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In the autumn of 1536,
William Tyndale was led from his prison cell,
in the castle of Vilvoorde,
to the site of his impending execution.
There a post had been prepared for him.
Tyndale was chained to the post,
strangled to death,
and then his body burned
before the onlooking crowd.
His crime?
Tyndale struggled to reconcile
the teachings of the church
with his own studies of the Bible.
William Tyndale died
with his faith intact
that the Bible
is the Word of God.
William Tyndale
was the first person to seek
to translate the Bible
from the original languages
into English.
Tyndale was born
in the late 15th century.
He was born
in the area of Gloucestershire
but had a chance to go to Oxford
and became a priest.
In the 15th century,
there was a lot of resistance
—the idea that the Word of God
could just simply be accessible
by the general people.
People knew the Latin Bible from church,
which was interpreted by the priest for them.
They never had direct access
to the Bible themselves.
Tyndale was not allowed
to do this translation in England.
He went to the Bishop of London
asking for his permission
to translate the New Testament
from the Greek
—the original text—
into English
but was not given that permission.
Such was the opposition
to Bible translation
that Tyndale later wrote
that there was
no place to do it in all England.
And so with the help of merchants
sympathetic to his cause,
Tyndale fled to Germany
where he could more easily work
on his English translation
of the New Testament.
By 1525,
his translation was complete
and ready to be printed.
The British Library in London
holds the answer
to what happened next.
Dr. Karen Limper-Herz,
a lead curator at the library,
is going to help us find out.
So we are looking
at a unique copy of the first edition
of Tyndale’s New Testament,
printed in Cologne in 1525.
The Cologne Fragment
is the only known copy
of what exists of Tyndale’s first edition
of the New Testament.
The fact that it is a fragment
shows that it was a dangerous thing to do.
The printer had too much to drink
and mentioned that he
was printing
this pro-Lutheran English New Testament
for somebody called William Tyndale.
The authorities found out about it,
and the print shop was raided.
Tyndale and his partners ran
—and this is all that survives today—
and they went down the Rhine
a bit further to Worms.
So the fact that they didn’t get much further
than part way through Matthew
is quite indicative
of how dangerous it was.
The first complete copies
of Tyndale’s translation
of the Christian Greek Scriptures
were finally printed
in the city of Worms in Germany
in 1526.
Around 3,000 or more
of these books were produced.
After leaving Germany,
Tyndale moved to Antwerp.
This bustling city
was ideal for Tyndale.
It had a thriving printing industry
and its busy port
made it easy for his books
to reach readers in England.
Professor Guido Latré
has kindly offered to show me
around the very streets that Tyndale
would have walked himself
some 500 years ago.
What he saw around him here
were ordinary people
having access to the Bible in Dutch.
He wanted the same
for his own folk in England.
If you wanted to smuggle Bibles
on a large scale into England,
this was Northern Europe’s biggest seaport.
You can’t easily smuggle
a big volume and a big format.
So tiny loose leaves
that were taken to places like this
—these underground cellars,
the warehouses—
and between the leaves
of larger books
that were not forbidden,
the tiny leaves of Tyndale’s translation
would have been hidden.
In London,
someone would have recognized:
‘Aha!
These are the stacks that are marked.
‘I must have a look at these
and find the loose leaves
of Tyndale’s Bible.’
There were about 30,000 copies
of Tyndale’s Bible available
by the end of his life.
This was a brave man
and a big man in terms of courage
and in terms of investment of time.
And the risks he took
are not to be underestimated.
William Tyndale was imprisoned here
in Vilvoorde,
just north of Brussels.
As he languished
in prison for over a year,
he no doubt contemplated the cruel death
that inevitably awaited him.
Tyndale is often renowned
for his influence on the English language,
but his work was more than
that of just scholarly ambition.
Tyndale loved the Bible.
Maybe it can be said of him
that he shared the feelings of the psalmist
who spoke of God’s Word
and said:
“How I do love your law!”
Despite intense opposition,
the Bible and the wisdom in it
survives to this day,
a faithful transmission
of the original writers’ words.
No wonder so many have placed
such value on the Bible.

They Valued the Bible—Excerpt (William Tyndale)