Sample Academic Essay
Written as part of graduate work toward an MLitt degree in Shakespeare & Performance, this scholarly essay illuminates a colorful character of the English Reformation through a seminal document he left behind.
Document Analysis: William Tyndale’s Preface to Genesis
by Jack DesBois
2,189 words.
William Tyndale’s Preface to his English translation of the Book of Genesis is an exciting glimpse into the personality of one of the most significant contributors to the English Reformation. Tyndale (ca. 1494-1536) was the first published translator of the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament into English. His life’s work was highly controversial, resulting in his flight to the Continent and eventual execution as a heretic. In his Preface to Genesis, published in 1530, Tyndale explains the initial impetus for his earlier project to translate the New Testament (published in 1526) as well as the trouble he encountered on pursuing the project. The Preface is filled with wry humor and sharp-tongued condemnations of the religious establishment first in the English “country” (Gloucestershire, where he grew up and preached after his university education) and later in London, and it concludes with a pious determination to publish his English Genesis despite fierce opposition from religious authorities in England.
William Tyndale was born in Gloucestershire to a prosperous, landowning, wool-merchant family. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, where the lack of official scripture study compelled him to lead his fellow students in study of Erasmus’s Latin and Greek editions of scripture. By the time he returned to Gloucestershire to begin a career as a tutor and preacher, he was thoroughly immersed in Reformist ideas and began to discern his calling to bring scripture to the English in their native language - a task that benefited greatly from his affinity for languages (he was proficient in at least seven), his facility with rhetoric, and his fearless and forward attitude toward religious debate. 16th century martyrologist John Foxe records Tyndale’s alleged retort to a Gloucestershire preacher: “Maister Tyndale hearing that, answered him, I defy the Pope and all his laws, and said, if God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough, shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.” Tyndale was to prove true to his word.
While Tyndale does not go into detail in his Preface to Genesis as to the grievances he held against those with whom he tried to share his English scripture translations in Gloucestershire, he does recount his perplexity at the hostility showed him. He concluded, “This I suffer because the priests of the country be unlearned,” and, continuing with his characteristic poison-tongued sense of humor, “... therefore, (because they are thus unlearned, thought I,) when they come together to the alehouse, which is their preaching-place, they affirm that my sayings are heresy.” As he explains in his Preface, he therefore decided to travel to London. With letters of introduction, Tyndale sought an audience with Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London, “Whereupon my lord [the Bishop] answered me, his house was full.” After a year of finding only hostility in London towards his enterprise, Tyndale “understood at the last 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.” Thus frustrated in England, he left for the Continent in 1524.
Tyndale first attempted to publish his New Testament at a printshop in Cologne, but he was forced to flee the city when the shop was raided by the anti-Lutheran authorities part-way through the printing of his manuscript. Tyndale fled to Worms, and his incomplete Gospel of Matthew did make its way into circulation in England. In Worms, in 1526, Tyndale succeeded in publishing the first complete English translation of the New Testament. Copies were smuggled into England, where they circulated widely and received much hostile attention from religious authorities, including Tunstall, who claimed to have found over 2,000 heresies in the translation and led a crusade to burn the books and arrest their readers.
In his Preface to Genesis, Tyndale alludes to Tunstall’s condemnation of the translation, “in which they affirm unto the lay-people (as I have heard say) to be I wot not how many thousand heresies, so that it cannot be mended or correct.” Tyndale goes on to point out the hypocrisy Tunstall’s declaration implies:
… they have yet taken so great pain to examine it, and to compare it unto that they would fain have it … that they might with as little labor (as I suppose) have translated the most part of the bible. For they which in times past were wont to look on no more scripture than they found in their Duns or such like devilish doctrine, have yet now so narrowly looked on my translation, that there is not so much as one i therein, if it lack a tittle over his head, but they have noted it, and number it unto the ignorant people for an heresy.
Here Tyndale’s sarcasm is in full display, in service of uncovering the hypocrisy behind the motivations of his detractors. He points out that, though Tunstall makes a show of condemning Tyndale’s work on the basis of the alleged inaccuracy of the translation, the Bishop is not, in reality, concerned that the work is faulty but that it exists at all. If the inaccuracy of the translation were the fault, Tyndale facetiously argues, Tunstall could have corrected the inaccuracies with no more effort than that he took in vilifying the translation in the first place. In fact, Tyndale makes plain that he would like nothing better than to have his work revised and corrected by other scholars; he concludes the Preface, “I submit this book … unto all them that submit themselves unto the word of God, to be corrected of them; yea, and moreover to be disallowed and also burnt; if it seem worthy, … so that they first put forth of their own translating another that is more correct.”
On the contrary, Tyndale makes the audacious argument that the Catholic religious establishment is hostile to his work because it is in the worldly interests of this establishment to deny the English people access to scripture. Doing so, he writes, enables them to “keep the world still in darkness, to the intent they might sit in the consciences of the people, through vain superstition and false doctrine, to satisfy their filthy lusts, their proud ambition, and unsatiable covetousness, and to exalt their own honour above king and emperor, yea, and above God himself.”
It is no wonder, then, that by the time Tyndale’s 1530 Genesis, along with his translations of the other four books of the Pentateuch, were circulating illegally in England, King Henry VIII and his chief minister Thomas Cromwell decided that something needed to be done about the rogue translator, then residing in Antwerp. In 1531 Tyndale received the first of several emissaries from Cromwell, first offering him a place in Henry’s court (where Cromwell and Henry could keep a close eye on him), and finally seeking to arrest him. Tyndale would meet his end at the hands of the Holy Roman Empire, probably aided by England; in a plot worthy of a crime novel, Tyndale was lured out of his house of hiding in Antwerp, arrested, cruelly examined, incarcerated for sixteen months, and ultimately executed as a heretic in 1536. (As a respectful gesture to his scholarly status, Tyndale was executed by strangling before his body was burned.) His legacy was not to be quenched, though; Tyndale’s translations formed the basis of all subsequent Early Modern state-approved English translations of the bible, including King James’ Authorized Version. Tyndale’s heavily Saxon, relatively simple and accessible writing style would influence the great writers of the next century, including Shakespeare.
Tyndale’s Preface gives historians a glimpse into the mind of a 16th century English reformer who was driven seemingly entirely by religious, rather than political, convictions. He believed wholly in scripture’s conveyance of one simple Christian truth, and he believed in the English vernacular translation of scripture as the only way to make that truth available to all the English. He saw the established Church’s suppression of such an endeavor as proof of the Church’s corruption and wilful obscuring of the knowledge Tyndale believed it was the Church’s duty to impart. This crime, and no political posturing on his part, led him to make publishing an English scripture translation his life’s work. Pursuing his work made him first immensely unpopular in Gloucestershire (despite strong Protestant sentiment in the region), then blacklisted in London. His chosen path forced him to live in hiding in self-imposed exile from the country he loved and the king to whom he continually professed his loyalty. He finally made the ultimate sacrifice for his beliefs. This is not the biography of a man seeking personal or political gain through his actions.
Protestant reform was not a popular topic in Henry VIII’s court in the early 1520’s when Tyndale first committed himself to the Protestant cause; rather, the increasing popularity of reform in England in the 1530’s is largely attributed to Tyndale’s illegal publishing of scripture translations and reformist tracts. By the time Henry had committed to severing ties with Rome, Tyndale had gone into hiding on the Continent, and Henry and Cromwell were unable to coax the scholar back to the English court. Though Cromwell’s emissary initially offered him safety in England, it is unlikely that Tyndale would have been allowed to continue publishing - and his work in exile was making a difference in England. His writings and translations circulated widely, despite efforts by Bishop Tunstall and the Church to burn his books. Within a year of the scholar’s execution by the Holy Roman Empire, Henry completed Tyndale’s mission by authorizing Tyndale’s translations, compiled and edited by Miles Coverdale, as the first legal English language Bible and ordering its placement in every English church. Tyndale’s religious zeal ultimately bore fruit, even if he did not live to see it.
The Preface to Tyndale’s Genesis, then, is a very human example of how deeply felt the religious controversies of the time were for many in England. While Henry’s break from Rome was arguably driven by political issues of royal succession (or even issues of personal romance) more than religious convictions, his religious policy did reflect doctrinal clashes that were greater than life-or-death for many. Tyndale’s writing is a first-hand account of his experiences and thus must be weighed with an appropriate level of bias; he would naturally endeavor to paint himself in a pious light in the preface to a scripture translation. The extant biographical facts about Tyndale, however, do seem to match up to his professed convictions, even after sifting out the layer of myth John Foxe would add to his story a generation later.
It is particularly fascinating to examine Tyndale’s balancing of self-confidence with Christian humility in his Preface. He takes a great deal of effort to explain, unapologetically and even harshly, his grievance and his mission, leaving no doubt of his own self-conviction. In his conclusion, though, he seeks to balance what might be construed as a headstrong voice with one espousing a humility of a very Christian nature. The work he is doing, he implies, is God’s own work, not Tyndale’s, and the completion of that work does not necessarily depend on a Tyndale scripture translation. He acknowledges that his work will necessarily be flawed, perhaps even enough to justify burning it. But he is doing what he can to make what he views as the truth of scripture available to all England, and he exhorts his fellow scholars to follow suit.
In the end, the first authorized English language bible was, mostly, a Tyndale translation, as were subsequent bibles for the next century. Even the Authorized Version commissioned by King James in 1607, a central text of English language culture to this day, owes a great deal of its language and phrasing to Tyndale. The first page of Tyndale’s Book of Genesis contains surprisingly few deviations from the famous translation that followed almost a century later; the iconic phrase, “God said: let there be light, and there was light, and God saw the light that it was good,” differs only in spelling and punctuation between the two texts. Tyndale set an enduring precedent in the quality and style of his translation. His love of the English language is evident in his preference for Saxon rather than Romance words. The resulting translation is simpler, more accessible and, for the general English reader, more powerful than one relying on the then-standard Latin translations. Indeed, Tyndale made a point to go back to the original Hebrew of the Old Testament rather than translating from Latin translations; he was the first scholar to attempt translation from Hebrew to English, and he was pleasantly surprised at the relative compatibility between the two languages. Bible readers for the past 500 years have benefited from his veneration of the English language and desire to write a translation accessible to all literate English men and women. This desire and other insights gleaned from his Preface to Genesis about his religious convictions, his persuasive and sharp-edged rhetoric, and his humility go a long way toward explaining the enduring nature of Tyndale’s work.
Works Consulted
The Acts and Monuments Online, www.johnfoxe.org/index.php?realm=text&gototype=&edition=1563&pageid=570&anchor=plough#kw.
Voynich Manuscript | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, beinecke.library.yale.edu/modal/photo-album/26137.
Bucholz, Robert, and Newton Key. Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History, 2nd Edition. John Wiley & Sons, 2009.
Carroll, Robert P., and Stephen Prickett. The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Daniell, David. "Tyndale, William (c. 1494–1536), translator of the Bible and religious reformer." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. May 19, 2011. Oxford University Press,. Date of access 10 Feb. 2019, <http://proxy.marybaldwin.edu:2124/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-27947>
Douglas, David Charles, et al. English Historical Documents. Routledge, 1956.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation. Penguin Books, 2005.
by Jack DesBois
2,189 words.
William Tyndale’s Preface to his English translation of the Book of Genesis is an exciting glimpse into the personality of one of the most significant contributors to the English Reformation. Tyndale (ca. 1494-1536) was the first published translator of the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament into English. His life’s work was highly controversial, resulting in his flight to the Continent and eventual execution as a heretic. In his Preface to Genesis, published in 1530, Tyndale explains the initial impetus for his earlier project to translate the New Testament (published in 1526) as well as the trouble he encountered on pursuing the project. The Preface is filled with wry humor and sharp-tongued condemnations of the religious establishment first in the English “country” (Gloucestershire, where he grew up and preached after his university education) and later in London, and it concludes with a pious determination to publish his English Genesis despite fierce opposition from religious authorities in England.
William Tyndale was born in Gloucestershire to a prosperous, landowning, wool-merchant family. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, where the lack of official scripture study compelled him to lead his fellow students in study of Erasmus’s Latin and Greek editions of scripture. By the time he returned to Gloucestershire to begin a career as a tutor and preacher, he was thoroughly immersed in Reformist ideas and began to discern his calling to bring scripture to the English in their native language - a task that benefited greatly from his affinity for languages (he was proficient in at least seven), his facility with rhetoric, and his fearless and forward attitude toward religious debate. 16th century martyrologist John Foxe records Tyndale’s alleged retort to a Gloucestershire preacher: “Maister Tyndale hearing that, answered him, I defy the Pope and all his laws, and said, if God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough, shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.” Tyndale was to prove true to his word.
While Tyndale does not go into detail in his Preface to Genesis as to the grievances he held against those with whom he tried to share his English scripture translations in Gloucestershire, he does recount his perplexity at the hostility showed him. He concluded, “This I suffer because the priests of the country be unlearned,” and, continuing with his characteristic poison-tongued sense of humor, “... therefore, (because they are thus unlearned, thought I,) when they come together to the alehouse, which is their preaching-place, they affirm that my sayings are heresy.” As he explains in his Preface, he therefore decided to travel to London. With letters of introduction, Tyndale sought an audience with Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London, “Whereupon my lord [the Bishop] answered me, his house was full.” After a year of finding only hostility in London towards his enterprise, Tyndale “understood at the last 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.” Thus frustrated in England, he left for the Continent in 1524.
Tyndale first attempted to publish his New Testament at a printshop in Cologne, but he was forced to flee the city when the shop was raided by the anti-Lutheran authorities part-way through the printing of his manuscript. Tyndale fled to Worms, and his incomplete Gospel of Matthew did make its way into circulation in England. In Worms, in 1526, Tyndale succeeded in publishing the first complete English translation of the New Testament. Copies were smuggled into England, where they circulated widely and received much hostile attention from religious authorities, including Tunstall, who claimed to have found over 2,000 heresies in the translation and led a crusade to burn the books and arrest their readers.
In his Preface to Genesis, Tyndale alludes to Tunstall’s condemnation of the translation, “in which they affirm unto the lay-people (as I have heard say) to be I wot not how many thousand heresies, so that it cannot be mended or correct.” Tyndale goes on to point out the hypocrisy Tunstall’s declaration implies:
… they have yet taken so great pain to examine it, and to compare it unto that they would fain have it … that they might with as little labor (as I suppose) have translated the most part of the bible. For they which in times past were wont to look on no more scripture than they found in their Duns or such like devilish doctrine, have yet now so narrowly looked on my translation, that there is not so much as one i therein, if it lack a tittle over his head, but they have noted it, and number it unto the ignorant people for an heresy.
Here Tyndale’s sarcasm is in full display, in service of uncovering the hypocrisy behind the motivations of his detractors. He points out that, though Tunstall makes a show of condemning Tyndale’s work on the basis of the alleged inaccuracy of the translation, the Bishop is not, in reality, concerned that the work is faulty but that it exists at all. If the inaccuracy of the translation were the fault, Tyndale facetiously argues, Tunstall could have corrected the inaccuracies with no more effort than that he took in vilifying the translation in the first place. In fact, Tyndale makes plain that he would like nothing better than to have his work revised and corrected by other scholars; he concludes the Preface, “I submit this book … unto all them that submit themselves unto the word of God, to be corrected of them; yea, and moreover to be disallowed and also burnt; if it seem worthy, … so that they first put forth of their own translating another that is more correct.”
On the contrary, Tyndale makes the audacious argument that the Catholic religious establishment is hostile to his work because it is in the worldly interests of this establishment to deny the English people access to scripture. Doing so, he writes, enables them to “keep the world still in darkness, to the intent they might sit in the consciences of the people, through vain superstition and false doctrine, to satisfy their filthy lusts, their proud ambition, and unsatiable covetousness, and to exalt their own honour above king and emperor, yea, and above God himself.”
It is no wonder, then, that by the time Tyndale’s 1530 Genesis, along with his translations of the other four books of the Pentateuch, were circulating illegally in England, King Henry VIII and his chief minister Thomas Cromwell decided that something needed to be done about the rogue translator, then residing in Antwerp. In 1531 Tyndale received the first of several emissaries from Cromwell, first offering him a place in Henry’s court (where Cromwell and Henry could keep a close eye on him), and finally seeking to arrest him. Tyndale would meet his end at the hands of the Holy Roman Empire, probably aided by England; in a plot worthy of a crime novel, Tyndale was lured out of his house of hiding in Antwerp, arrested, cruelly examined, incarcerated for sixteen months, and ultimately executed as a heretic in 1536. (As a respectful gesture to his scholarly status, Tyndale was executed by strangling before his body was burned.) His legacy was not to be quenched, though; Tyndale’s translations formed the basis of all subsequent Early Modern state-approved English translations of the bible, including King James’ Authorized Version. Tyndale’s heavily Saxon, relatively simple and accessible writing style would influence the great writers of the next century, including Shakespeare.
Tyndale’s Preface gives historians a glimpse into the mind of a 16th century English reformer who was driven seemingly entirely by religious, rather than political, convictions. He believed wholly in scripture’s conveyance of one simple Christian truth, and he believed in the English vernacular translation of scripture as the only way to make that truth available to all the English. He saw the established Church’s suppression of such an endeavor as proof of the Church’s corruption and wilful obscuring of the knowledge Tyndale believed it was the Church’s duty to impart. This crime, and no political posturing on his part, led him to make publishing an English scripture translation his life’s work. Pursuing his work made him first immensely unpopular in Gloucestershire (despite strong Protestant sentiment in the region), then blacklisted in London. His chosen path forced him to live in hiding in self-imposed exile from the country he loved and the king to whom he continually professed his loyalty. He finally made the ultimate sacrifice for his beliefs. This is not the biography of a man seeking personal or political gain through his actions.
Protestant reform was not a popular topic in Henry VIII’s court in the early 1520’s when Tyndale first committed himself to the Protestant cause; rather, the increasing popularity of reform in England in the 1530’s is largely attributed to Tyndale’s illegal publishing of scripture translations and reformist tracts. By the time Henry had committed to severing ties with Rome, Tyndale had gone into hiding on the Continent, and Henry and Cromwell were unable to coax the scholar back to the English court. Though Cromwell’s emissary initially offered him safety in England, it is unlikely that Tyndale would have been allowed to continue publishing - and his work in exile was making a difference in England. His writings and translations circulated widely, despite efforts by Bishop Tunstall and the Church to burn his books. Within a year of the scholar’s execution by the Holy Roman Empire, Henry completed Tyndale’s mission by authorizing Tyndale’s translations, compiled and edited by Miles Coverdale, as the first legal English language Bible and ordering its placement in every English church. Tyndale’s religious zeal ultimately bore fruit, even if he did not live to see it.
The Preface to Tyndale’s Genesis, then, is a very human example of how deeply felt the religious controversies of the time were for many in England. While Henry’s break from Rome was arguably driven by political issues of royal succession (or even issues of personal romance) more than religious convictions, his religious policy did reflect doctrinal clashes that were greater than life-or-death for many. Tyndale’s writing is a first-hand account of his experiences and thus must be weighed with an appropriate level of bias; he would naturally endeavor to paint himself in a pious light in the preface to a scripture translation. The extant biographical facts about Tyndale, however, do seem to match up to his professed convictions, even after sifting out the layer of myth John Foxe would add to his story a generation later.
It is particularly fascinating to examine Tyndale’s balancing of self-confidence with Christian humility in his Preface. He takes a great deal of effort to explain, unapologetically and even harshly, his grievance and his mission, leaving no doubt of his own self-conviction. In his conclusion, though, he seeks to balance what might be construed as a headstrong voice with one espousing a humility of a very Christian nature. The work he is doing, he implies, is God’s own work, not Tyndale’s, and the completion of that work does not necessarily depend on a Tyndale scripture translation. He acknowledges that his work will necessarily be flawed, perhaps even enough to justify burning it. But he is doing what he can to make what he views as the truth of scripture available to all England, and he exhorts his fellow scholars to follow suit.
In the end, the first authorized English language bible was, mostly, a Tyndale translation, as were subsequent bibles for the next century. Even the Authorized Version commissioned by King James in 1607, a central text of English language culture to this day, owes a great deal of its language and phrasing to Tyndale. The first page of Tyndale’s Book of Genesis contains surprisingly few deviations from the famous translation that followed almost a century later; the iconic phrase, “God said: let there be light, and there was light, and God saw the light that it was good,” differs only in spelling and punctuation between the two texts. Tyndale set an enduring precedent in the quality and style of his translation. His love of the English language is evident in his preference for Saxon rather than Romance words. The resulting translation is simpler, more accessible and, for the general English reader, more powerful than one relying on the then-standard Latin translations. Indeed, Tyndale made a point to go back to the original Hebrew of the Old Testament rather than translating from Latin translations; he was the first scholar to attempt translation from Hebrew to English, and he was pleasantly surprised at the relative compatibility between the two languages. Bible readers for the past 500 years have benefited from his veneration of the English language and desire to write a translation accessible to all literate English men and women. This desire and other insights gleaned from his Preface to Genesis about his religious convictions, his persuasive and sharp-edged rhetoric, and his humility go a long way toward explaining the enduring nature of Tyndale’s work.
Works Consulted
The Acts and Monuments Online, www.johnfoxe.org/index.php?realm=text&gototype=&edition=1563&pageid=570&anchor=plough#kw.
Voynich Manuscript | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, beinecke.library.yale.edu/modal/photo-album/26137.
Bucholz, Robert, and Newton Key. Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History, 2nd Edition. John Wiley & Sons, 2009.
Carroll, Robert P., and Stephen Prickett. The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Daniell, David. "Tyndale, William (c. 1494–1536), translator of the Bible and religious reformer." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. May 19, 2011. Oxford University Press,. Date of access 10 Feb. 2019, <http://proxy.marybaldwin.edu:2124/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-27947>
Douglas, David Charles, et al. English Historical Documents. Routledge, 1956.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation. Penguin Books, 2005.