnt at the stake.
This attempt to destroy Tyndale's Bible was very successful as only
two copies have survived.
In
1535 William Tyndale was betrayed by Henry Phillips and arrested in
Antwerp and imprisoned in a castle near Brussels. He was found guilty
of heresy and on 6th October, 1536, he was strangled and burnt at
the stake.
Tyndale did not die in
vain. Two years later Henry VIII gave
permission for the publication of the English Bible. However,
people were not allowed to read it aloud to another person; nor were
people below the rank of gentleman allowed to own a copy of the English
Bible.
The death of William Tyndale
(1563)
(1)
William Tyndale, Obedience of a Christian Man (1528)
All the prophets wrote in the mother tongue... Why then might
they (the scriptures) not be written in the mother tongue... They
say, the scripture is so hard, that thou could never understand it...
They will say it cannot be translated into our tongue... they are
false liars.
(2)
H. Arnold-Forster, History of England (1898)
In 1526... William Tyndale translated the New Testament into
English, and had it printed abroad. Some copies were brought over
to England, but they were burnt by order of the bishops. For years
later Tyndale translated a great part of the Old Testament, but he
was not allowed to finish his work, for he was thrown into prison,
and was there put to death by the Emperor Charles V.
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