William Tyndale: Answering the Call (Part 1)

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He preached only a handful of sermons. His books were burned and his name was scorned. 


Spending over a decade in hiding, he never married, had few and fleeting friends, possessed little and died relatively young. Yet William Tyndale’s tremendous impact upon the world is still felt today.


The Bones Must Be Burned

Tyndale was born in 1494 in a village in western England. Though his childhood experiences are unrecorded, the events that shaped his times are not. England had long been under the foreign dominion of the Pope. But this was about to change.


Over a century before Tyndale’s birth an English scholar and priest had dared to challenge the Roman Catholic church. From his perch in Oxford, John Wycliffe declared that the Bible was the “highest authority for every Christian.” In the 1300’s, this was heresy punishable by death.


Denying the biblical basis for the veneration of saints and transubstantiation–even questioning the authority of the Pope–Wycliffe avoided the flames only because he had friends in high government places. Most troubling of all to the church, however, he undertook to translate the Scriptures into English.


Poor preachers armed with Wycliffe’s Scripture portions dared to teach and read them to the common man. Roaming the English countryside, they were called Lollards, a derogatory term that means “to mumble.” Lollards still agitated the church authorities in Tyndale’s day. And they were still executed for their trouble as well.


Wycliffe’s memory was so disturbing that in 1415 Pope Martin V had his bones exhumed and publicly burned. His ashes were tossed into the River Swift.


Wycliffe plowed the ground. Over one hundred years later, William Tyndale was in position to sow the seed. Tyndale not only recognized, but seized the unique moment in history. We who read the Bible in English today owe him an incalculable debt.


The Fullness of Time

It would be easy to overlook the historically significant period of William Tyndale’s life span. Several years younger than Martin Luther, he came of age during the Reformation. Henry VIII sat on the English throne and Thomas More spent long nights insulting Tyndale in writing. The Renaissance was in its prime and the printing press was the invention literally changing history.


While attending Oxford, Tyndale, like other scholars of the day, learned Latin and Greek. He was also exposed to an instance of divine providence: the Greek New Testament, accessible for the first time in centuries. Though Desiderius Erasmus, the leading humanist scholar of the day, was a lifelong Roman Catholic, his Greek translation did much to pave the way for the Protestant Reformation.


Tyndale’s heart was pierced by reading the New Testament in its original language. The problem was, the common Englishman didn’t speak Greek—or the church’s Latin. Always the dutiful student, Tyndale listened keenly to the lively academic discussions around him. Luther’s writings were winding their way into English ports. The distant cry of sola scriptura (“by scripture alone”) was heard on Anglo soil.


Employed for two years as a tutor at a manor house in Little Sodbury, the specific call of God upon Tyndale’s life began to emerge. His host, Sir John Walsh, frequently invited traveling priests and monks to dine. With Tyndale around, lively conversations ensued.


Arguing his points from Scripture, Tyndale refuted much of the clergy’s superstitious and unbiblical beliefs. Ignorant of the Scriptures and with a reputation (often well-deserved) for immorality, Walsh’s guests found the young tutor intolerable.


But as he preached to the villagers on Sundays and observed their simple, agrarian lifestyles, Tyndale made his resolution. At a crowded dinner party he uttered his now famous words:


“I defy the Pope, and all his laws; and if God spares my life, ere many years, I will cause the boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost!” 


Initially Tyndale believed he would find patronage and be able to pursue work as a translator in London. But this hope quickly evaporated. Neither the church nor the government would tolerate such a step as Luther had made in Germany. If the English were to have their own Bible, Tyndale realized it would not be printed or sold (legally) in England.


So in 1524 he left Henry’s domain to pursue a course that made him a lifelong fugitive. He would spend the next 12 years until his death in hiding. But his labors would result in an English Bible that would profoundly shape the course of modern history.


 


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Published on May 24, 2017 20:45
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