years later, near his death, when he was racked by persecution, abuse, poverty and exile, he still held to his resolution, to continue his work ‘out of pity and compassion which I had and yet have, on the darkness of my brethren, and to bring them to the knowledge of Christ’.
Unsurprisingly, having flagged up his position in a country which was alarmed at all that he stood for, he found no position in London. Partly, he himself thought, because he was unimpressive and awkward in any interview about his future. Perhaps his character was too transparent for comfort, his meek demeanour thought to be camouflage. For whatever reason, aged thirty, he sailed for Hamburg in 1524. He would never again set foot in England.
It is thought that he went to Wittenberg where he met and very possibly worked with Luther – the new Satan. He certainly admired Luther. That sealed his fate. The English court turned on him and set out to silence him and to hunt him down.
He went to Cologne and worked on his first translation of the New Testament, for which he went back to the original Greek. It was finished and printed a year later. Six thousand copies were about to be shipped to London when a self-appointed spy, Johan Dobneck, alerted the authorities in Cologne and in England. He informed the Bishop of London, and, via Wolsey, Henry VIII. The English saw a dangerous association with Luther and with the brutal Peasants’ Revolt and went into a frenzy of counter-measures. Tyndale, no less determined, when tipped off about Dobneck, seized as many printed Bibles as he could and took to a boat on the Rhine. For a time, it was touch and go whether his translation would survive. It was here that Tyndale again proved his tenacity. He was determined not to have his translation banned from its destination.
Henry VIII put the English ports on alert. It has been said that he sent out the navy to search all ships coming from the Netherlands. Certainly warehouses on the Thames were raided and ransacked in the pursuit of the New Testament in the English language. Diplomatic letters and ambassadors urged the authorities in the Low Countries (Tyndale’s current location in a life on the run), to crack down on the production of this subversive and inflammatory book. The Lord Chancellor was commanded to prevent their import, clergy to prevent their circulation.
But in England there was a willing underground, stemming from the Lollards. Most of all there were Christians who wanted to read the Gospels and the Epistles in their own language. Between 1525 and 1528 it is estimated that about 18,000 copies of Tyndale’s New Testament were printed and, despite seizures, most of them got into the hands of those who wanted them. Printing made huge numbers available. Far too many to net anything but a fraction.
The energy of Tyndale’s New Testament came partly from the invention of print. Francis Bacon in the reign of Elizabeth I asserted that print, gunpowder and the navigational compass had changed the world. Without print, Tyndale’s work would most likely have followed that of Wycliffe along untrodden ways to remote safe houses, the contraband of faith smuggled through the lines for a minority. Print meant mass. Battalions replaced the single spies.
People fell in love with Tyndale’s translation because of its beauty, the sense of certainty, the way in which it seemed to be at the heart of this newly emerging, exotic, vivacious and proud language, his own language. Perhaps above all else it was loved because it was written to be spoken. Tyndale knew the limitations of literacy in the country which had now exiled him and it was on those people that his mind was fixed as his scholarship and great artistry unrolled the scrolls of ancient time.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; And without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life and the life was the light of men.
New words and phrases were planted in the English language, words that have flourished ever since. ‘Let there be light’, ‘fell flat on his face’, ‘filthy lucre’, ‘let my people go’, ‘the apple of his eye’, ‘a man after his own heart’, ‘signs of the times’, ‘ye of little faith’, ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’, ‘fisherman’, ‘under the sun’, ‘to rise and shine’, ‘the land of the living’, ‘sour grapes’, ‘landlady’, ‘sea-shore’, ‘two-edged’, ‘it came to pass’, ‘from time to time’ and hundreds more. He is bitten into our tongue.
And he gave us, in English, the Beatitudes, the most radical and compelling affirmation of morality, and one of the most sublime poems in the language, which begins:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Which Tyndale’s words have done.
The movement for a Bible in English, which had gathered for so long, now had its champion. Tyndale’s version of the New Testament was the fuse. God’s English could no longer be silenced. The English ruling classes panicked.
The Bishop of London, Tunstall, had a plan. He would arrange to buy up all the books at source, ship them to London and burn them on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral.
‘Well, I am the gladder,’ said Tyndale, ‘for these two benefits will come thereof: I shall get money of him for those books to bring myself out of debt and the whole world shall cry out upon the burning of God’s word.’ Which is what happened and Tyndale continued rewriting and refining his work. Yet it hurt. Especially when he was accused of deliberate deceit and profanation of the Scriptures. He knew that his only aim was to educate. There was no heresy in him. He was damned out of fear and politics and not for anything he wrote or said.
The campaign to stop Tyndale intensified. In the 1520s, Sir Thomas More was called up for service. Thomas More, a renowned scholar, was an admired friend of other liberal humanist scholars across Europe, especially of Erasmus, who wrote of him in the highest terms. He said that being in More’s company ‘you would say that Plato’s Academy was renewed again’. He wrote of More’s ‘gentleness and amiable manners’. There was More’s Utopia, a classic. And he had at one stage, like Erasmus, approved of vernacular translations of the Bible and attempted a few passages himself. He seemed, given the hardness of the age, a kindly man.
Yet once licensed by Bishop Tunstall in 1528 to read all heretical works and refute them, he bared his fangs in swiftly written dialogues. Tyndale became his chief prey. Tyndale wanted a ploughboy to be able to read the Bible? More, who abhorred free speech, was alarmed that the Bible might be available ‘for every lewd lad’.
In this he differed from his friend Erasmus, who found himself twice snared in these disputes. Luther claimed him for a master although Erasmus opposed Luther’s violent expression of their joint position and disassociated himself from the bloody consequences of the German wars. Now Thomas More saw Erasmus as an ally. Yet Erasmus wanted the Bible to be translated into every language and read as widely as possible. More’s frenzy against Tyndale was nourished by his concern for the future of the ancient position of the Church and monarchy. He saw it threatened and his liberal humanism was thrown overboard.
More savaged Tyndale’s translation. He even claimed it was not the New Testament but a forgery. He brought no proof and nor could he substantiate in any but the most minor way ‘its faults . . . wherein there were noted wrong above a thousand texts’.
Tyndale’s reply, Answer Unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue, carefully refuted the false claims of Henry VIII’s bulldog. More’s counter-response, Confutation of Tyndale’s answer, included descriptions of Tyndale as ‘a beast’ discharging ‘a filthy foam of blasphemies out of his brutish beastly mouth’, a ‘hellhound’ fit for ‘the dogs of hell to feed on’. He called him the son of the devil himself.
