William Tyndale : A Timeline
Read 1Cor13 from 1534… analysis of the Authorised Version …. shows that Tyndale’s words account for 84% of the New Testament, and for 75.8% of the Old Testament books that he translated. - Brian Moynahan, Book of Fire p.1 William Tyndale wrote ‘the most influential book there has ever been in the history of language, English or any other. - The Adventure of English, Melvyn Bragg quoted in Travel with William Tyndale.This book a thriller.
NT modern reprint to see. Original 6x`4x11/2”Travel with …
A hell hound in the kennel of the devil - More’s verdict on Tyndale another biographies are entwined. Both were pious men martyred for their beliefs but very different characters. One ordained. One punished himself for not being a priest. One was driven into exile relying on the gifts of supporters. One Lord Chancellor, rich and an influential politician with the ear of the king. The other an inept man politically alternatively detested, sought, offered protection by H. One beheaded as a traitor on Tower Green, the king being merciful. The other burned as a heretic in Belgium. One canonised saint, man for all seasons but in reality a hater, persecutor, torturer and burner of protestants. The other recognised by his enemies as a godly scholar, a man who influenced the English language more than anyone else. The greatest Englishman God’s providence.
A number of partial translations had been made from the seventh century onward, but the spread of Wycliffe's Bible in the late 14th century led to the death penalty for anyone found in unlicensed possession of Scripture in English—though translations were available in all other major European languages.
Important Moments in his Life
1491 - 1494 His exact date of birth is unknown. Most likely he was born in Gloucestershire, probably from a family living in or near Stinchcombe. Tyndale's family had moved to Gloucestershire at some point in the 15th century, probably as a result of the Wars of the Roses. The family emigrated from Northumberland via East Anglia.
Henry VIII (28 June 1491 – 28 January 1547) was King of England from 21 April 1509, year he married CoA b1485
1506 - 16 began a Bachelor of Arts degree at Magdalen Hall (later Hertford College) of Oxford University
1512 - 20 - B.A.
1514- 22 He was ordained a sub-deacon by the Bishop of Hereford. Being ordained a sub-deacon was one of several stages towards becoming a priest.
1515 - 23 M.A. and was held to be a man of virtuous disposition, leading an unblemished life.The M.A. allowed him to start studying theology, but the official course did not include the systematic study of Scripture. As Tyndale later complained:’They have ordained that no man shall look on the Scripture, until he be noselled in heathen learning eight or nine years and armed with false principles, with which he is clean shut out of the understanding of the Scripture.’He was a gifted linguist and became fluent over the years in French, Greek, Hebrew, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish. In London he was ordained as a deacon and then as a priest. Wolsey cardinal and chancellor and A of York. 2nd highest man in England, above A o Cantuar.
1516 - 1522 -24-30 Little is known for certain about his life in these years. He may have spent some time at Cambridge University. Also he may have worked as a priest in Gloucestershire at Frampton on Severn and Breadstone. Erasmus greek NT.
1517 and 1521, he went to the University of Cambridge. Erasmus had been the leading teacher of Greek there from August 1511 to January 1512, but not during Tyndale's time at the university.[1517 ML 95 theses He said H was a pig who should be rolled in his own dirt. For H wrote against ML in defence of 7 Sacraments. ™ probable author but Fid. Def received.
1521 - chaplain at the home of Sir John Walsh at Little Sodbury
1521- tutor to his children . His opinions proved controversial to fellow clergymen, and the next year he was summoned before John Bell, the Chancellor of the Diocese of Worcester, although no formal charges were laid at the time. John Foxe describes an argument with a "learned" but "blasphemous" clergyman which occurred after the harsh meeting with Bell and other church leaders, and near the end of Tyndale's time at Little Sodbury. The clergyman asserted to Tyndale, "We had better be without God's laws than the Pope's." Tyndale responded: "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! By now it seems likely that he had decided to translate the Bible into English. At this period the Bible was only available in Latin so that it meant little to most people when read in church. Luther German NT.
1523 Tyndale left for London iHe requested help from Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall, a well-known classicist who had praised Erasmus after working together with him on a Greek New Testament. The bishop, however, declined to extend his patronage, telling Tyndale that he had no room for him in his household. Tyndale preached and studied relying on the help of cloth merchant, Humphrey Monmouth.
1524 left England and landed on continental Europe, perhaps at Hamburg,possibly travelling on to Wittenberg. He began translating the New Testament at this time, possibly in Wittenberg,
1525 -At Cologne he completed his translation of the New Testament. He translated from the Greek in which the New Testament had originally been written. Printing began but it seemed likely that he would be arrested and so he fled to Worms.In 1525, publication was interrupted by the impact of anti-Lutheranism. H enamoured of AB b1501 . ML marries K.
1526 At Worms a free imperial city then in the process of adopting Lutheranism. Published whole NT. [22] More copies were soon printed in Antwerp. The book was smuggled into England and Scotland
Bishop Tunstall, who issued warnings to booksellers and had copies burned in public. Tyndale apparently remained at Worms for about a year. It is not clear exactly when he moved to Antwerp.It is possible that Tyndale intended to carry on his work from Hamburg in about 1529. He revised his New Testament and began translating the Old Testament and writing various treatises.[citation needed]The bishop of London had copies collected up and burned by St. Paul's Cathedral.Those who pirated Tyndale’s work used satirical colophons; one, poking fun at More, claimed to be ‘Printed in Utopia’;, another claimed that it was, ‘Printed at St Peter’s in Rome cum priveligio apostolico. while a third was ‘printed in Basle by Adam Anonymous’. , Brian Moynahan, Book of Fire, p108
Church to congregation, Mat 17. Priest to presbyter. Charity to love. Penance to repentance. All hit at RCC doctrine. A compendious introduction, prologue or preface into the epistle of Paul to the Romans
1527 - 1533 -35-41
He wrote a number of books. Some criticised teachings of the church. Others were about books of the Bible. The parable of the wicked mammon
1528 The Obedience of a Christen Man[39] (and how Christen rulers ought to govern. A king is a great benefit be he never so evil. - W Tyndale,The Obedience of a Christen Man in Brian Moynahan, Book of Fire, p152
Scottish reformation
1530, he wrote The Practyse of Prelates, opposing Henry VIII's planned annulment from Catherine of Aragon in favour of Anne Boleyn on the grounds that it was unscriptural, and that it was a plot by Cardinal Wolsey to get Henry entangled in the papal courts of Pope Clement VII.[3][26] The king's wrath was aimed at Tyndale. Henry asked Emperor Charles V to have the writer apprehended and returned to England, the Emperor responded that formal evidence was required before extradition.[27] Tyndale developed his case in An Answer unto Sir Thomas More's Dialogue.[The five books of Moses [the Pentateuch] Translation (each book with individual title page) Cromwell sent Vaughan to find WT.
1531 The exposition of the first epistle of saint John. The prophet JBilney burned, More tortures p261 beyond law. Jonah . An answer into Sir Thomas More's dialogue. ™ responds with The Confutation Ot Tyndale’s answer, 6 vols,over 500000 words in 18 months., H breaks with Rome, head of C o E. H fails to get emperor to extradite T.
1532 Cranmer A o C, Boleyn’s chaplain with secret wife fromGermany.
1533 H m AB. An exposicion upon the. v. vi. vii. chapters of Mathew.The Souper of the Lorde
1534 The New Testament Translation (thoroughly revised). In Antwerp he went to live with an English merchant, Thomas Poyntz, and there he completed a revised version of his translation
1535 More beheaded for treason. He had seen one woman and six priests taken for execution. Tyndale was betrayed by Henry Phillips [29] to the imperial authorities,[30] seized in Antwerp in 1535, and held in the castle of Vilvoorde (Filford) near Brussels. An exposicion upon the. v. vi. vii. chapters of Mathe
1536 He was tried on a charge of heresy and was condemned to be burned to death, despite Thomas Cromwell's intercession on his behalf. 19 May AB beheaded. After eighteen months in prison, 6 Oct he was taken out to be executed. He was first strangled and then burned. He is supposed to have called out a prayer : 'Lord, open the king of England's eyes', meaning that the king should allow a Bible in English. Dissolution begins. JC Institutes. Within four years, four English translations of the Bible were published in England at the King's behest,[a] including Henry's official Great Bible . All were based on Tyndale's work.[36]
Impact on the English language[edit]
In translating the Bible, Tyndale introduced new words into the English language; many were subsequently used in the King James Bible:
• Passover (as the name for the Jewish holiday, Pesach or Pesah)
• scapegoat
Coinage of the word atonement (a concatenation of the words 'At One' to describe Christ's work of restoring a good relationship—a reconciliation—between God and people)[41] is also sometimes ascribed to Tyndale.[42][43] However, the word was probably in use by at least 1513, before Tyndale's translation.[44][45] Similarly, sometimes Tyndale is said to have coined the term mercy seat.[46] While it is true that Tyndale introduced the word into English, mercy seat is more accurately a translation of Martin Luther's German Gnadenstuhl.[47]
As well as individual words, Tyndale also coined such familiar phrases as:
• my brother's keeper
• knock and it shall be opened unto you
• a moment in time
• fashion not yourselves to the world
• seek and ye shall find
• ask and it shall be given you
• judge not that ye be not judged
• the word of God which liveth and lasteth forever
• let there be light
• the salt of the earth
• a law unto themselves
• it came to pass
• the signs of the times
• filthy lucre
• the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak (which is like Luther's translation of Matthew 26,41: der Geist ist willig, aber das Fleisch ist schwach; Wyclif for example translated it with: for the spirit is ready, but the flesh is sick.)
• live, move and have our being
Controversy over new words and phrases[edit]
The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church did not approve of some of the words and phrases introduced by Tyndale, such as "overseer", where it would have been understood as "bishop", "elder" for "priest", and "love" rather than "charity". Tyndale, citing Erasmus, contended that the Greek New Testament did not support the traditional Roman Catholic readings. More controversially, Tyndale translated the Greek "ekklesia", (literally "called out ones"[48]) as "congregation" rather than "church".[49] It has been asserted this translation choice "was a direct threat to the Church's ancient—but so Tyndale here made clear, non-scriptural—claim to be the body of Christ on earth. To change these words was to strip the Church hierarchy of its pretensions to be Christ's terrestrial representative, and to award this honour to individual worshippers who made up each congregation."[49]
Contention from Roman Catholics came not only from real or perceived errors in translation but also a fear of the erosion of their social power if Christians could read the Bible in their own language. "The Pope's dogma is bloody", Tyndale wrote in The Obedience of a Christian Man.[50] Thomas More (since 1935 in the Roman Catholic Church, Saint Thomas More) commented that searching for errors in the Tyndale Bible was similar to searching for water in the sea, and charged Tyndale's translation of The Obedience of a Christian Man with having about a thousand falsely translated errors. Bishop Tunstall of London declared that there were upwards of 2,000 errors in Tyndale's Bible, having already in 1523 denied Tyndale the permission required under the Constitutions of Oxford (1409), which were still in force, to translate the Bible into English.
In response to allegations of inaccuracies in his translation in the New Testament, Tyndale in the Prologue to his 1525 translation wrote that he never intentionally altered or misrepresented any of the Bible, but that he had sought to "interpret the sense of the scripture and the meaning of the spirit."[49]
While translating, Tyndale followed Erasmus' (1522) Greek edition of the New Testament. In his preface to his 1534 New Testament ("WT unto the Reader"), he not only goes into some detail about the Greek tenses but also points out that there is often a Hebrew idiom underlying the Greek.[51] The Tyndale Society adduces much further evidence to show that his translations were made directly from the original Hebrew and Greek sources he had at his disposal. For example, the Prolegomena in Mombert's William Tyndale's Five Books of Moses show that Tyndale's Pentateuch is a translation of the Hebrew original. His translation also drew on the Latin Vulgate and Luther's 1521 September Testament.[49]
Of the first (1526) edition of Tyndale's New Testament only three copies survive. The only complete copy is part of the Bible Collection of Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart. The copy of the British Library is almost complete, lacking only the title page and list of contents. Another rarity is Tyndale's Pentateuch, of which only nine remain.
Impact on the English Bible
The translators of the Revised Standard Version in the 1940s noted that Tyndale's translation inspired the translations that followed, including the Great Bible of 1539, the Geneva Bible of 1560, the Bishops' Bible of 1568, the Douay-Rheims Bible of 1582–1609, and the King James Version of 1611, of which the RSV translators noted: "It [the KJV] kept felicitous phrases and apt expressions, from whatever source, which had stood the test of public usage. It owed most, especially in the New Testament, to Tyndale". Many scholars today believe that such is the case. Moynahan writes: "A complete analysis of the Authorised Version, known down the generations as "the AV" or "the King James" was made in 1998. It shows that Tyndale's words account for 84% of the New Testament and for 75.8% of the Old Testament books that he translated."[52] Joan Bridgman makes the comment in the Contemporary Review that, "He [Tyndale] is the mainly unrecognised translator of the most influential book in the world. Although the Authorised King James Version is ostensibly the production of a learned committee of churchmen, it is mostly cribbed from Tyndale with some reworking of his translation.”
1560 Exiles publish Geneva bible, standard for a century. With notes etc.- Breeches bible.
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