To Scatter Roman Darkness By This Light

A sixteenth-century portrait of William Tyndale, in which Tyndale is pointing to an unknown book, probably an English translation of scripture. The couplet in the banner under Tyndale's hand reads "To scatter Roman darkness by this light / The loss of land and life I'll reckon slight." (David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], illustration 4)

Modern champions of the Catholic position like to support a view of the Reformation, that it was entirely a political imposition by a ruthless minority in power against both the traditions and the wishes of the pious lay people of England, with the claim that, if matters had not been interfered with, the Church in its reforming wisdom would have got round to issuing a vernacular Bible in its own time. That may or may not be so: it seems extremely unlikely....Some reforming politicians can be made out to be ruthless self-seeking thugs, no doubt, just as some Catholic politicians can. The energy which affected every human life in Northern Europe, however, came from a different place. It was not the result of political imposition. It came from the discovery of the Word of God as originally written, from Matthew - indeed, from Genesis - to Revelation, in the language of the people. Moreover, it could be read and understood, without censorship by the Church or mediation through the Church, as it was written to be read, as a coherent, cross-referring whole. Such reading produced a totally different view of everyday Christianity: the weekly, daily, even hourly ceremonies so lovingly catalogued by some Catholic revisionists are not there; Purgatory is not there; there is no aural confession and penance. Two supports of the Church's wealth and power collapsed. Instead, there was simply individual faith in Christ as Saviour, found in Scripture. That and only that 'justified' the sinner, whose root failings were now in the face of God, not the bishops or the pope....

'The signs of the times', 'the spirit is willing', 'Live and move and have our being', 'fight the good fight' - the list of such near-proverbial phrases [produced by William Tyndale in his translation of the Bible] is endless. More important is that greater effect whereby the teaching and work of Jesus reached men and women entire, complete in all four Gospels: and with it the further writing and record of Luke in Acts, of Paul, Peter, James, the two Johns, Jude and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, also entire and complete and in a pellucidly direct English. The boy that driveth the plough had got his Scripture. With this volume, Tyndale gave us a Bible language....

Tyndale was a worker at the coal-face, a linguist and craftsman who was never seduced away to a more comfortable surface job. He was above all a scholar of the Greek Bible, and now of the Hebrew, who had translated the New Testament into a form of English that would live for ever, and published two books about the implication of the scriptural doctrine of justification by faith, one relating it to works, the other to civil obedience....

In the whirligig of time and fashion, Tyndale is today only known in some powerful intellectual circles as an annoyance to the blessed Saint Thomas [More], clinging like a burr to the great man's coat, as if Tyndale's life were meaningless without More. Tyndale is indeed, sometimes cited first of all as 'opponent of Sir Thomas More', with the fact that he gave us our English Bible mentioned among the also-rans, as being of little account. That is absurd. Even the modern Catholic English Bible, the Jerusalem Bible in its various revisions, depends greatly on Tyndale's legacy of translation. So we may observe here that More did not enter Tyndale's life until July 1529, when half Tyndale's work was done: and he entered as a trained and experienced assassin. This 'Dialogue' [More's work responding to Tyndale] sets itself out as a Socratic, humanist debate. It does not come over as anything so rational; its intention is slaughter....

These pages on faith [in Tyndale's book responding to More], like many others, are an anthology of scriptural points. Once again with Tyndale, the reader who opens this book knowing nothing of the New Testament finishes it knowing a lot. The contrast with More's Dialogue is obvious: the reader finishes that book knowing a great deal about the amusing, richly stored, clever, long-winded, devious, malevolent mind of Thomas More....

Less superficially, the size and extreme ferocity of More's attacks on him [Tyndale] help us to see the height of Tyndale's shadow in 'Establishment' England. Tyndale was a heretic to be greatly feared. Any means, fair or foul, were justified to preserve the Church and the realm from his effects. His books, his followers, he himself, must be burned with proper zeal - something to which More looks forward, appallingly....

The revolution that Tyndale began was not just that, in the teeth of the most ferocious opposition, he gave the people the Bible in the mother tongue: the whole New Testament, in all its comprehensiveness and integrity, and half the Old Testament, and so soon after his death the whole word of God available in English. Those deeds opened the gates of the flood of biblical knowledge which has been freely available to us ever since....

Both men [More and Tyndale] died martyrs, close in time, and curiously honoured in being saved the extremes of torture at their death - More was not disembowelled, and Tyndale was strangled before the flames were lit. But their legacy, in relation to each other, has been totally opposite. More gave us three quarters of a million words of scarcely readable prose attacking Tyndale. Tyndale outraged More by giving us the Bible in English, England's greatest contribution to the world for nearly five hundred years....

His [Tyndale's] discovery of the happy linguistic marriage of the two languages [Hebrew and English], though not quite as important as Newton's discovery of the principle of universal gravitation, was still of high significance for the history of Western Christian theology, language and literature...

All Old Testament English versions descend from Tyndale; even of the books of the Old Testament which he did not reach. Miles Coverdale, who first gave us printed in English the second half of the Old Testament, had worked with Tyndale, and imitated him....

Beyond that is his [Tyndale's] gift for coining words, in the Pentateuch not only 'Jehovah' as an English word, as we saw above, but 'mercy seat', 'Passover', 'scapegoat' and others...

In netting [capturing and arresting] Tyndale, the heresy-hunters had their largest catch. Tyndale was a particularly learned scholar, and a leader of European Lutherans. He was also extremely important in England - had not Sir Thomas More, no less, expended gallons of ink in attacking him? Tyndale was almost single-handedly spreading the heresy of Lutheranism in London and across England, with his books and especially his translations. The case against him would have to be extremely thorough, and the accusations widely known, so that with his destruction would fall a keystone of European heresy. This was no simple, deluded anabaptist: this was a learned enemy and politician who was a 'mighty opposite' to the leaders of the Catholic Church, from the Pope himself down....

As they crossed the space and approached the cross [place of execution], the prisoner was allowed a moment to pray, with a last appeal for him to recant. Then he alone moved to the cross, and the guards busily knelt to tie his feet to the bottom of the cross. Around his neck the chain was passed, with the hempen noose hanging slack. The brushwood, straw and logs were packed close round the prisoner, making a sort of hut with him inside. A scattering of gunpowder was added. The executioner went to stand behind the cross, and looked across at the procurer-general. It is at this moment, most probably, that Tyndale cried 'Lord, open the king of England's eyes'. When the procurer-general was ready, he gave the signal, and the executioner quickly tightened the hempen noose, strangling Tyndale. The procurer-general watched Tyndale die, and as soon as he judged him dead, he reached for a lighted wax torch being held near him, took it and handed it to the executioner, who touched off the straw, brushwood and gunpowder....

In 1550, Roger Ascham, tutor to that Princess Elizabeth who in eight years would be Queen, rode through Vilvorde. 'At the town's end is a notable solemn place of execution, where worthy William Tyndale was unworthily put to death.' (David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], pp. 58, 142, 262, 271, 278-280, 289, 315, 375, 383-384)