The year 2026 year marks the five-hundredth anniversary of William Tyndale’s New Testament (as it is known to posterity). Tyndale’s feat is that he was the first person to translate the complete New Testament from its original Greek into Modern English. Three copies of the original book have survived, and when the British Library purchased one of these copies from Bristol Baptist College in 1994 for one million pounds, it correctly declared it “the most important printed book in the English language.”[1] My goal in the remarks that follow (a shorthand version of my book on the subject)[2] is to encourage readers to make 2026 a year of the English Bible in their personal lives, starting with an inquiry into where it all started.

God’s Preparation of a Translator

Tyndale’s achievement was a combination of ordinary human talent and extraordinary endowment by God. Tyndale came from humble stock, being a farm boy from Gloucester, England. He received an ordinary grade school education comparable to our own. Then he spent a combined dozen years in the hallowed halls of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, where virtually all that he acquired for his eventual vocation was the result not of classroom instruction but of the assiduous self-education that he undertook.

After leaving the universities, Tyndale spent two years as a private tutor back in his native Gloucestershire. As a result of skirmishes with local Catholic priests, he “perceived how impossible it was to establish the lay people in any truth except the scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue” (Tyndale’s own words). This was Tyndale’s moment of calling to the work of translating the Bible into English. Because translating even the Lord’s Prayer into English was punishable by death in England, Tyndale fled to Germany to pursue his vocation as translator. He spent time in Wittenberg, where he saw that the Reformation was really possible. He learned Hebrew from rabbis in Worms, and it is here that we should pause to note Tyndale’s supernaturally endowed skill with languages. In addition to his native English, Tyndale mastered seven languages—Latin, Hebrew, Greek, German, Italian, Spanish, and French. A contemporary of Tyndale claimed that “whichever he speaks, you would think it his native tongue.”

Tyndale’s Life as a Translator

Tyndale achieved his feats of translation in the face of what would seem to be insurmountable obstacles. He lived the solitary life of an exile and then rather quickly of a fugitive living in hiding. He lacked the tools that modern Bible translators possess. In fact, his New Testament was a one-person translation. Tyndale himself acknowledged the disadvantage that this posed when he wrote in his epilogue “To the Reader” that “I had no man to counterfeit [i.e., imitate] . . . in the work now at the first time.” Martin Luther went so far as to state the axiom that in the task of translation “one man is no man,” meaning that a one-person translation is deficient right from the start. Tyndale rose above Luther’s stricture.

Tyndale’s difficulties in secretly printing his New Testament were extreme. When the first printing in Cologne had reached Matthew 22, enemies prepared a raid on the printing operation, and Tyndale fled up-river to Worms with only the few printed pages and the complete unprinted manuscript. The book was successfully printed in Worms in 1526, and Tyndale led a fugitive but productive life as a translator and writer of religious books for ten more years before he was executed by Catholic officials outside of Brussels in Belgium. His dying words were, “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes,” and one of the ironies of Tyndale’s life is that if he could have escaped martyrdom for just two more years, he might have returned to England a hero, inasmuch as by that time Henry VIII had mandated that a copy of the English Bible be placed “in some convenient place” in every parish church in England.

When the printing of Tyndale’s New Testament was finished in 1526, it was smuggled into England through a dissemination point known as the Steelyard, a German expatriate community living inside a walled village in London. As the book made its appearance in England, it made a sensation, but not in the way we ordinarily use that label. To call Tyndale’s New Testament a bestseller (as the title of a book on the subject does) is true only metaphorically. The actual number of copies printed was modest by modern standards. Tyndale’s New Testament led a double life, one public and the other secret. Tyndale’s book was a banned book that was publicly burned amid fanfare by Catholic and royal authorities. Its secret life likewise depended on its status as a banned book, as it quickly found its way as an “underground” book throughout England, thereby serving as the foundation of the Reformation in England.

How Tyndale Viewed His Most Famous Book

In a series of prefaces and epilogues, Tyndale left a detailed account of how he viewed his translation of the New Testament, and it does not totally coincide with modern conceptions. On some points, the common view is accurate. Tyndale viewed the Bible as the very word of God, the designation by which he most customarily refers to the Bible. Tyndale also had a patriotic agenda at work, hoping to affect the Reformation in his homeland and enrich its language as a byproduct. Martyrologist John Foxe was an Englishman who lived to see the fruits of Tyndale’s effort, and one thing he stressed in his survey of Tyndale’s life is that Tyndale “was stirred up of God to translate the Scripture into his mother tongue for the profit of the people of his country.”

But in other ways Tyndale surprises us with his views on his most famous book. Instead of commending its merits, he was self-effacing about it. He acknowledged that it was a book that needed improvement. He apologized for “the rudeness” of his work, in acknowledgement that the impoverished English language was in a state of transition from Middle English to Modern English. Tyndale encouraged his readers to “count it as a thing not having his full shape, but as it were born before its time, even as a thing begun rather than finished.” To that end, Tyndale implored “them that are learnéd and able, to remember their duty and to help thereunto” to correct and improve it.

Tyndale practiced what he preached in the matter. He revised his own translation and in 1534 published the results. In this revision he introduced four thousand changes to the 1526 edition. And then the next year he published another revision with 350 additional changes! For readers today who are impatient with periodic updating of their favorite Bible translation, Tyndale’s example can serve as a reassurance that revision is necessary.

One more thing remains to be said about how Tyndale viewed his epoch-making book. He viewed it as a book that might cost him his life. He knew that even as he was working on his translation, there were people back in England who were being executed for such efforts. When he received word of Bishop Tunstall’s celebrated burning of his New Testament outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, he wrote, “In burning the New Testament they did none other thing than I looked for; no more shall they do if they burn me also, if it be God’s will, it shall so be. Nevertheless, in translating the New Testament I did my duty.”

Tyndale’s Philosophy of Translation

The most striking discovery I made while doing the research for my book on Tyndale’s New Testament is the thoroughness with which Tyndale endorsed a literal philosophy of translation. In fact, Tyndale’s published views of translation correspond so thoroughly with the principles articulated in the preface to the English Standard Version (hereafter ESV) that the latter reads like a paraphrase of Tyndale.

For example, Tyndale wrote in a letter to his fellow English Reformer John Frith, imprisoned in London awaiting martyrdom, that “I call God to record against the day we shall appear before our Lord Jesus to give a reckoning of our doing, that I never altered one syllable of God’s word against my conscience.” Tyndale was so committed to rendering the original text into English that he sometimes invented words for specialized Greek terms instead of resorting to dynamic equivalence.

In the same vein as Tyndale’s “not one syllable altered” statement is his observation that the Greek language corresponds so closely with the English language that “in a thousand places you need only translate it into English, word for word.” Word for word: this is the model for literal translation.

But that is only the beginning. The following manifesto from Tyndale makes it seem that he is denouncing modern dynamic equivalent translations, even though they are the product of the middle of the twentieth century:

In many places, me thinketh it better to put a declaration [explanation] in the margin, than to run too far from the text [of the original]. And in many places, where the text seemeth at the first chop hard to be understood, yet the circumstances before and after [i.e., the context], and often reading together, maketh it plain enough.[3]

Tyndale clearly thought that interpretive commentary should be kept out of the translation itself and relegated to explanatory notes.

Tyndale’s Style

When we come to the actual text of Tyndale’s New Testament, we need to turn a deaf ear to prevailing misrepresentations of his style. At the heart of the misconception is a famous hearsay statement traceable back to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs but not found in Tyndale’s own writings. When a Gloucestershire priest said in Tyndale’s hearing that “we were better to be without God’s law than the pope’s,” Tyndale, echoing a statement from Erasmus, replied, “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than thou dost.” Tyndale was not identifying a target of audience of minimal intellectual and linguistic ability. The issue at hand was that of religious authority, and Tyndale was planting his flag on the side of the Bible as the authority for religious belief, along with the layperson’s right of access to the Bible. It was not a comment about style of translation but rather acquaintance with the whole Bible by laypeople of all educational levels.

To ascertain Tyndale’s style, we need only to read his translation itself. At every turn we are reminded of the elegance of the King James Version, which retained eighty percent of Tyndale’s New Testament. Here, for example, is Tyndale’s rendition of Jesus’s beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:3–5). This is the very touchstone of aphoristic beauty.

Modern colloquializing translators incorrectly claim that Tyndale wrote in short sentences and monosyllabic words. Tyndale’s translation philosophy committed him to passing on to his readers what the original stated. Passages like the following long sentence are the norm in Tyndale’s New Testament:

Blessed be God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which hath blessed us with all manner of spiritual blessings in the heavenly things by Christ, according as he had chosen us in him through love, before the foundation of the world was laid, that we should be saints and without blame in his sight. (Eph. 1:3–4)

The preface to the ESV is therefore correct when it claims to be not simply in the King James tradition but the Tyndale-King James tradition. Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament became the unchallenged basis and model for English Bible translation for four centuries, until the rise of dynamic equivalence in the mid-twentieth century introduced an alternative model. What all English Bible translations share is that their starting point was the work of William Tyndale at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Tyndale’s Influence on the English Language

The influence of Tyndale on the English language is a fact easy to undervalue. I will confess to having been guilty of slighting it through the years in deference to the religious side of Tyndale’s achievement. Until I did the research for my book, I was skeptical of the common saying “no Tyndale, no Shakespeare.” I now believe it to be true.

The power of the Bible is inseparable from the language in which it is expressed. The original words are what the writers wrote and what God superintended, and to shortchange those words is to lose much of the power of the Bible. Another unexpected discovery for me is that the Bible itself unleashed the power of Tyndale’s language. The prose that we find in Tyndale’s religious treatises strikes a modern reader as awkward and sometimes nearly undecipherable, whereas when we turn to Tyndale’s New Testament, the language sparkles.

I need to add a caution at this point. Tyndale’s New Testament was printed in a font known as old Gothic or black letter typeface. It is virtually unreadable for modern readers. Even when we transpose that font into modern font, we are nearly as bewildered. Spelling had not been regularized, and even some of the letters do not correspond to ours (with the letter s, for example, resembling our letter f). Only when we regularize the spelling and punctuation does Tyndale’s New Testament come alive in familiar King James terms.

What, then, are the ingredients of Tyndale’s language and style? Clarity and directness, most obviously. This is partly a matter of the words, but also of the syntax or sentence structure. The words and thoughts flow smoothly in a linear fashion. A major problem with the English language right to the end of the sixteenth century was the inadequacy of what Old English writers quaintly called “the word hoard,” meaning the storehouse of words. Tyndale added some 1,700 new words to the English language, and later Shakespeare added an identical number.

Most of the words that Tyndale contributed are still with us. Random examples are intercession, beautiful, peacemaker, uproar, and seashore. Equally interesting are phrases and sayings that we still use—the signs of the times, in the twinkling of an eye, the salt of the earth, safe and sound. These are more than simply interesting facts. They gesture toward the larger principles of Tyndale’s skill in formulating well-turned phrases and a vocabulary adequate to the demands of communication.

In Summary

2026 should be for us a year of the Bible. Commemorating Tyndale’s English New Testament is not a ho-hum event to which we give a passing nod. Commemorating Tyndale’s New Testament is more than giving honor where honor is due. It is to give praise for how we have knowledge of the Christian faith, namely, the words of God in our own language so we can “keep them and do them” (Deut. 4:6 in Tyndale’s translation of the Pentateuch).

Endnotes

[1] This article encapsulates the main points of my book on Tyndale’s New Testament, and documentation of my quotations appears there. In addition, the quotations are the shared knowledge surrounding the subject, appearing in books on Tyndale and readily accessible online.

[2] Leland Ryken, William Tyndale’s New Testament: A Biography of the Book that Changed Our World (Christian, 2026).

[3] From Tyndale’s preface to the reader in his 1534 translation of the New Testament, second paragraph on page 1.

Leland Ryken is emeritus professor of English at Wheaton College, where he continues to teach part-time. He has published more than fifty books. Ordained Servant Online, September–October, 2026