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Before the embers had cooled on William Tyndale’s martyr pyre, his dying prayer—“Lord, open the king of England’s eyes!”—was already being answered. Five hundred years on, it has been answered in ways that he could not have imagined. Whether or not King Henry VIII’s spiritual eyes were ever truly opened is contestable, but that Tyndale’s New Testament opened England’s eyes is not. The transformative effect of the Word of God that Tyndale had on the English-speaking peoples cannot be exaggerated. For the first time, they could hear God’s voice speaking in their native tongue from the printed page. In the intervening centuries, the echo of that voice—often using Tyndale’s very own idioms—continues to be heard globally in English language, literature, and liturgies.
Not all of Tyndale’s immediate successors in ministry shared his enormous capacity as a linguist; C.S. Lewis memorably said of Tyndale’s associate Miles Coverdale, “Among men like Erasmus and Tyndale . . . he shows like a rowing boat among battleships.” Nevertheless, standing on Tyndale’s giant shoulders, in 1535 Coverdale successfully completed his friend’s unfinished Old Testament to publish the first complete English Bible: the Coverdale Bible. Just two years later, John Rogers, another close friend of Tyndale, published a second full English Bible in Antwerp under the pseudonym Thomas Matthew: the Matthew’s Bible of 1537. As the English Reformation progressed, however, the work of Bible translation that had been the secretive labor of outlaws would gradually emerge from the shadows to become the very public project of scholars enjoying royal patronage.
In 1538, Henry VIII’s prime minister Thomas Cromwell issued his master’s stunning policy reversal, decreeing that every parish church in the realm must purchase an English Bible. To meet the expected demand, Cromwell turned to Coverdale, who in 1539 revised the Matthew’s Bible to produce the first “authorized version,” which because of its considerable size became known as the Great Bible. In what was widely regarded as a remarkable answer to Tyndale’s dying prayer, an English Bible had been published in England with a royal license from the same English king who had put a price on his head. With each successive English translation, Tyndale’s circle of friends ensured that England’s “plowboys” at last had God’s Word within their reach.
The next major milestone was the publication of the Geneva Bible in 1560, with its copious explanatory notes, which made it in many respects the world’s first study Bible. It was prepared by English exiles in Geneva such as William Whittingham and John Knox during the violent reign of “Bloody Mary” (Mary I, r. 1553–58). While a fresh translation, it clearly owed a tremendous debt to the prior work of Tyndale, Coverdale, and Rogers. Although Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) gave her consent for its publication in England after her sister’s brief reign of terror, she was keenly aware of the undisguised “presbyterian” and “puritan” sympathies of its copious study notes, which challenged the episcopalian ambiguities of her efforts to unite England’s divided national church. So it was that she commissioned her bishops to produce a second “authorized version”—the Bishops’ Bible of 1568. Despite this new official pulpit Bible of the land, the Geneva Bible—thanks partly to its handy pocket size and modest price tag—remained the undisputed personal Bible of choice in England and beyond. Copies were carried by the Pilgrim Fathers to the New World on the Mayflower, and it was also the very first Bible to be printed in Scotland, which would in time be justly nicknamed “The Land of the Book.”
Sharing Elizabeth’s resentment of the Genevan ecclesiology peddled by the Geneva Bible, her successor King James I (r. 1603–25) commissioned yet a third “authorized version”—the one that bears his name. In the preface to the King James Version (KJV) of 1611, its translators summarized the shared mission of every faithful Bible translator: “to deliver God’s Book unto God’s people in a tongue which they understand.” But they also openly acknowledged the debt they owed to their predecessors: “Truly (Good Christian Reader), we never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one . . . but to make a good one better.” Sure enough, scholarly comparisons have demonstrated the heavy reliance of the KJV on the earlier versions of Tyndale and his friends, while updating archaic language from the previous century. As the KJV gradually replaced the Geneva Bible, securing its place as the primary English Bible for the better part of three and a half centuries, Tyndale’s legacy became permanently cemented in the language and literature of the English-speaking peoples.
Of course, Tyndale’s English is not the English spoken today. Languages are dynamic things, shaping—and being shaped by—the cultures that speak them. Accordingly, the language of the English Bible came to establish new norms of written and spoken English. Many who may never open an English Bible enrich their daily speech with countless idioms imported from its pages: When we speak of “sour grapes,” “the skin of one’s teeth,” “the land of the living,” “a drop in a bucket,” “the salt of the earth,” “the powers that be,” or “being at our wits’ end,” we use biblical idioms translated by Tyndale’s fertile mind. Likewise, English literature and poetry is replete with references: Time would fail me (to use another biblical idiom) to tell of Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, Herbert, Wordsworth, Scott, Austen, Dickens, Hawthorne, and Melville and their plentiful allusions to Scripture.
The English Bible could have played such a formative role in shaping a global language only if it was a book almost universally read in the homes, taught in the schools, and preached from the pulpits of the English-speaking peoples for centuries. The English Bible was truly the stuff of national life. But in Tyndale’s day, no one could have guessed that in the coming centuries English would also become the language of international trade and politics—the language of a world empire—much as Koine Greek had been in the days of the Apostles when the New Testament was first written. Where the British Empire went, the English Bible went, and those who brought its light to the nations would become the vanguard of a whole new generation of Bible translators, making God’s Word known in the vulgar tongue of peoples that Tyndale could only have dreamed of.
Tyndale’s legacy is still evident in today’s modern English Bibles. While the same weighty responsibility lies on contemporary translation teams, the tools available to us far exceed what Tyndale and his Cambridge scholars had available to them in the 1520s. By the late nineteenth century, the discovery of literally thousands of portions of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures have made the Bible far and away the best-attested ancient document in terms of manuscript evidence. The careful analysis of this treasure trove has revealed such an astonishing degree of harmony between them that by any objective standard, God’s Word has clearly been, “by his singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages” (Westminster Confession of Faith 1.8). Modern translations such as the English Standard Version are thus the product of the same scholarly task bequeathed by Tyndale: to provide the English-speaking world with the most accurate translation of God’s inerrant Word, from the most ancient and accurate Hebrew and Greek manuscripts available to the translators. As such, the ESV’s preface acknowledges that “the ESV stands in the classic mainstream of English Bible translation over the past half-millennium. The fountainhead of that stream was William Tyndale’s New Testament of 1526.”
Sadly, English-speaking nations today do not share the same devotion to the Word of God that once made the Bible “the secret of England’s greatness,” as Queen Victoria memorably put it. To be sure, its echo can still be heard in countless phrases that fall from the lips of today’s comparatively godless generation. But it is surely a sign of the times that contemporary English Bible translations are increasingly shaped by the ideological conventions of the English-speaking societies that publish them (“gender-neutral” versions being a prime example), rather than the other way around. An abundance of Bibles on our shelves does not guarantee an abundance of biblical literacy in our pews, and a famine of the Word of God (see Amos 8:11) may exist in the nation whose plowboys have multiple Bible translations on their smartphones. The anniversary of William Tyndale’s work certainly calls us to give thanks for our English Bibles. But it also issues a warning from history not to take them for granted. In the end, the need of our generation may be less for gifted translators of the Word and more for skillful preachers of that Word (Rom. 10:14–17). To that end, let us echo Tyndale’s prayer, “O Lord, open our nation’s eyes!”