This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
2026 sees the 500th anniversary of one of the most consequential moments in English literary, not to mention political and religious, history: William Tyndale’s publication of his translation of the New Testament.
Tyndale’s act of translating the New Testament required considerable courage and self-sacrifice. The making of any English versions of scripture that had not been authorised by a bishop could result in the most extreme penalties, including being burned at the stake. Tyndale, who saw it as his life’s mission to “cause a boy that driveth the plough” to “know more of the scripture” than any clergyman, as he once famously declared, had to go into exile to undertake this work.
When the first copies of his New Testament printed in Worms started to reach England in March 1526, Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London, greeted it with rage. He declared it “pestiferous and pernicious poison”, and rounded up the city booksellers to watch impounded copies being torched outside St Paul’s.
Tyndale’s publication was an act of religious and political daring. In defiance of the church hierarchy’s insistence that unmediated public access to scripture would breed rank heresy, he made it possible for every individual to interpret scripture personally. In that scripture is also about the right order of society, his translation also sparked the development of political debate amongst the wider population.
Two years later, he released a tract which dealt with civil and religious government, The Obedience of a Christian Man, which included a discussion of whether one should resist or disobey a wicked ruler, and a consideration of the nature of nationhood — questions that would resonate down to the Civil War and beyond.
His translation was also an act of linguistic boldness. Even by the beginning of the 16th century, the English language was scarcely developed as a literary tongue. The poet John Skelton, despite writing in English, described it as “rude”, “rusty” and “cankered”, scarcely able to offer the writer “termes to serve [his] mynde”.
With such a “rude” language, it was a huge challenge for Tyndale to find the right register that would befit the word of God. Even though John Wycliffe had translated parts of the Bible in the 1300s, this was now little help as the language had evolved rapidly.
Tyndale was frank about the difficulty that faced him: “I had no man to counterfeit, neither was helped with English of any that had interpreted the same or such like thing in the scripture beforetime.” Tyndale had not only to grapple with an immature language, but also to sculpt from it a translation of scripture that would seem worthy to prelate and plough-boy alike.
David Crystal’s illuminating new book is primarily a forensic survey of Tyndale’s pioneering development of the English language both in his translation of the New Testament as well as in his other tracts. This is not the first time that Crystal, a distinguished scholar of the English language, has looked at the translation of scripture. His 2011 book, Begat, examines the impact of the King James Bible on the English language and culture. Here, he delves down into the work of Tyndale himself (which had a huge influence on the King James Version) to show just how original his response was to the linguistic problems he faced.
Tyndale’s work reflects both a personal linguistic creativity, and also an openness to using new developments in the common language of his time to serve both his biblical translation and his polemic writing. Crystal observes that the Oxford English Dictionary credits Tyndale with a huge number of first recorded uses of words, and that these are often formed in a manner characteristic of the period.
Tyndale creates compound nouns — birthright, landlady, seashore, stumbling-block, uproar — new nouns and adjectives by adding suffixes — childishness, longing, carnally, stewardship, effeminately, pottering — and also phrasal verbs: break through, dispense with, lay apart, set forth, draw into, stoop down.
He does not fear to draw from the idioms that might have been common amongst ploughboys and kitchen pages for use in the high realms of scriptural translation or theological debate. “Mark how he playeth bo-peep with the scriptures,” complains Tyndale of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, taking the nursery game better known now as “peep-bo” or “peekaboo”.
We likewise have “half an eye”, “go to pot”, “say the word”, and “what other thing doest thou make of God” giving us the contemporary phrase “What do you make of that?” He also gives us “good luck” as an interjection (although it had been used before in continuous prose): “Then said Leah ‘Good luck’ … ”
One of Tyndale’s as yet unsung achievements is his pioneering work as a lexicographer. Long before Samuel Johnson, or even Robert Cawdrey’s small 1604 “dictionary of hard words”, Tyndale was aware that the new words, names and even descriptions of biblical practices would require glossary and exposition.
Tyndale offered a number of tables explaining difficult words in his translations, naturally using alphabetical order (although it seemed to Cawdrey such a new idea that he felt the need to explain the concept to the reader). Tyndale explains etymologies, customs and sometimes even metaphors: “God is called a rock, because both he and his word lasteth for ever.”
One of the most striking parts of Crystal’s analysis is his exposition of Tyndale’s broader style. When one picks up a copy of, say, The Obedience of the Christian Man, with the text printed conventionally in continuous prose, despite the flair it shows in close extracts, it can seem heavy going, with long chapters, convoluted paragraphs and even sentences.
Crystal shows that Tyndale frequently does not see the sentence as the unit of complete thought in his writing, but that we should read his prose as a collection of much smaller clauses, almost as written speech. Crystal’s discussion of this will be eye-opening for those who find it difficult to deal with the prose of this period. It also forms the foundation for the later chapters of the book, which are a technical analysis of the frequently repeated claim that Tyndale’s translations formed the basis of around 80 per cent of the King James translation.
Crystal’s book is intended to mark the 500th anniversary of Tyndale’s New Testament, and it is a fitting tribute to him. But beyond this, it is unfortunate that Tyndale’s vast achievements have seen little public celebration this year. St Paul’s Cathedral (making some atonement for their burning of Tyndale’s work) is at least exhibiting one of the rare surviving copies of the 1526 New Testament, as is the British Library.
But given his contribution to our language, literature, politics, culture, even the idea of Englishness, he deserves far greater celebration. I would put him on the new banknotes instead of the proposed otters and beavers, even if he did complain about “filthy lucre” — another of his lasting coinages.
