William Tyndale’s New Testament: The Book That Made the Modern World

BY THE BOOK

By Joseph Loconte

At a dinner party hosted by Sir John Walsh, a wealthy friend of Henry VIII, a young humanist scholar and preacher caused a stir by insisting on the supreme authority of the Bible and that it be translated into vernacular English—a crime in Catholic England. “We were better to be without God’s law than the Pope’s,” declared one of the guests.

The scholar reputedly delivered one of the greatest rebuttals in history:

I defy the Pope and all his laws and if God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow, shall know more of the scripture than thou dost.

Displaying almost reckless courage, William Tyndale (ca. 1494–1536) embarked on a campaign to translate the entire Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into English. Nothing like it had been attempted since the fourth century, when the Catholic Church adopted the Latin translation from Jerome. In the summer of 1525—five hundred years ago—Tyndale’s English New Testament began to take shape in a print shop in Cologne. Published a year later and smuggled into England, it was the cultural equivalent of the splitting of the atom.

Indeed, the political and social consequences of Tyndale’s achievement, touching nearly every aspect of our modern lives, are incalculable. His dissent in the face of autocratic power and oppression is a standing rebuke to the illiberal impulses of our own age.

No one could have foreseen it. Elsewhere in Europe, the Catholic Church had permitted some vernacular translations of the Bible—but only from the Latin Vulgate and only under close supervision. In England, the Constitutions of Oxford of 1408 had outlawed any unauthorized translation of the Scriptures into English, under pain of punishment for heresy. As the biographer David Daniell summarizes it: “The prejudice that maintained that the Latin Bible was the original was deep and bitter enough to cost lives.”

Tyndale therefore left for the Continent and found safe haven in Martin Luther’s Germany, where the Protestant Reformation was in its early stages. But he lived as a fugitive with a price on his head. The formidable Sir Thomas More, one of the most powerful Catholic leaders in England, led the hunt. To More, Tyndale was “a serpent,” a “son of iniquity,” and a “hell-hound in the kennel of the devil.”

By the summer of 1526, the influx of “Tyndale Testaments” into England—thanks to profit-minded printers—prompted an emergency meeting of bishops. The bishop of London denounced Tyndale’s translation for corrupting the Holy Scripture “with cunning perversities and heretical depravity.” All available copies were to be seized and burned. A bonfire was lit at St Paul’s Church, and copies of Tyndale’s New Testament were tossed into the blaze.

Within a decade, Tyndale himself met the same fate. But not before he produced the text that has formed the basis for all subsequent English Bibles. As such, it has anchored virtually every argument in the English-speaking world for expanding human liberty. Even Christopher Hill, a Marxist historian of seventeenth-century England, could not deny its influence: “The availability of the Bible in English . . . was a cultural revolution of unprecedented proportions, whose consequences are difficult to over-estimate.”

It arose in troubled times. When King Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn, he unwittingly created an opening for Tyndale’s transformative text. Supporters of a vernacular Bible got appointments under his reign, in part because they had the backing of the new queen, who possessed a copy of Tyndale’s New Testament. As the historian Brian Moynahan puts it, “Anne had no hesitation in reading banned books.” In 1534, Henry’s bishops urged the king to authorize a new English translation of the Bible. Miles Coverdale, who had assisted Tyndale in Hamburg, was given the task of completing the English translation of the Old Testament that Tyndale had begun.

The eventual result, “the Great Bible,” was printed in 1539 and, by royal decree, was authorized to be read aloud in England’s Protestant churches. The English Reformation was in high gear.

It was Tyndale’s grasp of the “linguistic marriage” of Hebrew and English, though, that guided his successors, who completed the work after his execution in 1536. “And the properties of the Hebrew tongue,” Tyndale wrote, “agree a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin.” Daniell, the editor of Tyndale’s Old Testament (1992), argues that “all Old Testament English versions descend from Tyndale.” The same must be said of his New Testament, translated from the original Greek: until the twentieth century, every English version drew largely from that of Tyndale.

These facts were to have a profound effect on the American story. Central to that story is the King James Bible—the chief beneficiary of Tyndale’s work—which played a decisive role in the political revolutions that transformed Britain and, subsequently, Britain’s most important colonial possession.

After the death of King Edward VI, Mary Tudor’s attempt to return England to the Catholic fold backfired. Her violent crackdown on dissenters deepened the Protestant community’s attachment to the English Bible and the right of individuals to interpret it for themselves. Thus, when Elizabeth, Mary’s successor to the throne, walked in procession to assume the crown, she paused to kiss a copy of the Bible in English and pledged “diligently to read” the Scriptures.

After the death of Queen Elizabeth, the Church of England faced multiple sources of religious division. The new monarch, James I—ostensibly motivated by a “zeal to promote the common good”—commissioned a group of scholars to produce a fresh translation of the Bible. Almost immediately upon its appearance in 1611, the King James Bible (also known as the Authorized Version) was hailed as a literary masterpiece.

The extraordinary quality of Tyndale’s original translation is an essential reason why the King James Version has had such a catalytic effect on the politics and culture of the West. Tyndale did much more than find the English equivalent of the ancient languages of the Bible. His masterly and poetic ear for the rhythm of the modern English language, then in its infancy, imbued his translation with a vigor, charm, and clarity that have never been surpassed. Almost the entirety of his New Testament, and most of his Old Testament, were incorporated into the King James Bible.

Consider a few lines from his translation of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3–8):

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.

With Tyndale’s translation, anyone could read the Christmas story—or hear it read aloud in church—in stunningly vibrant English, for the first time.

Be not afraid. For behold I bring you tidings of great joy that shall come to all the people: for unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior which is Christ the lord.

The God of the Bible was no longer confined to speaking in a language—Latin—that no one outside of an educated elite could understand. The immediacy of divine grace quickened a deep-seated spiritual hunger that could no longer be suppressed.

Prior to Tyndale, much of the priesthood in England was as ignorant of the Bible as the laity. Propelled by the burgeoning printing industry, Tyndale’s achievement ensured the democratization of Bible ownership: an act of individual empowerment that proved irresistible. Martin Luther had launched this revolution with his German translation of the Scriptures. With the arrival of the King James Bible, placed on display in every Protestant church in England, there was no turning back.

As the historian Mark Noll explains, by achieving hegemony over all other translations, the King James Bible penetrated cultural and political discourse and thus occupied the “central conceptual space for the entire civilization” of the English-speaking world. This singular English Bible, largely dependent on Tyndale’s translation, became the authoritative religious text for Britain and her colonies. As such, the great political debates in seventeenth-century England—about natural rights, government by consent, and religious liberty—were not only framed by biblical assumptions; they were also awash in the language and imagery of the English Bible.

Herein lies a paradox. Although the Catholic medieval project had been shattered by the Reformation, many of its fundamental assumptions about political and religious authority remained. Advocates of absolute monarchy, the divine right of kings, and the necessity of national churches—Protestants as well as Catholics—all drew on the Bible to support their versions of Christendom. Modern progressive theorists and historians assume that it was the forces of secularization that discredited these medieval beliefs about political life. In fact, it was the arrival of the English Bible—and the democratic outlook it nurtured—that assured the total defeat of Christendom and the triumph of the conceptual pillars of liberal democracy.

John Locke, the intellectual father of the liberal-democratic project, had the King James Bible close at hand as he drafted his indictment of political absolutism, his Two Treatises of Government (1690). Taunting his opponent, Robert Filmer, Locke dared him to “show me the Place and Page” from the Bible that upheld the idea of absolute monarchy. Scholars often neglect the fact that the First Treatise is an exacting biblical refutation of patriarchal absolutism.

And even Locke’s Second Treatise, regarded as a natural-law argument for government by consent, draws upon biblical concepts. Locke’s defense of man’s natural rights—life, liberty, and property—is rooted in the language of the New Testament:

For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker . . . they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not another’s pleasure.

Locke’s audience would have recognized his allusion to a passage in Paul’s letter to the Ephesian church: “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10).

Thanks to Locke’s ability to combine natural-law arguments with biblical teachings, he exerted a profound influence over the American mind—a dissenting Protestant mind that was even more saturated in biblical language than Protestant England’s.

In Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers, Daniel Dreisbach observes that the King James Bible served as the primary textbook for education, law, letters, and civil government during the colonial era. “The Bible was the most accessible, authoritative, and venerated text in early colonial society,” he writes. “Indeed, no text provides richer insight into the world of the founders and their experiment in republican self-government and liberty under law.” In America—like nowhere else in the Western world—the Bible was deployed as an agent of democratic resistance and revolution. “The genius of the authors of the United States Constitution,” writes Tom Holland in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, “was to garb in the robes of the Enlightenment the radical Protestantism that was the prime religious inheritance of their fledgling nation.”

Biblical phrases and allusions animated the discourse of the colonial Patriots in the years leading up to the American Revolution. It was not only the nation’s evangelical ministers, though, who cast the struggle against British “slavery” and “tyranny” in biblical terms. In July 1776, in their proposed design for the Great Seal of the United States, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin—sons of the Enlightenment—both suggested the Exodus story of God delivering the Jewish people from the bondage of the Egyptian pharaoh.

It is thus unsurprising that Thomas Paine, a religious skeptic, drew heavily on the Bible to denounce the British monarchy in his explosive missive for Independence, Common Sense (1776):

As the exalting of one man so greatly above the rest cannot be justified on the equal rights of nature, so neither can it be defended on the authority of scripture; for the will of the Almighty, as declared by Gideon and the prophet Samuel, expressly disapproves of government by kings.

After delivering several pages of biblical exegesis on the topic, Paine concludes, “That the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government is true, or the scripture is false.” According to Mark Noll, Paine’s treatise “propelled scriptural argumentation into the center of Revolutionary consciousness.”

The success of Common Sense reveals the unique character of American Protestantism: armed with the King James Bible, colonial Americans advanced radical reinterpretations of the Scriptures to underwrite virtually every facet of their democratic journey.

John Adams was typical among the founders in describing the Bible as “the most republican book in the world.” Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration and a surgeon in the Continental Army, argued that inculcation in the teachings of the Bible was essential for creating virtuous, self-governing citizens:

We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government, that is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity, by means of the Bible; for this divine book, above all others, favors that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws, and all those sober and frugal virtues which constitute the soul of republicanism.

Nowhere is this outlook more powerfully on display than in the American commitment to religious liberty. William Penn and Roger Williams, for example, drew heavily from the Bible to establish their colonies of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island as havens of religious freedom. Pennsylvania’s constitution, the Charter of Liberties and Frame of Government (1682), is awash in scriptural citations. “For the history of the Bible in what became the United States,” writes Noll, “it was of first importance that Penn carried out his experiment as an exercise in scriptural Christianity.”

The subversive use of the Bible to demolish Anglican establishments and make the case for religious liberty became a ubiquitous feature of colonial rhetoric. It formed part of the brief for independence against the “popish” tendencies of England. More importantly, even before the Constitutional Convention, the framers took it for granted that biblical Christianity supported freedom of conscience, religious pluralism, and the separation of church and state. In his “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” for example, James Madison rejects government support for the Christian religion because “every page of [the Bible] disavows a dependence on the powers of this world.”

The enduring influence of Tyndale’s literary achievement appears in the wealth of expressions in our modern English prose: am I my brother’s keeper?; seek and ye shall find; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak; the salt of the earth; let not your hearts be troubled; for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. “An astonishing quality of Tyndale’s translations,” writes Daniell, “is that so much has not only survived, but has permanently enriched the language.”

In theology, politics, literature, education, the arts: over the last half millennium, no book has exerted a greater influence over the direction of Western civilization than the King James Bible. It is not too much to say that, without it, there would have been no Glorious Revolution of 1688 and no American Revolution of 1776. Without it, there would have been no Shakespeare, no Paradise Lost, no Pilgrim’s Progress, no Handel’s Messiah, no Gettysburg Address, and no Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Without Tyndale, there would have been no King James Bible. In his determination to translate the Scriptures into English, Tyndale allowed no obstacle—exile, shipwreck, poverty, imprisonment—to stand in his way. In the end, it cost him everything.

Betrayed by a friend at a safe house in Antwerp, Tyndale was arrested and sent to Vilvoorde prison—modeled after the hated Bastille in Paris—where he spent sixteen dreary months in isolation. He was to be executed as a heretic because, based on his reading of the Bible, he taught that justification could not be earned by good works but rather was “a free gift of God.” It was only by faith, he insisted, that “the love of him who overcame all the temptations of the devil shall be imputed to us.”

On October 6, 1536, William Tyndale was strangled to death and his body burned. Yet his achievement survived the flames: the democratization of the Word of God, arguably the most liberating event in Western civilization for more than a thousand years, was at hand.

To the authoritarianism of his age, Tyndale was unflinchingly defiant. “Has not God made the English tongue as well as others?” he asked. Using all of his remarkable gifts, Tyndale effectively gave God an English voice, one that resonated throughout England’s colonies, especially among the rebellious Protestants of colonial America. “It was a vernacular Scripture that liberated the English voice,” writes the biographer David Teems, “and the English conscience along with it.”

If so, then perhaps no other figure in modern history has done more to awaken the conscience of the West: to stir a yearning for political and spiritual freedom that resounds in our own day.

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Joseph Loconte, PhD, is a Presidential Scholar at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He hosts the YouTube channel History and the Human Story His forthcoming book, THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945, will be released in November 2025 by HarperCollins.