In 1552, an English Protestant named John Rogers was on trial for his Christian faith.
Rogers, who had been converted through the witness of William Tyndale, was told by Stephen Gardiner, the Lord Chancellor of Mary I and the man who was judging his case, that ‘thou canst prove nothing by the Scripture, the Scripture is dead: it must have a lively [i.e. living] expositor’. ‘No’, Rogers replied, ‘the Scriptures are alive’.
Where did Rogers get such a conviction? Well, from the Bible – see, for example, Hebrews 4.12. But Rogers’ conviction in this regard was also shaped by the achievement of his friend and co-worker Tyndale, whom God had used to make the Scriptures live forever in the hearts and minds of a multitude of English men and women.
Translating the New Testament
Born near Dursley in Gloucestershire, William Tyndale subsequently studied at both Oxford and Cambridge. By the early 1520s, he was a brilliant linguist, at home in the Greek of the New Testament, and eventually totally conversant with the Hebrew of the Old Testament. Convinced of the need for the English people to have the Scriptures in their own tongue (though we cannot trace in detail how he arrived at this conviction), and finding nowhere in England where he could he do such a translation, Tyndale sailed for the European continent in 1524 and eventually made his way to Martin Luther’s Wittenberg.
Tyndale could have stayed in Wittenberg and translated the Scriptures in relative security and with all of the scholarly aids that he needed. Instead he chose to go to Cologne, one of the great trading ports of north-east Europe. It was a dangerous move since Cologne was a Roman Catholic stronghold. But Tyndale’s major reason for the move undoubtedly has to have been the fact that Cologne was on the Rhine River that flowed out into the North Sea and boats would come there on trading trips from England. And Tyndale wanted his translated Scriptures to be taken to England where they could be read.
In Cologne he finished his translation of the New Testament from the Greek. All that has survived, however, is a manuscript down to Matthew 22, since, just as he was about to print it, he was betrayed to Catholic authorities. Tyndale managed to escape with his translation and made his way up the Rhine to Worms.
Printed or smuggled
And so it was in Worms, on the printing press of Peter Schöffer the younger (his father, Peter Schöffer the elder, had been an apprentice of the justly-famous Johann Gutenberg), that three or six thousand copies of the first printed New Testament to be translated into English out of the original Greek were run off. It was a small octavo, that is, it was made by folding each sheet three times to form a quire of eight leaves. The title page, which is missing from two of the three copies that have survived (the recently-discovered copy in 1996 does have the title page), did not contain Tyndale’s name. It reads thus: ‘The new Testament as it was written and caused to be written by them which heard it. To whom also our Saviour Christ Jesus commanded that they should preach it unto all creatures.’
The Tyndale New Testaments were then smuggled back into England on boats, hidden in bales of cloth and other innocent-looking containers, and Tyndale’s dream of giving the common person the Word of God started to become a reality. By early 1526 they were being sold openly in England.
The impact of the Tyndale NT
There is little doubt that Tyndale had a solid handle on the Greek language, its idioms, shades of meaning and idiosyncrasies. But equally important was his impressive grasp of the words and rhythms of the spoken English of his day. He knew how to render the Scriptures into the English vernacular so that they spoke with force and power. In fact, as Tyndale scholar David Daniell noted, ‘what still strikes a late-20th-century reader is how modern’ Tyndale’s translation actually is.
The reasons for this are twofold. First, in translating the New Testament, Tyndale aimed to reproduce clear, everyday, spoken, English. And then, second, Tyndale sought to impact the heart of his readers. And John Rogers, preparing to die for the gospel of Christ in 1555, is a good example of how well Tyndale succeeded.
