English Bible

A Newly Digitized Bible Reveals the Origins of the King James Version

A one-of-a-kind Bible used by the King James translators offers a rare glimpse of their textual decisions.

Though often thought to be a fresh translation, the King James Bible is, at heart, a revision of the 1602 Bishops’ Bible that was produced in three stages (translation companies, General Meeting, and final revisions). It was a monumental feat and one that has influenced English Bibles ever since. Fortunately, we know more about the process that produced the King James Bible (KJB) than just about any other translation of its time.

One key source involves the actual Bibles used by the revisers. According to an extant bill dated 10 May 1605, King James I purchased “40 large church bibles for the translators” from Royal Printer Robert Barker for the translators to use.¹ The translators worked directly on these unbound pages in the first stage of work. As far as we know, only a single copy remains.

This remaining copy, a 1602 Bishops’ Bible in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, collects handwritten notes reflecting alterations made while crafting the KJB. Thankfully, it has recently been digitized and made completely accessible online for the first time ever.² The document’s importance to scholars studying the history of the English Bible is hard to overestimate. This article introduces the history of its study and gives a small sample of its value for understanding the work of the KJB translators.

The document’s importance to scholars studying the history of the English Bible is hard to overestimate.

The 1602 Bishops’ Bible with the translators’ notes (left) and the final product in the 1611 KJB (right). Images from Bodleian Library and UPenn

Previous scholarship

The Bodleian Library acquired the volume in 1646 when it was described as “a large Bible wherein is written downe all the Alterations of the last translacōn.”³ The first critical notice was in 1868 by B. F. Westcott. When preparing his history of the English Bible, he requested a summary of its notes from John Wordsworth, Bishop of Salisbury, and Bodleian Librarian Henry Coxe. Unfortunately, Westcott mistakenly thought it represented “a scholar’s collation of the [KJB] and Bishops’ texts” rather than the source for the KJB itself.

In 1888, Nicolas Pocock pronounced Westcott’s judgment “very doubtful,” and Edwin Willoughby later took the document more seriously as a genuine draft and brought it to public attention.⁴ In the 20th century, Edward Jacobs examined the Old Testament annotations in detail in his 1972 dissertation but, sadly, had to rely on microfilms; he extended this study in later articles to its New Testament annotations.⁵ As Jacobs finished his dissertation, Irena Backus started a thesis studying Theodore Beza’s impact on the KJB New Testament which also employed the document, their different conclusions interacting only in a footnote.⁶ A decade later Jacobs published, with Ward Allen, a transcription of the Gospels with an introduction and, more recently, David Norton has used the document to sift translators’ intentions from printers’ errors while editing the New Cambridge Paragraph Bible for Cambridge University Press.

What’s in this Bible?

What’s in the document and what makes it so important to scholars? The answer is the handwritten notes themselves. In the Old Testament, these annotations cover almost every book, though in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, they end after chapter four. (Lamentations and the Apocrypha are unannotated.)

Letters were used to identify other translations as the sources for suggested changes. Source

The notes also reveal other translations used by the revisers besides the Bishops’ Bible itself. Back in 1868, Westcott described a set of miniscule letters (g, t, and j) which identify these other sources. He correctly identified “g” as the Geneva Bible, the KJB’s famous predecessor. Other scholars have suggested that “t” is for Tremellius and “j” is for Junius or Jerome’s Vulgate.⁷

Dating the translators’ notes

Dating the Old Testament annotations is complicated as they stretch across text assigned to all three translation companies and are written in what Jacobs believed is the same hand. This means, as Miller points out, that “the Old Testament annotations, in the aggregate, must postdate the company stage of the translation process, since one person could not have been part of three different translation companies in three different locations.”⁸

Several dates have been proposed, including ones that suggest the notes are an actual printers’ master copy, a copy of the printers’ master copy, notes made at the General Meeting, or a revision sent to the General Meeting. Miller argues that, most likely, “the annotations were made in preparation for the general, revisory meeting in London, assimilating into a single working manuscript the changes that had been separately proposed by the three Old Testament translation companies.” This would mean the handwriting is likely that of a scribe, though it is also possible they “could have been made at the general meeting itself.”⁹

The New Testament annotations are less extensive. The text of Matthew, Mark, and Luke is heavily revised, but in John, only chapters 17–21 are annotated. Elsewhere, only brief notes are found in a handful of places (Eph. 4:8; 2 Thess. 2:15; 1 Cor. 9:5; Gal. 3:13; and 2 Pet. 1:10).

Dating the New Testament annotations is simplified by the fact that they occur across text assigned to only one company. Even here, however, the dating is complicated by the fact that the annotations are in three separate hands.¹⁰ Miller gives this as a reason why “the draft of the Gospels seems to be assignable to the company stage of the translation process, distinct from the draft of the Old Testament now bound together in the same Bodleian volume.”¹¹ The different hands would then represent either the company internally critiquing its own draft or the input of one or more of the other companies upon it. The process of producing the most famous English Bible in history was obviously not a simple one!

Insights into the translators’ decisions

One of the most interesting and unexplored areas of the translators’ work that this document illuminates is how they wrestled with textual issues. Here are four examples.

1. Mary’s purification (Luke 2:22)

I have noted before that, in the Christmas story, the translators’ base text for Luke 2:22 explains that Mary brought Jesus to the temple because it was the time of “her purification,” without any notes. Virtually all the textual data read “their purification” (including either Joseph or Jesus in the purification). Greek editions at the time differed, particularly those of Erasmus and Beza.

What did the KJB translators do? This document shows a complex back-and-forth. First, “Or, theyr” was added to the main text (which read “her”) to indicate a textual variant. Then they changed their minds on the base text but still wanted a note. “Her” was crossed out in the text, “theyr” written above it, and in the margin “theyr” was replaced by “her.” Now the main text would read “theyr” with a marginal note giving the alternative: “Or, her.” This revision too was apparently overturned, presumably at the General Meeting. In the end, the KJB ended where it began: “her” in the text and nothing in the margin.

The text at Luke 2:22, showing a series of changes from “her” to “their” and back to “her.” Source

2. Jesus’ rebuke of Satan (Matt. 4:10)

Another example appears in Matthew 4:10 in the case of Jesus’ rebuke of the Devil, a rebuke later echoed after Peter’s confession (Matt. 16:23). The translators’ base text has “get thee hence behind me” (opisō mou). But they crossed out this last phrase. Why? Because the editions of the Greek New Testament they had available from Erasmus (1535), Stephanus (1550), and Beza (1598) all have the shorter reading in the text (though each mentions the longer reading).

The words “behinde mee” are crossed out in Matt 4:10. Source

3. Greeting our friends (Matt. 5:47)

Matthew 5:47 provides an example of how the translators wanted their readers to see more textual variation than what ultimately made it into the final version. The Bishops’ text has Jesus asking if his followers only greet “your brethren”—with no note. The KJB revisers added a marginal note that read “Or, frendes,” indicating the variant in Greek (philous vs. adelphous). As before, the two readings were known to them because of the Greek New Testaments of Erasmus and Beza. But, this note was not to survive. It was struck down by later revisers and didn’t make it to the published 1611 KJB.

The words “or friends” were added to the margin but never made it into the final King James. Source

4. Two longer marginal notes (Luke 17:36; Matt. 26:26)

Other marginal changes did make the cut. In Luke 17:36, the Bishops’ Bible has no marginal note, but the revisers wanted to alert their readers to a variant by adding a note saying: “The 36 verse is wanting here in the most of the Greeke copyes.” The revisers at Stationers’ Hall made a few minor changes in wording to the note but included it in the published text.

A note added in the left margin about manuscripts missing Luke 17:36. Source

Likewise, in Matthew 26:26 the text of the Last Supper says that he broke the bread when he had taken it and “given thankes,” without a note. The revisers crossed this out, added “blessed and” beside it, and added the marginal note, “Many Greeke copies have, given thankes.” This switched the base text from “given thankes” (eucharistēsas) to “blessed” (eulogēsas) and alerted the reader to the variant. The note was tweaked slightly but still published.

The note added in the left margin for Matthew 26:26. Source

This is just a sample of what this Bible reveals about the translators’ textual work. All the KJB’s notes that reflect textual variants were collected by F. H. A. Scrivener and his list remains the best treatment of the translators as textual critics. Scrivener, however, never examined this document.

Conclusion

For the translators, textual variants like these were part of a larger category they called “differences of readings.” This category included not only textual uncertainties but also lexical uncertainties, where words could have several different meanings. Today, we tend to think of these as separate categories. But applying our distinction to the KJB translators would be an anachronism.¹² Perhaps detailed examination of the document in the future from a text-critical perspective can catalogue all annotations reflecting textual decisions, painting a clearer picture of the KJB translators as textual critics.

Viewing the images online is a visual reminder of how many decisions Bible translators have to make.

This is just a small sample of the kind of insight that can be gained from studying this source of the most important English Bible in history. Viewing the images online provides an immediate, visual reminder of how many decisions Bible translators have to make. Further study will undoubtedly bring to light further insights into how the translators made their decisions. May we all be grateful for the push towards open access upon which human knowledge thrives!

An earlier version of this article could have given the impression that F. H. A. Scrivener’s list of the KJB’s notes was collected by him in 1910. What was meant is that his list was last published, posthumously, in 1910.

Notes

1
“MS. Don. c. 88” (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, n.d.); Paul Morgan, “A King’s Printer At Work: Two Documents of Robert Barker,” The Bodleian Library Record 13, no. 5 (1990): 370; A massive cache of documents relating to the King’s printing house, the largest collection of manuscript materials relating to any single printing house in the Jacobean period, have recently been studied by Graham Rees and Maria Wakely, Publishing, Politics, and Culture: The King’s Printers in the Reign of James I and VI (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
2
Previously catalogued as BL Bib. Eng. 1602 b.1, it was given a new pressmark in Sep. 2013: Arch. A b. 18. My thanks to Chris Yetzer for informing me about its digitization.
3
William Dunn Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford: With a Notice of the Earlier Library of the University, 2nd ed. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1890), 102.
4
Nicholas Pocock, “The Bishops’ Bible of 1568, 1572, and 1602.,” The Athenaeum, no. No. 3148 (February 25, 1888): 243–45; Edwin Eliott Willoughby, The Making of the King James Bible: A Monograph with Comparisons from the Bishops Bible and the Manuscript Annotations of 1602, with an Original Leaf from the Great “She” Bible of 1611 (Los Angeles: Printed for Dawson’s Book Shop at The Plantin Press, 1956); Adam Nicolson, Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible (London: Harpercollins, 2003), 151–52.
5
Edward Craney Jacobs, “A Bodleian Bishops’ Bible, 1602 (Bib. Eng. 1602 b. 1): A Preliminary Study of the Old Testament Annotations and Their Relationship to the Authorized Version, 1611.” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Alabama, Auburn University, 1972), 14; Edward Craney Jacobs, “Two Stages of Old Testament Translation for the King James Bible,” The Library S6-II, no. 1 (March 1, 1980): 16, fn. 2; Jacobs, “A Bodleian Bishops’ Bible, 1602 (Bib. Eng. 1601 B. 1)”; Edward Craney Jacobs, “An Old Testament Copytext for the 1611 Bible,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 69, no. 1 (1975): 1–15; Jacobs, “Two Stages of Old Testament Translation for the King James Bible”; Edward Craney Jacobs, “King James’s Translators: The Bishops’ Bible New Testament Revised,” The Library s6–14, no. 2 (June 1, 1992): 100–126.
6
Irena Dorota Backus, “Influence of Theodore Beza on the English New Testament” (DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, 1976); Irena Backus, The Reformed Roots of the English New Testament: The Influence of Theodore Beza on the English New Testament, ed. Dikran Y. Hadidian (Pittsburgh: Wipf & Stock, 1980), 28, fn. 63.
7
See Jacobs, “A Bodleian Bishops’ Bible, 1602 (Bib. Eng. 1601 B. 1),” 30–31, fn. 44; Jeffrey Alan Miller, “‘Better, as in the Geneva’: The Role of the Geneva Bible in Drafting the King James Version,” Journal of Medieval & Early Modern Studies 47, no. 3 (September 2017): 517–43.
8
Jeffrey Alan Miller, “The Earliest Known Draft of the King James Bible: Samuel Ward’s Draft of 1 Esdras and Wisdom 3–4,” in Labourers in the Vineyard of the Lord, 2018, 216.
9
Miller, 216.
10
Allen and Jacobs, The Coming of the King James Gospels, 5–7.
11
Miller, “The Earliest Known Draft of the King James Bible,” 216.
12
As seen in the comments of Miles Smith defending the KJB’s marginal notes, which discuss both textual and lexical differences in the same section, and in the report of translator Samuel Ward to the Synod of Dordt, suggests. Samuel Ward, “SSC MS Ward L1” (Sidney Sussex College, n.d.), fol. 5r; Anthony Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619), vol. 13, Church of England Record Society (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2005), 138–40; Christian Moser, Donald Sinnema, and Herman J. Selderhuis, eds., Acta of the Synod of Dordt, vol. I, Acta et Documenta Synodi Nationalis Dordrechtanae (1618-1610) (KG, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 17, 203; Samuel Ward, “British Statement on the Method of Bible Translation,” in Early Sessions of the Synod of Dordt, ed. Anthony Milton, vol. II/2, Acta et Documenta Synodi Nationalis Dordrechtanae (1618–1610) (KG, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 69, 70.

The Life and Legacy of William Tyndale

Tyndale’s work to translate the Bible into English reminds us that the Bible has a history written in blood.

Peter J. Gurry

It’s fair to say that no single individual has left a more indelible mark on the language of the English Bible than William Tyndale (ca. 1494–1536). He was the first to translate the Bible into English from the original languages (the Wycliffe Bible was from Latin). He completed two editions of the New Testament and got as far as 2 Chronicles (and Jonah) in the Old Testament. By one estimate, as much as 80 percent of the wording of the King James Version is Tyndale’s. He was, by all accounts, a superb translator and his concern was always to give the Bible to the people. As one biographer says, “One key to Tyndale’s genius is that his ear for how people spoke was so good. The English he was using was not the language of the scribe or lawyer or schoolmaster; it really was, at base, the spoken language of the people.”¹

But he was also not afraid to innovate. He coined many English words including “anathema,” “godly,” “Passover,” and “fisherman.” He is also responsible for such famous biblical lines as “let there be light” (Gen. 1:3) and “fight the good fight” (1 Tim. 6:12) and he gave us “Jehovah” for the personal name of God in the Old Testament.

Preparation

Not much is known about Tyndale’s youth. Our first real record of him comes from his time at Oxford, where he began his training at age fourteen. This was on the younger side, but also not especially unusual for the time. The university was still small by today’s standards with only several thousand students, but it was growing in influence. The printing press was still new and printed textbooks were available but rare. Students typically borrowed, bought, or had a new copy made of their textbooks. Importantly, the memory of John Wycliffe still loomed large at Oxford. More than that, the tide of the Reformation was just beginning to hit the English shores. A German monk named Martin Luther would soon make a deep impression on Tyndale’s theology.

It was said of Tyndale’s time in Oxford that he was “brought up from a child in the university of Oxford, where he, by long continuance, grew up, and increased as well in the knowledge of tongues and other liberal arts as especially in the knowledge of the scriptures, whereunto his mind was singularly addicted.” Along with this devotion, he was intellectually gifted. He would later be praised by another scholar for mastering eight languages: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, German, and, of course, English.

A series of events that would shape his future occurred just as the young Tyndale finished his master’s degree. The first was the publication of Erasmus’s Greek-Latin New Testament that came off the press in 1516. This new edition met a growing interest in the Bible in its original languages. Nowhere would that interest be more significant than in Germany where, a year later, Luther nailed his 95 theses in a challenge to the Catholic church’s teaching on indulgences (1517). Five years after that, in 1522, Luther published his German New Testament—the first translated from the Greek and an edition that would become Tyndale’s model for an English counterpart.

After finishing school, Tyndale returned to his home in Gloucestershire, England to become a tutor. It was during this time that he was ordained as a priest and began to preach in the surrounding churches. What marked his preaching was his emphasis on the Scriptures. But the people were not used to this, nor were they well acquainted with the Bible. His preaching was so unusual that he was warned that, if he kept it up, it would eventually cost him his life—a prescient warning in hindsight.

But Tyndale persisted for, as he wrote later, he “perceived by experience, how that it was impossible to [es]stablish the lay people in any truth, except the scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue, that they might see the process, order and meaning of the text … which thing only moved me to translate the New Testament.” Already, he began to see the need for the Bible in the language of the people.

It was also during this time that he had his most famous encounter. He met a “learned man” who told him that “we were better without God’s law than the pope’s” to which he famously replied, “I defy the Pope and all his laws” and “If God spare my life ere many year, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough, shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.”

Rejection in London

As predicted, not everyone liked Tyndale’s preaching and he soon found himself with enemies who began to threaten his patron. So, he left Gloucestershire for London with hopes of securing the support and necessary license-to-print from the Bishop of London to publish a Bible in English from the original languages. By this time, he had already produced several translations of Greek classical works as a sort of proof-of-concept and he probably began his New Testament while in London. But it was to no avail.

After a year of failed attempts to secure a meeting with the bishop, Tyndale came to see that England was not welcome to his ideas. As he would say later, he came to see “not only that there was no room in my lord of London’s palace to translate the New Testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all England.” He left for Europe in 1524.

The time in London was not a waste, however. While there, he established crucial connections with a group of merchants who supported him and would continue to do so.² They would prove key to his success. As one writer says of them,

The merchants of London, mainly in the cloth and tailoring industries, were firmly entrenched in the Lollard movement first set in motion by John Wycliffe 150 years earlier, a movement which now was in touch with the German Lutherans and which, in defiance of English Church law, was crying out for a new translation of the Scriptures. Such men as these were to provide the finance and shipping that were crucial to the success of the enterprise, and that is how, in 1525, Tyndale found himself in Cologne and in the printing house of Peter Quentell.³

It is in Cologne that he first begins to print his New Testament.

The First Print Run

Printing began in 1525, but was interrupted when the printshop was raided by authorities. He seems to have reached only to Mark and, today, only part of Matthew survives in a single copy. But the door had cracked. For the first time in English, Matthew 7:7 read, “Ask and it shall be given you: Seek and ye shall find: Knock and it shall be opened unto you.”

Tyndale did not give up. He fled up the Rhine River to Worms—the same city where Luther had defended his own theology just five years before. There Tyndale started again, and this time succeeded. His second edition stands as the first complete English New Testament translated from Greek. Besides this, several features helped make it a success: it was small, attractive, and affordable.

It was half the size of his first attempt and a bound copy might cost just five days’ wages for a skilled laborer.⁴ Contrast that with a few centuries before, when a complete Latin Bible might cost fifteen years’ salary for the same man. A century before Tyndale, a copy of Wycliffe’s English Bible might still cost around two year’s wages.⁵ For the first time, the ordinary Englishman had a Bible he could understand—and afford.

Matthew 1 in Tyndale’s 1525 (left) and 1526 (right) editions. His 1526 edition includes chapter divisions seen in the right margin. Images are not to scale. British Library G.12179 and C.188.a.17.

Thousands were smuggled to England and sold and it was immediately condemned by the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall—the same bishop who had previously refused to host him. In October, Tunstall sent out a prohibition of the book, calling it “that pestiferous and most pernicious poison dispersed throughout all our dioceses of London in great number.” He had it burned at St. Paul’s Cathedral, an occasion at which he preached the sermon. Today, only three copies survive.

Capture

Despite the instant interest, Tyndale did not benefit financially from his new Bible. In 1531 he spoke to a friend of his poverty, his exile, his hunger, thirst, cold, danger, and absence from friends—all which he did with the hope to “do honour to God, true service to my prince, and pleasure to his command.”⁶

Despite the instant interest, Tyndale did not benefit financially from his new Bible.

But he remained undeterred. During this time, he published several theological works and finished his translation of the Pentateuch, published in 1530. But the opposition only grew. His most famous critic was Sir Thomas More who wrote no less than nine volumes against Tyndale, totaling nearly half a million words!⁷

By November 1534, Tyndale had finished a second edition of his New Testament in Antwerp where he was then living—still in exile from England. Like most Bible translators, especially in this new era of vernacular translations, revision started almost before finishing. Work on his Old Testament continued as well. He was, by this point, very Lutheran in his theology and is on record attacking the Catholic church’s theology, which he saw as nullifying the role of grace in salvation.

But his work would soon be interrupted for good. In 1535, a young man named Henry Phillips, who had left England in disgrace after gambling away his father’s money, feigned friendship and interest in Tyndale and his work. In a turn eerily reminiscent of Judas’s betrayal, he turned him over to the authorities for money. On May 21, 1531 Phillips tricked Tyndale into leaving his house and Tyndale was seized in an alleyway. He was taken to the castle of Vilvorde near Brussels. The charge was being a Lutheran. The sentence was death. During his year in prison, Tyndale was interrogated by the local Catholic theological experts, the goal being to solicit a confession to save his soul from hell.

Vilvorde Castle from an early engraving. Image source

As winter approached, he wrote what is his last and only surviving letter. Today, it is all that remains in his own handwriting. He writes,

I beg your lordship, and that of the Lord Jesus, that if I am to remain here through the winter, you will request the commissary to have the kindness to send me, from the goods of mine which he has, a warmer cap; for I suffer greatly from cold in the head, and am afflicted by a perpetual catarrh [nasal inflammation], which is much increased in this cell; a warmer coat also, for this which I have is very thin; a piece of cloth too to patch my leggings.

My overcoat is worn out; my shirts are also worn out. He has a woolen shirt, if he will be good enough to send it. I have also with him leggings of thicker cloth to put on above; he has also warmer night-caps. And I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening; it is indeed wearisome sitting alone in the dark.

But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency to be urgent with the commissary, that he will kindly permit me to have the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew dictionary, that I may pass the time in that study. In return may you obtain what you most desire, so only that it be for the salvation of your soul. But if any other decision has been taken concerning me, to be carried out before winter, I will be patient, abiding the will of God, to the glory of the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ: whose spirit (I pray) may ever direct your heart. Amen

As he prepares for death, Tyndale’s chief desire was still to get the Bible into English. What is especially remarkable about this letter is that, at the time he wrote it, he had no reason from the circumstances to be hopeful about his life’s work. His books were being burned, his house had been raided, the new Bishop of London was harsher than Tunstall. David Daniell says of this time that a “heavy curtain hung before him, through which he could see little or nothing.”⁸

One can’t help but think of the heroes of faith in the book of Hebrews of whom it is said, in Tyndale’s own version, “They all died in faith, and received not the promises: but saw them afar off, and believed them, and saluted them: and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Heb. 11:13).

Early in October, he was brought out, a chain placed on his neck. He was strangled first and then burned, but not before crying out his final prayer, “Lord! Open the King of England’s eyes.”

The depiction of Tyndale’s death from *Foxe’s Book of Martyrs*. Wikimedia

Legacy

His legacy was immense. We have already noted his contribution to the English language and to subsequent English translations. But perhaps most remarkably, it was within months of is death that his friend John Rogers printed, for the first time, a complete English Bible with all of Tyndale’s translation work: not only his New Testament and Pentateuch, but also his work through 2 Chronicles that many thought was lost during his arrest.

The initials “W.T.” at the end of the Old Testament in the “Matthew Bible” (1537). Image source

More remarkable still is that a copy of Roger’s Bible, printed under the pseudonym “Thomas Matthew,” was sent to the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer sent it on to King Henry VIII’s viceregent, Thomas Cromwell, with an endorsement saying, “I like it better than any other translation heretofore made.” From there, it was shown to the king and, amazingly, approved for use in England. Cromwell wanted a copy in every English parish.

In less than a year after his death, Tyndale’s dying words were answered. His own translation would be in the hands of the people in a Bible with his own initials stamped in large letters at the end of the Old Testament. The Lord had indeed opened the king’s eyes.

Conclusion

Tyndale’s life and work is a reminder of the cost that has been paid to have the Bible. Even listening to a copy being read could be punished by death in the flames. Today, our easy access to dozens of English translations can lead us to take the English Bible for granted. We can argue so much about the “best” translation that we fail to appreciate the fact that we have any at all. But, if the lesson of Tyndale’s life needs to be learned today, it is not the first time.

Tyndale’s life and work is a reminder of the cost that has been paid to have the Bible.

In 1570, John Foxe made the same point. He wrote in his Book of Martyrs about how the zeal for the Bible in the time before Tyndale should be a spur to Christians in his. “The fervent zeal of those Christian days seemed much superior to these our days and times, as manifestly may appear by their sitting up all night in reading and hearing; also by their expenses and charges in buying of books in English … some gave a load of hay for a few chapters of St. James or of St. Paul in English.” The lesson then is the same as today: “To see their travails, their earnest seekings, their burning zeal, their readings, their watching, their sweet assemblies … may make us now in these days of free possession, to blush for shame.”

If the “free possession” of the Scriptures was a reason to appreciate the Bible in Foxe’s day, how much more should it be one in ours?

The content of this article is also available as a video lecture. King Henry’s viceregent was Thomas Cromwell not Oliver Cromwell as an earlier version of this article said.