The Life, Work, and Legacy of William Tyndale

This article is part of the ESV 25th Anniversary series. Tyndale’s Life and Works William Tyndale was born around 1494 into a world that, as he would later say, walked in darkness. People did not hear the word of God taught clearly in church; instead they heard Latin—a language most could not understand. Only an educated few could access or understand the Latin Vulgate Bible, and ninety years earlier the University of Oxford had banned its translation into English (a move echoed by a province of the Church of England). Tyndale, as it happened, was one of those educated few, attending the University of Oxford. Yet even there, he said, “they have ordained that no man shall look on the scripture, until he be noselled [instructed] in heathen learning eight or nine years.”1 However, the times were changing. This was, after all, the age of the Renaissance, when many were hungry for fresh ways of thinking. Behind the scenes, Tyndale and a number of other students at Oxford were questioning their formal education and even secretly studying the Scriptures. Then, in 1516, the influential Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus published his Greek New Testament, allowing students like Tyndale to com...