THE MAN WHO GAVE US OUR WORDS

 As far as William Tyndale’s appearance, we only know he was small. His betrayer indicated the heretic to authorities waiting in the room to arrest him by pointing down. Although the verdict was foregone, Tyndale seemed to enjoy the opportunity to argue his case. He may have even hoped for the same goodness and intelligence in his enemies that he himself possessed. The authorities did the scholarly priest the favor of strangling him before burning his body at the stake because although such a stubborn heretic deserved death, such a gentle, humble man did not deserve to suffer. When I think about William Tyndale, I want to make the outrageous claim that the diminutive priest was the most important historical figure in the English-speaking world of the second millennium. There is no such thing as a single most important individual, or ten, or a thousand of any place or time. A lockstep mechanism limits individual endeavors that contribute to progress. Those ahead of their time often die alone and unappreciated, their ideas and insights rediscovered by geniuses with better timing. I digress. Let me make my case.

His great enemy, Sir Thomas More, who had expended almost as many words as there were in the bible (750,000 vs. 788,000) attacking, scorning, and refuting William Tyndale, had been executed a few years before. The future saint would not compromise on the scriptures, or the dogma of the Catholic Church that he claimed was the logical extension of the scriptures. Being brilliant as well as dogmatic, Saint Thomas felt in his bones the revolutionary repercussions of Tyndale’s work and so spilled gallons of ink in books and tracts against his diminutive scholarly nemesis. The appetites of kings like Henry VIII—carnal, political, and otherwise—were the stuff of history and really nothing new. On the other hand, Tyndale was different.

William Tyndale, a gifted linguist, and translator, merely wanted to bring the Bible to the plowman, the cobbler, and the fishwife in a language they could understand. By having the gall to translate the New Testament and much of the Old Testament from Greek and Hebrew into English, he threatened the Church and State’s monopoly on religion. His bibles were printed and distributed and burned as quickly as they could be found, occasionally along with the possessors of the dangerous books. But there was more to this than the essential freedom of religious thought.

The power and clarity of the language of Tyndale’s translation are unmatched in English literature. “Let there be light,” “my brother’s keeper,” and “the salt of the earth” are a few of the phrases he put into our mouths. The fifty-four scholars who labored over the King James Bible incorporated most of his translation wholesale because they could do no better.

It is hard to imagine a one-book household in our modern world where information pours from our cellphones and laptops. This, however, was the norm for at least three hundred years following Tyndale’s death. The Bible, of course, was that book. It was doubtful that the speech of a Yorkshire shepherd and a Cornwall tin miner was mutually intelligible in the 16th century. Yet, they both understood the language of the Tyndale Bible. Shakespeare read the Geneva Bible, which drew overwhelmingly from Tyndale and Coverdale’s translation. For over three hundred years, Tyndale’s language was delivered every Sunday to all those who went to church by reason of faith, laws of the community, or pressure of conformity. In daily devotions, the words were repeated trillions of times. Well into the twentieth century, the published versions of the bible were in substance Tyndale’s translation. Today, we speak and write Tyndale English in our conversations, newspapers, novels, television and blogs, films, and podcasts.

But that was not his most world-changing contribution.

I like to give attribution to an idea. This is a profound one, and I regret being unable to do so. The source, I believe, is a book by a professor about early Church reformists in England. The professor was writing about the Levelers or the Lollards—Lollard being a term of derision meaning the mumbler—who passed around early handwritten translations of the bible. The professor contended that the modern democratic movement began with a question that the mumblers posed in their bible studies. The plowman, the cobbler, and the fishwife, when they heard the scripture in the language that they could comprehend, asked each other: “What do you think?”

Nothing was more important to the average man and woman in the sixteenth-century world of laws mandating maximum wages and minimum hours and a well-fed nobility who “looked down their noses” at them because they were smaller than the salvation of the soul. To be asked for an opinion on their eternal destiny gave their thoughts, words, and hopes an empowering revolutionary expansion. The ideas of the plowman, cobbler, and fishwife now mattered in what mattered most. Some were tortured and burned at the stake for daring to ask and presuming to answer. The nameless heroes still persevered in posing the liberating question, “What do you think?”

Sir Thomas More sneered that allowing the common people their opinions was dangerous and preposterous. The majority of the educated and powerful agreed. As they had done before, the authorities would have likely succeeded in intimidating these annoying scrawny upstarts, but then Tyndale’s printed bibles began to arrive, giving the full power and glory to the language of the scripture in English. It was like arming a small, poorly equipped insurgency with the most technologically advanced weapons available—and the question, “What do you think?” couldn’t be unasked.

I am being carried away by my enthusiasm again when I want to call Tyndale an architect of the modern democratic state. That wasn’t his intention. He did not question the hierarchical society. He only wanted to give the plowman, cobbler, and fishwife the words to understand their salvation. They took his words and did the rest. It might be said that they and their ilk became the most important men and women of the second millennium, but there are just too many of them. That was Tyndale’s intention.

Like all of us, Tyndale must be measured by his effect on others. It is difficult to find his equal.