William Tyndale's New Testament

From Gloucestershire to the Ploughboy

William Tyndale was born around 1494 in Gloucestershire, between the Cotswolds and the Severn, a region of sheep and cloth whose merchants traded across the North Sea with the Low Countries. Those trade routes would one day carry his New Testaments into England. He studied at Magdalen Hall in Oxford, took his bachelor's degree in 1512 and his master's in 1515, and was ordained a priest.

From Oxford he seems to have gone on to Cambridge, where the Dutch scholar Erasmus had recently taught Greek. In 1516 Erasmus published the first Greek New Testament ever put on sale, and in its preface he wished that the Scriptures might be translated into every language, so that the farmer might sing them at his plough. Tyndale would spend his life turning that wish into a book.

Around 1521 he became tutor to the children of Sir John Walsh at Little Sodbury Manor in Gloucestershire. Clergy dined at Walsh's table, and Tyndale argued with them about Luther, Erasmus, and the Bible, answering them from the text. He came to believe that the clergy's ignorance of Scripture could not be cured while the Scriptures stayed locked in Latin. Summoned before the diocesan chancellor on suspicion of heresy, he was dismissed with a furious rebuke.

Foxe records the moment that became his life's motto. A learned man, pressed hard in argument, said that it would be better to be without God's law than the pope's. Tyndale answered that he defied the pope and all his laws, and that if God spared his life, before many years he would make the boy who drives the plough know more of the Scripture than his opponent did.

“The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple.”PSALM 19:7 · KJV