28 May 2026

This year marks the five hundredth anniversary of the publication of a New Testament by the English scholar, William Tyndale. He came from a village near Gloucester and studied at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. A hundred and fifty years before, John Wycliffe translated the Bible into Middle English from the Latin Vulgate. Tyndale translated the New Testament and much of the Old from the original Greek and Hebrew texts into English.

Tyndale was appalled at the ignorance of the clergy and became convinced that ‘it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth, except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue’. The Bishop of London didn’t agree. He outlawed Tyndale who made his home on the continent  eventually in Antwerp.  When his New Testament was smuggled into London, the Bishop bought them up and burnt them.

His New Testament was written in Black Letter font and divided into chapters. It retained some illumination reminiscent of the handwritten codices e.g. St. Luke depicted as an artist and St. Peter carrying a key. Having translated the first five books of the Old Testament, he lost all his manuscripts in a shipwreck and had to start again.  The Bishop of London sent secret agents after him. There were police raids and betrayals.

Eventually, Tyndale  was arrested at Vilvorde near Brussels in 1535 and imprisoned. The following year, he was strangled and burnt at the stake not for the publication of his NT but the promulgation of his Reformed  views. His aim was famously ‘to cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more Scripture than the clergy of the day’. And despite the hardship and the ultimate sacrifice of his life, it was done.