Tyndale
“Do not fear those who can kill the body.”
I am starting out tonight in a way that Tyndale would not approve, I am using one line from tonight’s lesson in order to hang all my thoughts on it. I shouldn’t do that, should I? Rather, Tyndale would want us all to pick up our bibles and read the whole section – the scholars call them pericopes – so that we can contemplate the context of the saying and get the full impact of the verse in its setting. This would be a great deal of scholarly work if we were to do it ourselves, but let us thank God for all the scholars who have put pen to paper and given us many and different commentaries to all the Bible. I am all too conscious of my debt to the generations of scholars who flourish only because of a Tyndale in this country and a Luther in Germany.
I think Tyndale has a lot to answer for, because he, along with Erasmus and a number of other humanistic, academic scholars, brought about a radical change in attitude toward the Bible, both the Old Testament and the New Testament.
So, let us get right down to the meat of this sermon. Why did Tyndale set himself against the Church and the State in order to engage in his obsession with the Bible? Why was he so sure of himself that he would forsake all the comforts of ordinary life and set himself up as a translator of the Bible, even though the King himself forbade it, and the Church, which he served as a priest, used the Latin translation of Jerome almost exclusively.
His story is extraordinary. – As we all know, he came from these parts, and lived here for quite some time, then he moved because of his desire to translate the scriptures, first to London where he hoped the bishop would support him, then onto the Continent, when the political climate became too hot in England for “the Lutheran heretics,” spending most of his exile in the Low Countries. We really know nothing about his life apart from his literary outpourings, which were considerable at that time trading blow for blow in a literary tirade against Sir Thomas More’s vitriolic attacks. This was a tiring and expensive occupation, for Tyndale had to pay in order to get any of his work printed and he had to write it all down in the first place, and all the proof-reading mistakes were his also, for he had to do all the work except put the type into the cases. It would seem that self-publishing has always been around, doesn’t it? It is not just something that has happened today, but today we have an easier time of it – with computers and quick-print shops. However, it is sufficient to say that Tyndale was a self-publisher, not like today’s self-publishers who only want to live an idle life of “the author.” Tyndale was a self-publisher with a mission – a mission for God, not for himself. Tyndale wanted to share the good news that he learned about in his considerable education as a scholar at Oxford. Tyndale, as a priest, wanted to share the good news of salvation with everyone in the language they understood, in the stories they would remember. This meant a bold step outside of the tradition, a step that paradoxically gave us a new tradition, that of reading the bible for ourselves.
That bold step set his fate. The historians among us can tell us of the political intrigue, the spies, the wicked plotting that took place on the side of the wicked men of the church and state, Bishop Tunstall and Thomas More, especially if Brian Moynahan’s study of Tyndale’s life is followed as a lead. Nevertheless, whatever the machinations of the political animals of church and state, nothing would keep the very quiet and introverted Tyndale from the translation of scripture.
Up to the time of Tyndale, the bible was commonly the Latin translation of the Greek and Hebrew by Jerome. This was called the Vulgate, a Latin of the Roman Empire which was the vernacular of that time. This Latin translation was part of the tradition which perplexed and frustrated Tyndale in his efforts to bring about the story of salvation to everyone. His plan was to translate anew from the Greek edition which Erasmus had only recently compiled.
The one Latin version within the Church was much like the Authorised Version in this country until recently, because it was the only widely-known and accepted version of the Bible. That so-called Authorised Version, according to Moynahan and other scholars, was mostly Tyndale’s work, work that was taken over by the king’s commissioners and assigned to the King. There was no copyright in those days. However, the question of crediting the translation is not my purpose tonight. Rather, I want us to grasp the monolithic nature of the church in the symbol of the Bible. Up until Tyndale, there was only the Latin Vulgate translation – a translation which suited only the erudite priests of Tyndale’s generation.
Tyndale wanted to bring the stories of the Bible into the language that the boy plowing in the field could understand, his own language. Tyndale wanted us all to encounter the stories of the Bible so that we would understand why Jesus told the stories he did, why the Old Testament took the shape it has, why Paul’s arguments in his letters make sense to people today as well as they did to the people of the early churches.
His purpose is the purpose of every evangelist, that is, to share the good news of salvation with everyone. And so the task of translation continues, with the myriad translations that are published today. I have skirted the issue at the heart of Tyndale’s life, why he set himself against King and Country for the life of an outlaw and expatriate. Why did he do it?
As I read Moynahan’s biography of Tyndale, I was reminded of that sentence of scripture with which I began tonight. Nothing gave Tyndale any pause, except not translating the Bible. Tyndale did not fear absolutely those who had the power of life and death, for he continued to write in a manner that was condemned as heresy which carried with it the death penalty, a death of incredible pain – the sentence of being hung, drawn and quartered. Instead of the actions of many martyrs who taunted the powerful with their opinions and faith, Atyndale decided to secrete himself away in order to continue his work of telling that all-important story of Christ and the salvation we have through faith. And here is theology becomes entwined with the mission – that God can be approached directly, and so we should be able to read the Bible, “the greatest story ever told” as someone dubbed it, for ourselves.
Tyndale was transfixed by the Bible and the story it told of God’s dealing with humankind. Tyndale was an evangelist of the greatest sort, tireless in bringing the story to an authentic, vibrant life from the lifeless pages of a manuscript lying in a dead language on the library shelf, an evangelist who engaged with the substance of the story in its original language in order that we might be able to hear it now.
The work is still going on, many translations are being created today in many vernacular languages throughout the world. Work that will still continue for many more decades, I am sure. However, it is not just translation into an obscure language from a dead language which is the work of the evangelist. The work of an evangelist is telling anew that ageless story of salvation which God has wrought.
That is the work we share as christians today with the christians of the past, but especially with William Tyndale. We are all to “translate” the story of salvation which the Bible contains into episodes that the computer-literate and classics-illiterate generations to come will understand. We need to tell the story anew, with a fresh vigour, in a way that people will remember it and tell it to their friends. That was Tyndale’s vision, that we all have a stake in this translation of the bible into the language that our contemporaries can understand, and so afford them the possibility of transforming their lives.
Tyndale should inspire us all to be translators of the Bible in the sense of being evangelists. I think he would want us all to go out and spread the news in a way our contemporaries would find inspiring, in a language which engaged their intellects as well as their hearts so that they too might join us in a hearty discussion of the good news for every generation, the news that God is with us.