William Tyndale (reformation)

Come, gather round children and shed a tear for old William Tyndale our great poet and inspiration.

 

 

When Martin Luther nailed his challenge to the Pope on a church door to begin the reformation on All Saints Eve in 1517 he caught a groundswell of popular opinion. Translation and printing of the Word in Europe had begun nearly two generations earlier and the traditional power of the church was under challenge.

 

 

In England, the Lollards had held fast for more than a century to their vision of free access to the written word in their own language. Their teacher John Wycliffe had translated the vulgate Bible into English until the translations were banned by the church in 1408. The church feared that reading of the Bible would lead to heresy. The Lollards tended towards considering the word as a sacrament. The Bible in English remained banned by the law under King Henry the eighth, the tudor brat.

 

 

Tyndale caught the vision and began translation of the new testament from the Greek and Latin of renaissance scholar, Desiderius Erasmaus, rather than using the vulgate of the Roman church.

 

 

His free verse captured the essence of the word in a direct and exciting way that endures into our current translations and shaped the english language as the vision became reality. Generations have learned to read, write and think from Tyndale’s finest work.

 

 

Tyndale published the new testament in 1526 from hiding in Germany and Belgium. Eighteen thousand copies were smuggled into England. King Henry’s chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, pronounced the word naughtily translated, and declared Tyndale a heretic.

 

 

When King Henry became frustrated that his queen Catherine had not produced a male heir, he asked the Pope for an anullment of the marriage. Catherine was Henry’s first wife, his older brother Arthur’s widow. The Pope, however, was in no position to pronounce an anullment of the marriage because he was being held prisoner by Catherine’s nephew, Holy Roman Emperor Charles the fifth, who had captured Rome. Henry took the law into his own hands and cast Catherine aside. Tyndale criticised the King’s action and Henry asked the Holy Roman Emperor to hunt him down. Henry ordered all copies of Tyndale’s bible to be destroyed.

 

 

King Henry married protestant sympathiser Anne Boleyn in 1533 and the Pope excommunicated him. The parliament endorsed Henry as the supreme head on earth of the church of England. The separation from Rome was complete and the reformed church was begun in England.

 

 

Tyndale remained an outlaw until he was betrayed, arrested and imprisoned in Brussels in 1535. He was tried and found guilty of heresy. In 1536 he was strangled and burnt at the stake.

 

 

Two years later, King Henry relented and allowed limited publication of the bible in English, which was based on Tyndale’s translations.

 

 

It is estimated that King Henry had seventy two thousand souls executed during his thirty eight year reign.

 

Burning the body was cruelly intended to deny a person their place in the resurrection. Cremation did not become fashionable until much more recent times.

 

 

 

 

© 2007 Epiphanist

 

 

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