William TyndaleThe Man Behind the King James Version

A Bible a Ploughboy Could Read

William Tyndale (about 1494–1536) translated the New Testament into English from the Greek, and saw it printed in 1526: the first English New Testament ever printed. He went on to translate the five books of Moses and Jonah from the Hebrew, and revised his New Testament in 1534. He did all of it in hiding on the Continent, under a law that forbade English Scripture without a bishop's licence, and he was put to death for it in 1536. Seventy-five years later the King James Version carried most of his words into the Bible English-speaking Christians would read for the next four centuries.

John Foxe, writing in 1563, records the purpose that drove him. Disputing with a learned man while he was a tutor in a Gloucestershire household, Tyndale was told that it would be better to be without God's law than the pope's. He answered: "If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost."

Tyndale gave the same reason in his own words, in the preface to his Pentateuch of 1530. He had "perceived by experience, how that it was impossible to stablish the lay people in any truth, except the scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue, that they might see the process, order, and meaning of the text." The conviction is Scripture's own. The psalmist says the word of God gives light to the simple, and Paul reminds Timothy that he had known the Scriptures from childhood.

The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple.

Psalms 119:130
KJV

And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

2 Timothy 3:15
KJV

The cross-reference trail from Paul's words to Timothy leads back to the psalmist's boast that the testimonies of God, read and meditated on, give more understanding than all one's teachers. It is very nearly the ploughboy's promise.

I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditation.

Psalms 119:99
KJV

Why an English Bible Was Forbidden

England had an English Bible before Tyndale, but only in handwriting. The Bible produced in the 1380s by the followers of John Wycliffe was translated from the Latin Vulgate and copied out by hand, one manuscript at a time. In response to it, the Constitutions of Oxford (issued in 1409) forbade anyone to translate Scripture into English, or to read such a translation, without a bishop's approval. A century later, owning English Scripture without that approval could still bring a charge of heresy.

Tyndale studied at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, taking his B.A. in 1512 and his M.A. in 1515, and became a gifted linguist. In 1523 he went to London hoping that Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London and a scholar of Greek, would take him into his household and sponsor a translation. Tunstall declined. He wrote later that he came to understand that "there was no room in my lord of London's palace to translate the New Testament," and in the end that "there was no place to do it in all England." In 1524 he left the country and never returned.

From the Greek, and Into Print

Two things made Tyndale's New Testament new. It was translated from the Greek, not from the Latin: Tyndale worked from the printed Greek New Testament of Erasmus, first published in 1516. And it was printed, so it could be made by the thousand rather than copied one at a time. For how Scripture was handed down by hand before printing, see The Process of Writing and Copying Ancient Manuscripts.

A first printing at Cologne in 1525 was raided before it was finished, and Tyndale fled up the Rhine with what sheets he could save. A single fragment of that edition survives, running as far as Matthew 22. At Worms in 1526 the printer Peter Schöffer completed the whole New Testament in a small octavo, a book small enough to hide in a merchant's cargo, and copies were smuggled into England that way. That October, Bishop Tunstall condemned the translation, bought up the copies he could find, and had them burned in public. The fire did not stop it. Of the thousands printed at Worms, only three copies are known to survive. The book's five-hundredth anniversary fell in 2026.

Tyndale closed the 1526 edition with a word to the reader that shows what he meant the book to do. He urged the reader to "come with a pure mind, and, as the Scripture saith, with a single eye, unto the words of health and of eternal life" (an echo of Matthew 6:22), and to "repent and believe the gospel, as saith Christ in the first of Mark."

Four Words and a Quarrel

The fiercest attack on the translation came from Sir Thomas More, the leading lay scholar in England and later Lord Chancellor. In his Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529) he charged Tyndale with corrupting Scripture, and he named the words. Tyndale replied in An Answer unto Sir Thomas More's Dialogue (1531), and More answered at greater length in his Confutation. The quarrel turned on four Greek words.

The word the older English Bible rendered "church" was congregation¹ in Tyndale: the Greek word means an assembly called together, and Tyndale translated it so. Where the Latin tradition said "charity," he wrote love². The Greek elder³, which English had long rendered "priest," became "senior" in 1526 and "elder" by 1534. And for the Latin "do penance" he wrote repent⁴, the Greek word for a change of mind and heart.

More saw these choices as an assault on the Church, its priesthood and its sacraments. Tyndale answered that he had translated what the Greek says. Underneath the dispute lay the question of whether Scripture or the institution was the final authority, the question the Reformation answered with Scripture alone. Matthew 16:18 shows the difference plainly: where the King James Version has Christ build his "church," Tyndale wrote "congregation."

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

Matthew 16:18
KJV

The King James translators did not side with Tyndale on every word. Their instructions required that "the old ecclesiastical words" be kept, "as the word church, not to be translated congregation." But they followed him further than that rule suggests. They wrote "assembly" where the same Greek word describes the town gathering at Ephesus (Acts 19:32). They kept "repent" in every verse where the Greek verb stands. And though 1 Corinthians 13 still ends with charity, most of the time they wrote love.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

1 Corinthians 13:13
KJV

The Old Testament, and the Words English Owes Him

Few in England knew Hebrew in the 1520s. Tyndale learned it in exile so that he could translate the Old Testament from its original language, as he had the New. His Pentateuch was printed at Antwerp in 1530 under a false imprint, "Malborow in the land of Hesse," to hide where it came from. Jonah followed in 1531.

Several words that every English reader of the Bible now knows were given their English form in that Pentateuch. Where the Hebrew names the feast of Exodus 12, Tyndale wrote passover⁵, the night the LORD passed over the houses marked with blood. For the goat of Leviticus 16 that carried Israel's sins away into the wilderness, he wrote scapegoat⁶: the goat that escapes. For the gold lid of the ark, where the blood of atonement was sprinkled, he wrote mercy seat⁷. The King James Version kept all three.

And thus shall ye eat it; with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and ye shall eat it in haste: it is the LORD'S passover.

Exodus 12:11
KJV

And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the LORD, and the other lot for the scapegoat.

Leviticus 16:8
KJV

Each of these words points forward. Paul writes that "Christ our passover is sacrificed for us" (1 Corinthians 5:7). The Greek word Hebrews uses for the mercyseat (Hebrews 9:5), propitiation⁸, occurs in only one other verse of the New Testament, where Paul says that God set forth Christ himself to be a propitiation through faith in his blood. In giving English readers these words, Tyndale gave them the Old Testament's own vocabulary for the work of Christ.

Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;

Romans 3:25
KJV

Betrayed in Antwerp

In 1534 Tyndale published his revised New Testament at Antwerp. It is this text, more than the 1526 edition, that lies under the King James New Testament. He was living in the house of the English merchants in Antwerp when, in May 1535, an Englishman named Henry Phillips, who had won his friendship, led him into the hands of officers who were waiting to arrest him. He was taken to the castle of Vilvoorde, near Brussels, and held there for nearly a year and a half.

One letter in his own hand survives from that prison, written in Latin in the winter of 1535 to the castle's governor. He asks for a warmer cap, a warmer coat and cloth to mend his leggings, because he suffers from cold. He asks to have a candle in the evening, because it is wearisome to sit alone in the dark. Above all he asks for his Hebrew Bible, his Hebrew grammar and his Hebrew dictionary, so that he can spend his time in study. Paul, near the end, asked for the same two things.

The cloke that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments.

2 Timothy 4:13
KJV

Tyndale was condemned as a heretic and, early in October 1536, strangled at the stake at Vilvoorde, and his body was burned. He is commemorated on 6 October. Foxe records his last words as a prayer: "Lord, open the King of England's eyes." It is the language of the commission Christ gave Paul, to open eyes and turn them from darkness to light (Acts 26:18).

From Tyndale to 1611

What followed came quickly. In 1537 the Matthew Bible, edited by Tyndale's friend John Rogers under the name "Thomas Matthew," gave England a complete Bible whose New Testament, Pentateuch and Jonah were Tyndale's. In 1539 Henry VIII authorised the Great Bible, a revision of the Matthew Bible, to be set up in the parish churches of England. Within three years of Tyndale's death, his translation was being read aloud in English churches by the king's authority.

Every major English Bible of the next seventy years stood on the same foundation: the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible of 1560, and the Bishops' Bible of 1568. When the King James translation was organised in 1604, the translators' first rule was to follow the Bishops' Bible, "as little altered as the original will permit." Their fourteenth rule named the older translations to be used where they agreed better with the original text, and Tyndale's stood first on the list.

The translators explained their aim in their preface of 1611, The Translators to the Reader. They had never meant to make a new translation, "nor yet to make of a bad one a good one," but "to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one." How much of the good one was Tyndale's has been measured. A 1998 study by Jon Nielson and Royal Skousen, sampling the passages Tyndale translated, estimated that about 84 per cent of the King James New Testament and about 76 per cent of those Old Testament books keep his words.

Tyndale's spelling has been modernised in the table; his words have not. Where the two columns agree, the King James translators judged that his English could not be bettered. Where they differ, as at Hebrews 11:1, they made their own choice.

The Word That Endures

Tyndale did not live to see an English Bible in English churches, or the King James Version, or any of the hundreds of translations into other languages that followed the same principle: Scripture from the original tongues, in the reader's own language, for anyone who will read it. He worked for a book a ploughboy could understand, and he was willing to die for it. The words he chose are still read every day, in the verses this site draws and in pulpits around the world.

His confidence was not in his own words but in God's. The Scripture he translated says why the work could not be stopped by fire or by the stake.

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

Isaiah 40:8
KJV

But the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you.

1 Peter 1:25
KJV

For how the books of the Bible were received and gathered, see The Canon of Scripture: How We Got the Bible, and for the Greek translation of the Old Testament that the apostles knew, The Septuagint: The Greek Old Testament.