This year marks the 500th anniversary of the appearance in England of William Tyndale’s translation of the Greek New Testament into English. It was one of the first such translations into the vernacular making the New Testament accessible to the general population.
Originally from Gloucester in southwest England, Tyndale studied at Oxford as well as Cambridge and subsequently decided to set out on his translation of the scriptures. His story is one of religious devotion, intellect and independence of mind, determination and, as recounted below, ultimate brutal tragedy.
This was of course before the English Church broke with Rome and the bishops did not favour the idea of the Bible in the vernacular, as the opening up of the Bible to ordinary people risked strengthening the Reformation process that was already under way.
One might expect that Tyndale would have known of this immense difficulty as far as his plans were concerned, but he seems to have been the type of person who believes so much in a course of action that all such obstacles are deemed surmountable.
Faced with the continued aversion to the Bible in the vernacular among the hierarchy, Tyndale fled to Germany in 1524. He completed his New Testament translation in 1525 but faced legal jeopardy over its printing. Nonetheless, it proceeded and Tyndale’s translation began circulation in England in the following year.
Tragically he was martyred in 1536 by strangulation and burning at the stake, his final words having been recorded as, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”
We do not have any of the original manuscripts, and nor did Tyndale or Erasmus (1466?-1536), on whose Greek text Tyndale relied. Erasmus had used a relatively small number of Greek manuscripts to compile his Greek text, but none of these is understood to have dated to before the 11th century.
The original texts of the New Testament were written in Greek because it was a common language used by officialdom and merchants across the region. Indeed, this assisted the spread of the Gospel beyond the Holy Land.
What happened was that the original texts were copied by scribes, often in a group setting in a scriptorium, with one person dictating. As a result of this, sometimes errors crept in or indeed changes were made because of doctrinal preferences.
The discipline of textual criticism, involving the assessing and comparing of many ancient manuscripts, has advanced remarkably since Tyndale’s time. As a result, we can be confident that our Bible today represents much more accurately what was originally written, although versions differ in style, and the number of books in the Protestant, Orthodox and Roman Catholic versions of the Old Testament differ.
One of the earliest extant New Testament manuscripts, known as P45, dates from the mid-3rd century and is held at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin.
This an edited version of an Irish Times article by Canon Ian Ellis who was rector of Newcastle, Co Down, until retirement in 2020, and edited The Church of Ireland Gazette from 2001-2017.