The Fugitive Translator

The Fugitive Translator

Can you imagine William Tyndale on the “Ten Most Wanted” list?

WILLIAM TYNDALE was born about 1494 and educated first at Oxford, where he was ordained into the priesthood, and then at Cambridge, where he joined the Reformation. When he completed his education, he felt he needed to get away from the academic atmosphere of the university to be able to think, pray, and study the Greek New Testament on his own. His solution was to take a job as tutor for a wealthy family. During that time he became convinced that England would never be evangelized using Latin Bibles because “it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth, except the Scripture were laid before their eyes in their mother tongue.”

However, Tyndale’s efforts to get permission from the bishop of London to translate the Bible into English were unsuccessful, so he left England, never to return.

Tyndale settled in Antwerp, where sympathetic English merchants hid and protected him as he translated the Greek New Testament and parts of the Hebrew Old Testament into English. His first English New Testament was printed in Germany in 1525.

As Tyndale’s English Bibles were smuggled into England, the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London began attacking him fiercely. Finally on June 18, 1528, Thomas Wolsey, the English cardinal, ordered the ambassador to the Low Countries to demand from the Low Countries regent that Tyndale be arrested and extradited to England. It took his pursuers seven years to track him down, but Tyndale was finally arrested near Brussels in 1535. He was held in a cold castle dungeon nearby for eighteen months before his trial.

A long list of charges was drawn up against him, among them: He had maintained that faith alone justifies and that to believe in the forgiveness of sins and to embrace the mercy offered in the gospel was enough for salvation.

Tyndale, in his early forties, was found guilty at his trial and condemned to death as a heretic. Referring to the king’s opposition to his English Bible, Tyndale said, “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.” Then William Tyndale was strangled and his body burned.

The year that Tyndale died, there were two English Bibles containing his translation of the New Testament circulating in England, awaiting the approval of King Henry VIII. When the first was presented to him, the king, not realizing it was Tyndale who had translated the New Testament, proclaimed, “In God’s name let it go abroad among the people.”

Two years later the king directed that every church in England display “one book of the whole Bible in English.” Tyndale’s dying prayer was answered.

Tyndale’s Bible translations were his lasting legacy. They were so well done that they make up 90 percent of the wordings of the King James Version published nearly one hundred years later and 75 percent of the wordings of the Revised Standard Version of 1952.

Reflection

Some of our prayer requests may not be answered in our lifetime, but that doesn’t mean they won’t ever be. Which of your prayers are you afraid may fit into this category? Toward the end of his life the prophet Daniel prayed, “For your sake, Lord, smile again on your desolate sanctuary. . . . See how your city lies in ruins—for everyone knows that it is yours. . . . O Lord, listen and act!” (Daniel 9:17-19). Daniel did not live to see the rebuilding of the temple and the city of Jerusalem, but God answered Daniel’s prayers according to his own timing. Don’t despair! Keep on praying!

Every day I call to you, my God, but you do not answer. Every night you hear my voice, but I find no relief. Yet you are holy. The praises of Israel surround your throne. Our ancestors trusted in you, and you rescued them. You heard their cries for help and saved them. They put their trust in you and were never disappointed.

Psalm 22:2-5