Great Christian Biographies with John Piper: William Tyndale 1

Before I pray, I want to highlight the biography from which almost everything I know about William Tyndale came. You should not be very impressed with these talks as though I'm some scholar about Tyndale.

I just do what you do the summer before I read a biography. So don't be impressed. Just go do it. Do it for your church. And this was a riveting biography. David Daniel, William Tyndale, a biographer.

He's a professor of literature, formerly University of London, and I could hardly put it down, which says something about me because I was a lit major. And he loves Tyndale and does not like Thomas More.

And you will find out why in this talk. So I think they have a bunch of these at the bookstore, so run out. And it's not expensive because it's just cheap paper. And I enjoyed this very much. There are others, but if you're going to get one, I'd get this one.

Why Tyndale’s Biography Matters for Bible Translation

Before I pray and then go into it, I sat down over this manuscript this morning and I asked myself the question, what do I hope and expect that you will take away from? So on exit interviews, if somebody stuck a mic in your face and said, what do you remember from that talk?

I think these three things might be what you would say. I hope they would be what you would say. One, justification by grace through faith alone apart from works of the law is at the heart of the Bible and at the heart of a passion for Bible translation.

Surprising maybe that that would come out of the life of Tyndale, but I think you're going to just hear it over and over again. That's number one. Number two, vague doctrinally minimizing language common to some emergent church and new perspective writers is not postmodern, but premodern because it is perpetual.

Number three, the Bible with justification by faith at the center of its gospel is worth suffering and dying for. I think that would be the third thing. So let me pray and then we'll try to unload, unpack some of Tyndale's life.

Unload me and unpack him. Let's pray. Father in heaven, I pray now for help in being faithful to the providence of your exercise in the life of William Tyndale from 1494 to 1536 and the ripple effects that followed from it to this very moment.

I praise you for his life and what he achieved by your help. And I want with the book of Hebrews to honor the leaders who taught us the word of God, indeed gave us the word of God. And so help me, I pray, and you teach us now from the lessons of the life of William Tyndale.

I ask in Jesus' name, amen. Stephen Vaughan was an English merchant who was commissioned by Thomas Cromwell, who was the advisor to Henry VIII, the King of England, to go to the continent, find William Tyndale in exile, and persuade him to come back to England.

Vaughan wrote letters back to the king, and in a June 19, 1531 lecture, Vaughan wrote this. I find him always singing one note, which is why I chose that as the title for this talk. And the note was, will the King of England give his official endorsement to a vernacular Bible for all of his English subjects?

If not, I will not come home, and if so, I will give myself up to him at any cost. That was the passion, the one note that drove William Tyndale, to see a Bible translated from the Greek and Hebrew into ordinary English available for every person.

Henry VIII was very angry with William Tyndale because he was a strong reformer and exponent of Luther's views. Luther and he were contemporaries. Whether they met, we don't know. And Tyndale had written one book in response to Thomas More, who was the chancellor under Henry VIII, very critical of More's criticism of him.

And this made Henry VIII very angry, and Thomas More and the king had written together a defense of the seven sacraments. Thomas More was radically anti-Lutheran, radically anti-Tyndale, and radically Roman, Catholic, and Tyndale had come in for excoriating criticism from Thomas More.

Thomas More had, Danielle said, a near rabid hatred for William Tyndale. He wrote three quarters of a million words in three books attacking William Tyndale. So the relationship here was poor between these two.

In spite of all the hatred and all the anger in the king and in his chancellor, the king extended mercy to Tyndale through Stephen Vaughan, his emissary, to go get Tyndale and bring him home. And so he read to Tyndale, the king's royal majesty is inclined to mercy, pity, and compassion.

Now, Tyndale was easily moved and he came to tears when he heard that. Picture this now, he's been in exile for seven years. He left in 1524, he was born in 1494, he's been outside of his own country because he was fearful of his life in caring about the translation of the Bible.

And here his sovereign, his king, is extending what sounds like authentic mercy and he was brought to tears and then he sounded his one note again, will the king authorize a vernacular English Bible for the people from the original languages?

This is what he said, I assure you, if it would stand with the king's most gracious pleasure to grant only a bare text, he meant a text with no Lutheran notes attached to it, just a bare text to be put among the people, like as is put forth among the subjects of the emperor in these parts and other Christian princes, I shall immediately make faithful promise never to write more.

I think he was always using that word more in a double sense. Not abide two days in these parts with the same, but immediately to repair unto his realm and there most humbly submit myself at the feet of his royal majesty, offering my body to suffer what pain or torture, yea, what death his disgrace will, his grace, bless his grace, his grace will so this translation be obtained.

Until that time, I will abide the asperity of all chances whatsoever shall come and endure my life in as many pains as it is able to bear and suffer. In other words, I will give myself up to the king under one condition, namely, will the king authorize an English Bible translated from Greek and Hebrew for the common man and the king refused and Tyndale never went home again.

Instead, the king and the Roman Catholic Church would not provide the Bible, Tyndale would provide the Bible for the English-speaking common man, even if it cost him his life, which it did five years later as he was strangled and then burned near Brussels in 1536.

When he was 28 years old, he died at 42. When he was 28 years old, 1522, he was serving as a tutor, kind of like a little governor in a home with two sons. The master of the house was named John Walsh in Gloucestershire, spending most of his time studying Erasmus Greek New Testament.

Now, that Greek New Testament was the first printed Greek New Testament in the history of the world six years earlier, 1516. And we should pause here to let the incendiary effect of that event, namely the publication of the Greek New Testament in print so that it could be distributed, land on us.

David Daniel describes the magnitude like this. This was the first time that the Greek New Testament had been printed. It is no exaggeration to say that it set fire to Europe. Luther translated it into his famous German version, 1522, four years before Tyndale did his.

In a few years, there appeared translations from the Greek into most European vernaculars. They were the true basis of the popular Reformation. Every day in John Walsh's house, as a young tutor, graduate of Oxford, he was reading and reading.

He was an ordained Catholic priest, living, working as a tutor, and reading Tyndale's, I mean, Erasmus Greek New Testament, and becoming increasingly persuaded of his Reformed views, and making himself a colossal pain in this Catholic household as scholars were coming to dinner at night, and Tyndale would be sharing what he's seeing in the Greek Testament, and it sounded very un-Catholic to many of these men, and his host was becoming nervous for his safety.

One night, John Fox records this, a learned Catholic scholar at dinner became so exasperated with what Tyndale was saying that he responded, we were better to be without God's law than the Pope's. In response to that, Tyndale uttered probably his most famous sentence, maybe second most famous.

He said, I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow shall know more of the Scriptures than thou dost. And four years later, Tyndale finished the English translation of the Greek New Testament in Worms, Germany, and began to smuggle it back, layered in bales of cloth.

It was no...this is such a remarkable thing. When you study history and you see the way that God takes the seemingly insignificant providences of our lives. He grew up in Gloucestershire, which was the cloth-working district of England, and therefore, all of his connections as he moved to the continent were worth the cloth makers.

And therefore, he had a network by which to take these 700 interleaved pages of this pocket-sized 1526 first-ever English translation from the Greek and Hebrew, and layer it in between the cloth, put it on boats, and 3 ,000 of them in the first edition were distributed in England, a most remarkable providence.

By October of 1526, after the release in March, it had become banned by Bishop Tunstall in London. Nevertheless, it was making its way into England with its revolutionary effect. In 1534, he published a revision of it.

In the meantime, you got to feel the wonder of this as well. In the meantime, between 1526 and the first edition and 1534, the revision, he had learned Hebrew. There were probably two men in all of England that knew the Hebrew language.

He learned it probably in Worms, Germany. It was new. It was earth-shaking that the Hebrew Old Testament could be read and translated into vernacular, and that the Greek could be read and translated into the vernacular.

Tyndale, before he did his revision, wanted to know about all these Old Testament quotations. And so, he learned Hebrew, and therefore, his revision is more of a masterpiece. David Daniel says it was the glory of his life's work, the 1534 revision of the Greek New Testament into vernacular English.

For the first time ever in history, the Greek New Testament was translated into English. The first time ever it was translated in or in a printed form. Now, before Tyndale, you're wondering, there was John Wycliffe.

John Wycliffe had no printing press at his disposal in 1388 and on up to the end of that century, but he did, with the people around him who came to be called Lollards, he did translate from the Vulgate, from the Latin.

And so, you could search out and find English, big, written-out Bibles, and be burned for reading them. It was the most astonishing thing. So, I'm not saying that Tyndale put the Bible into English first.

He moved it from Greek and Hebrew into English first, doing an en run around the Latin Vulgate, and first, it was printed so that it could be run off quickly and distributed wisely. He also translated the Pentateuch from the Hebrew, Joshua to 2 Chronicles, and Jonah, and that's as far as he got before he was cut down with martyrdom in 1536.

The wonder of his translation is that it became the basis of, first, the Great Bible, Coverdale's Bible, 1539. It became the basis of the Geneva Bible, 1557. A million copies of the Geneva Bible were sold between 1560 and 1640 in England.

But you don't get a clear impression of the amazing achievement of this New Testament, Pentateuch, Joshua through 2 Chronicles, and Jonah, that much of the Bible, until you draw the comparison out with the authorized version, 1611, which we all know is the King James Version, 1611.

The King James Version, when you do a statistical analysis, takes over roughly nine-tenths of Tyndale's Bible in the parts that he translated. Let me give you a sampling, and I think we just take this for granted.

We don't realize the impact on the English language and on our spiritual vocabulary from a man who was willing to give his life to bring from the Greek and the Hebrew into vernacular. Because English in those days was a rude and difficult language to handle, and he brought it over with such skill that Daniel says, Tyndale is more often quoted today than Shakespeare.

People just don't know it. Here are some of his words. Let there be light. Now, with each of these, you should just imagine, if you know Hebrew and Greek, this could have been translated in another way.

These words could have come out another way. And here we are, 500 years later, 450, and we're still using Tyndale's language. Let there be light. Am I my brother's keeper? The Lord bless thee and keep thee.

The Lord make his face to shine upon thee and be merciful unto thee. The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee and give thee peace. Except for the word thee and the word merciful, I use those very words almost every Sunday, and I'm quoting Tyndale.

It's just breathtaking to think about the impact over the centuries. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Tyndale, verbatim. There were shepherds abiding in the field.

Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. The signs of the times. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. He went out and wept bitterly.

Now, you may think virtually every modern translation except for the message preserves wept bitterly. That's amazing. It's exactly right. In fact, Danielle, who's a literature scholar, said, those two words are still used by most modern versions.

It has not been improved upon for 500 years, least of all by one recent translation, went out and cried hard. Unlike that phrase, Danielle says, unlike that phrase, the rhythm of his two words carries the experience.

Those of us who are not given to language, we don't know how language works, we just benefit from people who do, and Tyndale was one. A few more. A law unto themselves. In him, we live, move, and have our being.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, fight the good fight, and on, and on, and on. Danielle says, the list of such proverbial phrases is endless. 500 years after his great work, newspaper headlines still quote Tyndale, though unknowingly, and he has reached more people than even Shakespeare.

Now, Luther is usually credited in his 1522 translation into German for having created a German language. Danielle claims the same for Tyndale in these words. In his Bible translations, Tyndale's conscious use of everyday words without inversions in a neutral word order and his wonderful ear for rhythmic patterns gave to English not only a Bible language, but a new prose.

England was blessed as a nation in that the language of its principal book, as the Bible in English rapidly became, was the fountain from which flowed the lucidity, suppleness, and expressive range of the greatest prose thereafter.

His craftsmanship with the English language amounted to genius. He translated two-thirds of the Bible so well that his translations endured until today. Now, that was not merely a literary phenomenon, it was a spiritual explosion.

Tyndale's Bible and writings were the kindling that set the Reformation ablaze in England. So now the question I want to pose is, how did he do this? How did he achieve this remarkable accomplishment?

And I have two things in mind by the accomplishment. One is the sheer beauty and glory and durable nature of the translation, and the other is the explosive spiritual effect of his life, his writings, and the Bible on England.

I think the answer to how he did it can be given if we ask two ways that a pastor must die in the ministry. Number one, he must die to the notion that we do not have to think hard or work hard to achieve spiritual goals.

He must die to the notion that you don't have to think hard or work hard to accomplish spiritual goals. That notion must die. And secondly, he must die to the notion that our thinking and our working is decisive in achieving spiritual goals.

Now, if we take those two deaths, the death to the notion that you don't have to work and think to accomplish spiritual goals, and the death to the notion that working and thinking are the key and decisive causes of spiritual goals, if we take those two things and lay them on the life of William Tyndale, I think we might get a clue to what was the key to this man's accomplishment.

I'm basing this on 2 Timothy 2 .7, which goes like this. Paul says to Timothy, think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything. First, Timothy, think about what I'm saying.

Exercise your mind. Don't coast and glide through my words. Put on your thinking cap and think with me, Timothy, for the Lord will sovereignly and graciously in and through, and sometimes in spite of, your thinking give you understanding.

That comes from God, but you can't short-circuit your brain. Now, there it is in the Bible, and I think the life of Tyndale works it out most remarkably. Now, the way these two truths come together in Tyndale, I think, can be best seen by drawing a comparison between William Tyndale and Erasmus.

This was, for me, perhaps the most illuminating new discovery for me. I knew something about the translation. I knew something about the martyrdom. I knew virtually nothing about his relationship with Erasmus and how this worked itself out and how they were similar and dissimilar.

So, here's what I'm doing right now. I'm going to compare Erasmus and Tyndale, how they were similar and how they were dissimilar, and all the while, I'm looking for how Erasmus accomplished what he did by dying to the notion, you don't have to think and work, and dying to the notion that God isn't the sovereign one who, sometimes in spite of and in and through, our thinking and working brings about spiritual effects.

They were very, very similar in some regards. First of all, their timeframe, Erasmus was 28 years older than Tyndale. Both died in 1536. Tyndale, a martyr of the Catholic Church, and Erasmus, a member in good standing in the church that put Tyndale to death.

Now, the similarities are remarkable. Erasmus was a Latin scholar. He was a university man, just like Tyndale was. He printed the first Greek Testament, the first printed Greek Testament. He taught at Oxford and in Cambridge when he came over to England for a season.

We don't know whether they ever met. At least, I couldn't find any evidence one way or the other that they met. On the surface, there were a lot of similarities. Tyndale knew eight languages, Latin, Greek, German, French, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, and English.

Both of them loved the natural power of language, and both of them were a part of the rebirth of interest in the way language works in those Renaissance days. Here's an example. This one just blew me away.

This was so illuminating with where Shakespeare came from and where Tyndale and Erasmus came from. Erasmus wrote a book called De Copia. Now, Copia, you can hear our English word, copious, means fullness, overflowing.

De Copia was a book written to help students. And since he was a head of Tyndale, Tyndale was one of those students at Oxford, used De Copia, and so you need to get a mind here. Where did this New Testament come from with such excellence?

It didn't come out of the blue and it didn't fall from heaven without hard work and craftsmanship. Where did that come from? De Copia trained students to use the copiousness of language. It helped them discover the infinite possibilities of crafted language.

It was aimed at helping us, them in those days, not sink down into mere jargon and worn-out slang and uncreative, unimaginative, prosaic, colorless, boring speech. And here was one of the lessons from that book.

That is a lesson assigned to students. Give 150 ways of saying, your letter has delighted me very much. You wonder where Shakespeare came from? He came from the 50 years leading up to his birth, 1564, in that kind of milieu.

I mean, what would you...you sit down in school and they sign you a sentence, your letter has delighted me very much, and they make you write that 150 ways. Good night. You're going to become a certain kind of translator, preacher, poet, dramatist, journalist.

I mean, your mouth and your mind are just going to be so full of what language can do, and you won't stand up and do the offertory prayer, leading God in direct, lead God in direct. Where'd that come from, lead God in direct?

I heard that every Sunday for 15 years in my Southern Baptist church. Good night. God, deliver us from pastors who don't prepare and, therefore, do not default to spontaneity, but default to rut. God help us, Tyndale died to the notion that translation isn't costly.