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Five hundred years of the New Testament in English: The Testimony of William Tyndale · Centrally Speaking

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Centrally speaking, is the Central Schweinfeller Church's podcast.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: It speaks about issues that would be of interest to our society.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: In particular, it addresses how a Christian worldview intersects with Western secular culture.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: In the spirit of the church's founder, we take the perspective of the Middle Women, which is in agreement with the historic Christian Church.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Dr.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Drake Williams, Minister of Mission and Theology of the Church.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Our website is www.cscfamily.org.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: The church has one scripture that it passes along, the Old and New Testaments in our Bible.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: And we are fortunate as English speakers to have the Bible in our language for over 500 years.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the key people involved with putting the Bible in the English language is William Tyndale.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: And we're on the anniversary of the time where he put the New Testament into English.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: We're very fortunate to have Tony Watkins here with us today to talk about this with us on 500 Years of the New Testament in English, the testimony of William Tyndale.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: Tony is the fellow for public engagement at Tyndale House in Cambridge, United Kingdom.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: The Tyndale House is one of the most advanced libraries of biblical scholarship in the world today.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: Tony has been a speaker and writer on the Bible and media for many years.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: He previously worked in partnership with various organizations, including the Lazon Media Engagement Network, Demaris Norway, and IFES Graduate Impact.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: He's also been an adjunct lecturer in Norway and a visiting lecturer at several other academic institutions.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: Tony is happily married to Jane, who is uh director of mentoring for growing young disciples.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: Tony, it's wonderful to have you uh be part of Centrally Speaking.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_03: Great pleasure to be here.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: Let's talk about William Tyndale for a moment.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: Many may not uh associate him uh with uh the New Testament or with the Bible originally.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: They might think of the King James Bible.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's the Bible that my grandmother gave me.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: But why don't we if as we get started on this podcast, can you just provide a biography of uh William Tyndale?
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: Who was he?
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_02: Where was he educated and what led him to translate uh from uh Greek into English?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there's there's a lot we don't know because he was born in the uh early 1490s, and records from the late 1490s and early 1500s are sometimes a bit patchy.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_03: So what we do know is that he was born sometime in the early 1490s in South Gloucestershire in England, which is not all that far from the Welsh border, which may or may not be significant for his facility with linguistics later in life.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_03: That's speculative, we just don't know.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_03: In the early 1500s, he went to Oxford University.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_03: So that means he went when he was maybe 12 or at least maybe a teenager, but young.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I mean it's unthinkable to think of going to Oxford at that age now.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: But of course, he was being trained for the ministry, trained for the priesthood.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, so it was more normal then.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_03: So at that kind of age, he went off to Oxford.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_03: He was in Hartford, or it was called Mordlin Hall at that point, it's now Hartford College in Oxford, where there's a commemorative window for him.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so if you're ever in Oxford, do go into Hartford College and have a look at that window, it's rather good.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_03: And when he went to uh Mordlin Hall, he found himself at the middle of uh an intellectual debate, uh warfare, really, more than a debate.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: Uh on the one side, you've got the scholastics who were the um very conservative traditionalist scholars who had tried to reconcile the Greek philosopher Aristotle with the church fathers and with medieval theology, and they were obsessed with with logic and and these kinds of issues.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_03: On the other side of the of this um battle, intellectual battle, were uh people called uh humanists, not secular humanists as we think of them today, but uh Christian humanists.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_03: And there was there was a movement that had begun in Italy and had moved across Europe uh with leading light among among the humanist tradition is uh Erasmus of Rotterdam, uh who was in Cambridge from about 1510 to 1514, I haven't got my dates quite right, somewhere around there.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_03: His ideas and and other ideas from the humanists were very significant, particularly in Maudlin Hall in Oxford.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: And they were arguing that uh rather than getting caught up in all of these long discussions about logic and how many angels you could fit on the head of a pin, we needed to go back to the sources.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_03: And that's true both for classical literature, the Greek and Roman writers, and for the Bible.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_03: So Christian scholars needed to go back to Greek and Hebrew to see what does the original text or whatever manuscripts were available to them, what does it say, rather than relying on tradition.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_03: Tyndale was very much teen humanist uh when he was at Maudeline Hall.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_03: He was very caught up with these ideas, and that's a significant part of his background.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_03: The other significant part of his background, I think, is that having been born in South Gloucestershire, he had grown up in an area that was the heartlands of a group of people in England called the Lollards.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_03: So we need to go back more than a century before Tyndale at this point.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_03: John Wycliffe, who many people will have heard of, he and his followers, or probably his followers, were the first people to do a complete translation of the Bible into English.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_03: That was Middle English.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_03: By Tyndale's time, Middle English was going out of use and modern English was coming in.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_03: So he was right on the cusp of that change.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: So they translated into Middle English and they translated from Latin because they had no Greek texts available to them, and they would not have been able to read them if they had.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_03: They'd been made illegal in the early 1400s.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_03: 1408, uh, a guy by the name of Bishop Arundel had passed a set of laws called the Constitutions of Oxford, which made it illegal not only to translate the Bible into English without the permission of a bishop, but even to read it in English.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_03: And I came across recently an account of a mother and child who were burnt at the stake for reading the Bible in English, one a Wycliffe translation or a Lollard translation.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_03: The area where Wycliffe, where Tyndale grew up, was a was a hotbed for the continuing Lollards who had not gone away, they'd just gone underground.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_03: It was a secret movement, but they were still very much active.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_03: Tyndale was from a family of um cloth working merchants, and Lollardy was particularly strong among cloth workers in South Gloucestershire.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_03: So it's it's unimaginable that Tyndale didn't have that kind of background.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_03: So if he's been exposed to the ideas of Bible and English, and people are no longer speaking Middle English but beginning to speak modern English, and now with these humanist ideas of go back to the sources, go back to the Greek and the Hebrew and work from there, the idea at some point developed in his mind.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_03: I need to translate the Bible from Greek or the New Testament from Greek into modern English.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_03: That idea probably took root in his mind sometime before about 1520.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_03: It seems he may have spent a little time in Cambridge, which was the birthplace of the English Reformation.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_03: So there was there were ideas beginning to be discussed in Cambridge around that time.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_03: So the fact that he probably at least visited here is important in this as well.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_03: Then he went back to Gloucestershire where he was chaplain and tutor to a guy called Sir John Walsh, who was a friend of Henry VIII.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_03: And they were quite interested in these new ideas coming from the continent, Lutheran ideas.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_03: And so they had Tyndale in their house, and it seems that at that point he's really developing this deep longing to translate the Bible in English.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_03: There's a famous story of an encounter he had with well, there's different versions of the story.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_03: Either the Chancellor of Worcester Cathedral, or more likely a monk who'd been invited to dinner at the Walsh House called Little Sobre Manor.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_03: They got into a debate, and the monk or the Chancellor of Worcester Cathedral, whoever it was, said to him, I would rather be without God's laws than the Pope's.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_03: To which Tyndale very famously replied, If God spare my life before many years are out, I will cause the ploughboy to know more of the scriptures than you do.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_03: He was true to his word.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_03: In 1523, he went to London to try and get permission from Tunstall, the Bishop of London, who was a very good friend of Erasmus.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_03: Now, Erasmus is a really significant significant figure, not just because he's the leading light in the humanist, but because by this point in 1516 Erasmus had had gone to Switzerland.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_03: He had brought to completion a work that he started here in Cambridge, which was to have the Greek text on one side and the Latin text of it on the on the other side of a printed volume.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_03: And it was not just the Vulgate Latin text that dates back to Jerome, 4th century, that was the standard Latin text of the New Testament, which the Catholic Church used right across Europe.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_03: He corrected it because he was looking at the Greek, gone back to the sources, and he was saying, no, the Roman Catholic Church has got this wrong.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_03: And uh Erasmus is was was was the Roman Catholic Church's greatest theologian, their great their greatest mind.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_03: He stayed in the Catholic Church, he didn't become a reformer, but he was very critical of a lot of things.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_03: So having published this Latin and Greek side by side, that's what Luther used in 1522 to translate the New Testament into German, and that's what Tyndale had and wanted to do the same.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_03: So because Tunstall was a friend of Erasmus, surely he expected a favorable response from Tunstall, but he was turned down.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_03: And so yeah, he the um he wasn't he was not allowed to do it.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_03: It was an illegal thing to do, so he had to make alternative arrangements.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, well, I know that uh Wycliffe was the one who translated uh the Bible from Latin, but to go back to the Greek text, that's uh that's a special thing, isn't it?
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh how broadly had Wycliffe's translation traveled compared to what Tyndale was trying to do?
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_03: It's hard to say because uh Wycliffe and the Lollards or the uh his first Lollard followers predated the printing press.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_03: So it was made illegal in 1408.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_03: So Wycliffe had been working in the 1380s, uh late 14th century, at least, uh I think around the 1380s.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_03: Every manuscript had to be hand copied.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_03: So there are there are still some surviving copies, not very many, but there are some.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_03: And it seems that they'd spread around the country, but because they were hand-copied manuscripts, they would not have been very accessible to people.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_03: So groups of lollards may have had a manuscript between them, perhaps.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_03: You know, maybe it would be shared around, we just don't know.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_03: It would have been unusual for an individual to have had copies.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_03: Tyndale, now living very much in the edge of the printing press, he wants not only to translate from Greek into English, modern English, but to have it printed, because then it becomes widely available.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_03: And that's what Luther had had done to such great effect in Germany.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_03: 1522, his his New Testament.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_03: And so Tyndale is just itching to do that, but it's illegal.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_03: He stays here in London for a while, um, living at the house of a guy called a merchant called Humphrey Monmouth.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know whether the fact that his surname is Monmouth is significant.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it certainly shows that his family would have come from Monmouthshire, which is the county just into Wales from Gloucestershire, so so very close to Tyndale's territory.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_03: Whether that makes any difference?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_03: I have absolutely no idea.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody does.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_03: But it's just a little tempting to wonder.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_03: So he stayed with this merchant who was very persuaded by Protestants, these new evangelical ideas that have come in from Germany.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_03: And Monmouth put him in touch with German merchants in an area of London called, it's known as the Steelyard.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_03: That's a mangling of its German name, it's the Stahlhof, which was the trading post, the London trading post for the Hanseatic League.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_03: So in the medieval period, the Hanseatic League was this network of trading cities right across Europe, 200 cities at its peak, very wealthy, very powerful.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_03: So this was their trading post.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_03: So that so there's German merchants, many of them from the Cologne area, in this area of London.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_03: If you visit London, it's where Cannon Street Station is now.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_03: And there's a couple of roads nearby that are named the Still Yard Lane for it, for example.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_03: So Tyndale then is also having contact with these people, these merchants who probably have almost certainly have contacts with printers in Germany.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, there are no printers in London who were either capable or prepared to do the job, even if he could have done it here.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_03: So in 1524, he heads off to Germany.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_03: Well, what we call today Germany, of course it wasn't Germany then, uh, but he heads off to the continent, almost certainly spent some time in Wittenberg, where Luther was.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_03: We can't prove that, but it's there's a there's a William somebody who's in the records in in Wittenberg at the right time.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_03: Is it William Tyndale?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_03: We don't know.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_03: It could well be, yeah, and it's highly likely.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_03: But by 1525, he ends up in Cologne, which is where many of the German merchants in London were from.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_03: So he's got context there.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_03: Uh he starts printing his New Testament.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_03: So he's finished his translation by this this point, and he starts printing, and it he's printing at quarto size, which means that there's four pages printed to a sheet, and then you've got to have all of those signatures printed, and then you can fold them up and stitch them together, cut the edges off, and you've got your pages, and you can then get it bound.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_03: He was rumbled though.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_03: So he got as far as printing the first eight signatures, the first eight sheets, which gave him the pages of the prologue, and a woodcut of Matthew writing his gospel, and then the first 22 chapters of Matthew.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_03: And that's as far as he got.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_03: And there's one copy of this remaining, still surviving, which is in the British Library in London.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_03: It's called the Cologne Fragment.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_03: So Tyndale took whatever sheets he could with his assistant William Roy, and they escaped up the river Rhine to the city of Worms, where Luther had been put on trial.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_03: And this is a city much more positive about evangelical Protestant ideas.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_03: And so in 1526 he starts printing again in the printing workshop of a guy called Peter Scherfer.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_03: He prints it now octavo size, so eight pages on the sheet.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_03: So it's it's now pocket sized.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_03: He drops out the prologue, he drops out the big wood cuts, he just has little ones at the beginning of each chapter, and those have been used in previous books.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_03: So they're not original to his, it seems.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_03: Well, they're probably not original to his New Testament.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_03: And he drops out all of the marginal notes and other things that were going to be in his original copy.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_03: So I think he's wanting to get it out quickly.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_03: But because it's small, it's much more easily smuggled.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_03: So then these copies are smuggled unbound into England, often hidden in bales of cloth, so they'll be coming into the steelyard in London, and other there's a few other Hanseatic ports.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_03: Kings Lynn, not far from Cambridge, was a Hanseatic port.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yep, smuggled in various places and it finds its way around quite quickly.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_03: We know that copies reached Scotland.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_03: We know that there were plenty of copies around in London because this comes to the attention of the church authorities, who of course are livid.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_03: Tunstall, the bishop, starts collecting copies up in order to burn them outside St.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_03: Paul's Cathedral, which happened getting on the fall of uh 1526.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_03: I think it was around then.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_03: Archbishop Warham, um, who the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, he was paying for copies to collect them together in order for Tunstall to burn.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_03: So, I mean, at least it puts the money back in Tyndale's pocket.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_03: They weren't just going up in smoke for nothing.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_03: But Tyndale was was horrified that the church in England, not the church of England, the church in England, uh, should consider it was even possible to burn God's word.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_03: He he was just outraged by this.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_03: But they considered it to be heretical.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_03: Tunstall claimed he'd found 2,000 errors in Tyndale's translation.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_03: And Tyndale himself was open about the fact that there were mistakes because he'd done it quickly.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_03: He's still learning.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_03: He's actually the key person developing modern English.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_03: He codified a lot of modern English, especially in the his second edition of 1534.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_03: So much of what we think of as modern English today goes back to Tyndale.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_03: There are 822 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary for which Tyndale is the first documented use.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_03: There are phrases that we use that are straight from Tyndale, my brother's keeper, an eye for an eye, the salt of the earth, act of faith.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_03: There are words that he coined, scapegoat, Passover.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_03: Daybreak, it was it was the first documented use.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_03: We don't know if he came up with it, that's the first documented use.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_03: Pleasure and various other words.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_03: So he makes English in many ways.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_03: So it was an exciting time.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_03: Because the church authorities hated it so much, they they wanted to outlaw it and to destroy it.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_03: So some of the errors that Thomas Cuthbert Tunstall and then Thomas Moore claimed to have found were some of them were genuine mistakes that Tindell corrected in 1534.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_03: Some of them were really coming down to the big theological issues of the Reformation.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_03: So should it be a church or a congregation?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_03: Is it an elder or a priest?
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_03: Is it due penance or is it repentance?
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_03: And these are fundamental theological issues.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_03: They're not, they're not just error, they're not errors.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_03: Uh that's a difference of opinion.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, that's what we're celebrating 500 years on.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so those are very significant.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_02: So the quality of the translation you've you've just uh spoken about, uh I guess evaluated differently if one is uh Catholic rather than one is is Protestant.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: Is that is that fair to say?
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely right.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_03: And although we, as I say, connected many corrected many of the errors in the 1534 edition, and there's much more standardization of spelling and those kinds of things in 1534, which is interesting.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_03: So it shows how how the English is developing, but those theological issues remain.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: And this is the 500th anniversary.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's uh released um officially.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: When uh when was it officially released?
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um hard to say exactly because it's been smuggled in.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_03: It sometime in the spring, probably March, April.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_03: Certainly it's causing a big stir by the summer when slow is beginning to collect copies up.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: And previously people were are only hearing the scripture, let's say, read in Latin from uh the church.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: So to have an English copy, per well, personal copy, or at least one within the congregation, this is just a landmark event, isn't it?
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_03: I mean it couldn't officially be in the congregation at that point, but certainly personal copies.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, this is a time when there's a wealthy merchant class arising across Europe, and so there are many more people who want to have books for themselves, and because of printing, it's much more affordable to have books.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_03: And England was unusual in not having a vernacular translation.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_03: There were vernacular translations right across Europe, including in Germany.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um, there are 15, according to Bruce Gordon from Yale, in his book, The Bible of Global History, there were 15 German New Testaments before Luther's.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_03: But Luther was the first one to print.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_03: Like Tyndale, he's also shaping the German language at a at a critical juncture because of going into print.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_03: And there were copies in uh in in other places, uh vernacular languages in other places as well.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_03: So England was the big exception.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_03: So there would have been individually owned, but I bet there were some congregations where uh the the priest who was persuaded by these new Lutheran ideas is um secretly reading from it on a on a Sunday morning.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_03: Just how amazing it would have been for people to hear English in their language for the first time.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_03: And not a not a remote, not Middle English, you know, even those people who had had access to a to uh to a Wycliffe Lollard translation.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_03: This is the language that that they use.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_03: And it's so vivid in his language.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_03: His theological work uh is quite dull.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_03: But he really comes alive when he's translating scripture with these just wonderful phrases.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_03: He's got it's got a poetic rhythm to it, even when it's not poetry.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_03: And these powerful phrases, they just stick in the mind.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_03: Uh when I've done a couple of talks on on William Tyndale of uh when I'm talking to people about it, uh if I have my facsimile of his 1526 edition, I often read them the Sermon on the Mount, because it sounds just like the Sermon on the Mount in the King James, apart from just one or two old words.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_03: Or the Beatitudes, rather, not the whole Sermon on the Mount.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_03: There are some words that feel very unfamiliar, but so much of it feels, yeah, this is this is what we the language we still use.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_03: It's language that even finds itself way into a uh a translation like the NIV, which actually started from scratch from from Greek and Hebrew, and yet these phrases are so powerful that readers expect to find them.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_03: And so the translators still end up using these familiar phrases, which is fascinating.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: So his legacy goes on much more than just his own translation, but is incorporated in the King James and probably in the just even the way that we commonly express Christian truth, isn't that right?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yeah, that's right.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and he did some Old Testament work as well.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_03: So by 1530, he had uh published a translation of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, and I think 1531, Jonah, and then some odd passages here and there because he translated some of the lectionary from Hebrew into Greek.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_03: So that you see by this point he learned Hebrew and was a brilliant Hebrew scholar.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: He was he was just had such an ability with languages.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_03: He was really unique in Britain at that point.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_03: Can you be really unique?
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_03: He was unique in Britain in that point, in that he was such a great scholar, such a brilliant linguist, and with this passion to put God's word into the language of ordinary people.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody else could have done that at the time.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_03: So Miles Coverdale, 1535, publishes the Coverdale Bible.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_03: That consists of Tyndale's New Testament, Tyndale's Pentateuch, Tyndale's Jonah, and then Coverdale translated the rest.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_03: But he's working from Latin and German.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_03: He can't work from Greek and Hebrew.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_03: And then by the time so Tyndale was arrested, he was betrayed in 1535 by a young English student who'd got some gambling debts, and almost certainly has been paid to do so to betray Tyndale by one of the high-ups in the church in England, uh, possibly Tunstall's successor, John Stokesley, that seems the likely suspect.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, so he's betrayed, arrested, put into Villevaard prison, six miles north of maybe kilometres just north of Brussels.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_03: And uh he he's there until September, October 1536, when he's executed.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_03: While he's in prison, he he wrote a letter pleading for a warmer cap and um material to mend his trousers and a warmer coat because it's jolly cold and damp in this prison cell.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_03: But what he really, really wants is his Hebrew Bible and his Hebrew dictionary and writing materials.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_03: He wants to continue the work of translating.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_03: End of September, beginning of October 1536, he is he was executed, strangled and burned at the stake.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_03: And before he was strangled, according to Fox's Book of Martyrs, he cried out, Lord, open the King of England's eyes.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_03: So, 1536, two years later, 1538, Henry VIII's chief minister.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Thomas Cromwell puts out a statement saying that every church in England should have the Bible in English.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_03: And then in 1539, the Great Bible becomes available, which is in many ways a modification of Tyndale's work via the Matthew Bible.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_03: So Tyndale's friend John Rogers published the Matthew Bible in 1537.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_03: And he had Tyndale's unpublished translations as well, as far as Second Chronicles.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_03: So quite a bit more of Tyndale's work.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_03: And he he puts Tyndale's prologues in there and Tyndale's marginal notes.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_03: So that's a there's a lot of Tyndale in the Matthew Bible.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_03: Much of that ends up in the Great Bible.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_03: Miles Coverdale's in charge of it, so the the bits that are missing from Tyndale's work are Coverdale's work.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_03: But he softens, he softens some of Tyndale a little bit.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_03: So he changes congregation back to church and he changes elder back to back to priest.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_03: So he just softens it a little bit to make it accessible, uh, acceptable to the church authorities.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_03: And Tyndale's name is nowhere in sight.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_03: Caverdale and Tyndale were good friends.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_03: They did they worked together on things.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_03: So it's just if Tyndale's name was there, it would not have been given the royal approval.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and that great boy.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's called the Great Bible because it's huge, and that was to be on the lectern in every parish church in England.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_03: And that's just three years now after Tyndale and how extraordinary.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_02: And he died for this Bible that he translated, and now it's on the pulpit.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: That is amazing.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_02: I I'm sure some who are listening to this podcast would be interested in finding where Tyndale's Bible is.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: Can you you can find it on the internet, can't you?
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_03: Uh yes, you can.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_03: So there are three copies of his 1526 New Testament still in existence.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_03: There is a St.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_03: Paul's Cathedral have uh a partial one.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_03: They're missing, I think, about 70 pages.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_03: And it's nice that they have one having had the bonfire of of goodness knows how many in in 15 uh twenty-six.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_03: And if you're you're in England, they've they've just opened a new exhibition uh about William Tyndale there.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_03: The British Library have a complete copy, apart from the title page.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_03: They bought that from Bristol Baptist College for a million pounds, which was the most the British Library had ever spent on a single volume.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_03: And they said that this is the most important book that had ever been published in English, um, which is a fair assessment, I think.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_03: And then in the late 1990s, somebody in the um in an archive in in Stuttgart found another copy, a complete copy, complete with title page.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so Stuttgart also have an exhibition of that at the moment.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_03: So there's just these three three these three copies.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_03: There are facsimiles in various libraries around the world.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_03: There was a Victorian businessman called um Francis Fry, had a chocolate making company that got incorporated into Cabries and uh very, very famous company, and he had a factory-making chocolate and a factory-making packaging, but he was passionate about old Bibles.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_03: So an interest in Tyndale had risen, and he borrowed the Bristol Baptist College copy, and he made him, you know, personally made himself this beautiful facsimile that he then printed in his factory and sent to libraries around the world.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_03: So there's a there's a copy of Fry's facsimile in Cambridge University Library and and and then a few others as well.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um they didn't print huge copies, but he was able to put his machinery to the purposes of producing facsimiles, which is quite something.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, but if one wanted to read uh Tyndale's Bible and not get to some of these um uh editions that are in various places, you could read it somewhat on the internet, or you could read probably find it uh through just even the King James, right?
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_03: You find yes, uh so a new book came out in April by a guy called David Crystal, who's found new ways of measuring the the level of agreement between Tyndale and the King James.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_03: And so rather than trying to say how much of the King James is from Tyndale, he said how much of Tyndale's work survives into the King James in a recognizable form, and he comes to about 70%.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_03: So a lot of a lot of Tyndale's work is survived into it, which is not to say 70% of the King James is from Tyndale, but but yeah, it might just be an odd phrase in the middle of a verse or whatever, but but yeah, a lot survives.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um so yes, you can find find um you can find the Tyndale New Testament in modern English, uh not in modern English, in modern spelling, which is an awful lot easier to read.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_03: Uh you can find that online.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_03: There's a Canadian scholar who is producing a very lightly updated version of the Matthew Bible, so just modern spelling and and just evening out one or two things, but basically trying to stay close to the Matthew Bible.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_03: That's accessible on quite accessible online, if I remember rightly.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_03: That's worth having a look at because there are a lot of Tyndale's workers in there.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_03: Um you can buy a facsimile and get used to reading old English typeface and and weird spellings.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_03: That's great fun.
• 26:28
  unknown: Okay.
• 26:29
  unknown: Okay.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_02: Don't even put a lot of work into uh understanding Tyndale and his Bible.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just wondering on this uh 500th anniversary of the publication of the New Testament.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think that William Tyndale will be saying to uh English speakers, English readers uh today on the 500th anniversary of his translation?
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_03: I I think one thing he will be saying is you have no idea how blessed you are to have so many Bibles.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_03: You're not stuck with with my translation with all of its you know deficiencies because we've learnt a lot.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_03: Tyndale was learning a lot in his own lifetime.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_03: We've learned much more since we have access to many more manuscripts.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_03: So the science of of finding out what was the original text has gone on in leaps and bounds, especially over the last hundred years.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_03: So he'd say, You have no idea what riches are at your fingertips.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_03: Don't take it for granted.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_03: And the other thing he would say is what he said to his contemporaries.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_03: This is God's word, this is the supreme authority for matters of life and and conduct.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_03: There is there is nothing.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_03: Well, as it says in the uh the English, the coronation of English monarchs, they're presented with a copy of the Bible and they are told there is no more precious thing this world affords.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and Tyndale would have said, Yes, Amen to that.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_03: It's about the individual believer with God's word open in front of them and the Holy Spirit taking the word of God and using it to shape us and make us into the people of God.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_03: Not just an individual exercise.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, Tyndale worked with others and he believed in reading the Bible with others.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_03: But there is a there's both a corporate and an individual dimension that we can hear God speak to us in our language as the Holy Spirit takes these words.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_03: So do it, don't take it for granted.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_03: Get into scripture, read it all, and then get back to the original languages and get your Greek and Hebrew sorted, and then and then you don't need to rely on language translations at all.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: This is a good word in a good way to end our podcast today.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Dr.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: Tony Watkins, we thank you very much uh for uh uh sending this interview and uh sharing this with us uh about William Tyndale on this uh 500th anniversary.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_03: That's a very uh great pleasure.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_03: I'm pleased to be able to do it.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_03: If if people want to uh listen to the Tyndale House podcasts, maybe I'll be allowed to mention those.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_03: We did a series of four in which I interviewed four leading historians of the Reformation, five, actually, four historians of the Reformation, and one from Cambridge University, who's a historian of of the history of print bibles, uh, and and particularly of Francis Fry.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_03: Uh yeah, interviews with those, and um there are one or two things that having finished the series, then I think, oh okay, yeah, actually that's not quite correct because still finding things out.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_03: So uh that's the story of scholarship, isn't it?
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: It is, it is.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but those are available on the Tyndale House website or from YouTube or from Spotify or wherever.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_02: Wonderful.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for the synergy today.