He was strangled and burned for translating the Bible into English. William Tyndale’s last prayer was about a king
In October 1536, near Brussels, William Tyndale was strangled and his body burned. His crime was translating the Bible into English.
According to the account of his death, his last words were a prayer: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” Within a few years, King Henry VIII had authorised an English Bible for every church in England, and much of it was Tyndale’s own work.
A scholar with a mission
Tyndale was an English scholar, educated at Oxford and Cambridge, fluent in several languages including Greek and Hebrew. He believed ordinary people should be able to read the Bible in their own language. He is reported to have told a clergyman that he would make a boy who drives the plough know more of the scriptures than the clergyman did.
In England at the time, translating the Bible into English without church permission was forbidden. Tyndale left for continental Europe to do his work.
The 1526 New Testament
Working from the Greek text, Tyndale completed his translation of the New Testament, and it was printed in Worms, Germany, in 1526. Copies were smuggled into England in bales of cloth and other goods. Church authorities bought and burned many of them, and very few copies of that first edition survive.
He then began translating the Old Testament from Hebrew, completing the first five books and other portions before he was arrested.
Betrayal and death
In 1535, while living in Antwerp, Tyndale was betrayed by a man who had befriended him and was arrested. He was held in the castle of Vilvoorde, near Brussels, for more than a year, tried for heresy and condemned. He was executed in October 1536.
His words live on
Tyndale’s influence on English is enormous. Scholars estimate that the large majority of the King James Version of the New Testament, published in 1611, follows his wording. Phrases still used every day in English come from his translations, including “let there be light”, “the powers that be”, “my brother’s keeper”, “the salt of the earth” and “fight the good fight”.
Modern English Bibles, including many read in churches across Ghana and Nigeria, stand in the tradition he started.
Why it matters for Bible translation today
Tyndale’s conviction, that people should read scripture in the language they speak, is the same conviction behind Bible translation work into Twi, Ga, Ewe, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and hundreds of other African languages. Translators today do not face execution, but the work still takes years of careful labour.
He prayed that a king’s eyes would be opened. Every believer who reads the Bible in a language they understand is living in the answer to that prayer.
