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The final revision of the Tindale translations was published in 1534, and that becomes the notable year of his life. In two years he was put to death by strangling, and his body was burned. When we remember that this was done with the joint power of Church and State, we realize some of the odds against which he worked.
For the Greek tongue agreeth more with the English than with the Latin, a thousand parts better may it be translated into the English than into the Latin." And when a high church dignitary protested to Tindale against making the Bible so common, he replied: "If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth a plow shall know more of the Scriptures than thou dost."
Packington was a friend of Tindale, and went to him forthwith, saying: "William, I know thou art a poor man, and I have gotten thee a merchant for thy books." "Who?" asked Tindale. "The Bishop of London." "Ah, but he will burn them." "So he will, but you will have the money."
Sir Thomas More and Erasmus were close friends, and More's Utopia and Erasmus's Greek New Testament appeared the same year, probably while Tindale was a student at Cambridge. But he came at a troubled time. The new learning had no power to deepen or strengthen the moral life of the people. It could not make religion a vital thing. Morality and religion were far separated.
In 1526 Tindale's New Testament was burned at St. Paul's by the Bishop of London; ten years later, 1536, Tindale himself was burned with the knowledge and connivance of the English government; and yet, one year later, 1537, two versions of the Bible in English, three-quarters of which were the work of Tindale, were licensed for public use by the King of England, and were required to be made available for the people!
Or ask Erasmus, who never broke with the Church: "What man of real piety does not perceive with sighs that this is far the most corrupt of all ages? When did iniquity abound with more licentiousness? When was charity so cold?" And, as a century before, Wiclif had felt the social need for a popular version of the Bible, so William Tindale felt it now.
The peculiar genius which breathes through it, the mingled tenderness and majesty, the Saxon simplicity, the preternatural grandeur, unequaled, unapproached, in the attempted improvements of modern scholars, all are here, and bear the impress of the mind of one man, William Tindale."
Neither was an independent work, but was made largely from the Latin and the German, and much influenced by Tindale. Coverdale was a Yorkshire man like Wiclif, feminine in his mental cast as Tindale was masculine. Coverdale made his translation because he loved books; Tindale because he felt driven to it. But now the way was clear, and other editions appeared.
So he translates them into German, a gigantic task; and this work, almost single-handed, is done so well that it becomes the standard of the German language, as the Bible of Tindale helped to form the English tongue; and not only so, but it has remained the common version in use throughout Germany, even as the authorized King James version, made nearly a century later by the labor of many scholars and divines, has remained the standard English Bible.
Putting the Bible into current English impressed these literary men very much as we would be impressed by putting the Bible into current slang. All this while, and especially between the time when Tindale first published his New Testament and the time they burned him for doing so, an interesting change was going on in England. The King was Henry VIII., who was by no means a willing Protestant.
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