Tyndale, William

Tyndale, William (c.1494–1536). Translator of the Bible. Tyndale was probably from a Gloucestershire family and entered Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1510. He became tutor to the children of Sir John Walsh of Old Sodbury, but soon removed to London and the continent, visiting Luther at Wittenberg. Meanwhile he worked on his English translation of the New Testament. Printed in Germany, copies smuggled into England were seized and burned by the authorities. In 1528 Tyndale issued The Obedience of a Christian Man, which argued for complete submission to temporal power, but his Practice of Prelates in 1530 attacked both Wolsey and Henry VIII's proposed divorce. His subsequent controversy with More turned on the question whether the authority of Scripture or of the church was paramount. In 1535 Tyndale was seized by servants of the Emperor Charles V and burned as a heretic at Vilvoorde near Brussels in October 1536. Tyndale's translation, based on Erasmus' Greek version, was much used by the Authorized Version issued in 1611, and his great phrases roll round the heads of Christians and non-Christians alike—‘God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes’; ‘And though I bestowed all my goods to feed the poor, and though I gave my body even that I burned, and yet had no love, it profiteth me nothing’; ‘the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.’

J. A. Cannon