Language is always changing. New words appear, old words vanish, and some expressions suddenly catch the public imagination. There is a theory called voice pilling; the idea that we may soon bypass keyboards altogether and speak whole articles, essays and books straight into machines. Whether that particular phrase survives is anyone’s guess. But it’s a reminder that language is never still. It is constantly being made, remade and carried forward.
Few people have given the English language more words with “stickability” than William Tyndale.
This year marks the 500th anniversary of Tyndale’s English New Testament, first printed in 1526. It is of significant historical significance as Tyndale believed the Bible should not belong only to priests, scholars and church authorities, but ordinary people; he wanted everyone to be able to hear Scripture in ordinary English. Before him English Bibles were rare, expensive, and usually based on the Latin Vulgate rather than the original Greek and Hebrew. Tyndale’s great ambition was that even “the boy that driveth the plough” should know more of the Scriptures than some of the clergy who tried to keep them from him.
The Tyndale Window at Hertford College, Oxford
Oxford has its own important link with this story. Tyndale studied at Magdalen Hall, the predecessor of Hertford College, in the early sixteenth century. He gained his BA and MA there and was ordained as a priest. Hertford College still remembers him today - its chapel contains a Tyndale window, and the college notes that his influence on English has been compared with Shakespeare’s.
Tyndale’s achievement was revolutionary. He was the first to translate the New Testament completely from Greek into English, and he also translated the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, from Hebrew. His New Testament was printed on the Continent in 1526 and smuggled into England, reportedly hidden in bales of cloth. Church authorities tried to hunt down the copies and burn them, but the words kept travelling.
The Tyndale Bible
And what words they were. Many phrases we still use today come directly, or very nearly, from Tyndale: “Let there be light”, “the powers that be”, “a law unto themselves”, “fight the good fight”, “the salt of the earth”, “from strength to strength”, and “the writing on the wall” are just some of the phrases we still see today. The King James Bible of 1611, often thought of as the great monument of biblical English, owed an enormous debt to Tyndale: Hertford College states that 90% of the New Testament in the King James Version was “pure Tyndale”. His genius was to make sacred language clear, muscular and memorable. Tyndale did not write English that was grand for the sake of grandeur. He wrote English that could be spoken, understood and remembered, which is why his phrases still form part of our everyday speech; they entered the bloodstream of the language.
But words are dangerous. In translating the Bible into English, Tyndale was not simply producing a book, but shifting power. If people could read Scripture for themselves, they could begin to think for themselves and no longer needed every religious truth filtered through Latin, clergy and institution. For that, he was branded a heretic. In 1535 he was betrayed, arrested near Antwerp and imprisoned at Vilvoorde Castle, near Brussels. The following year he was strangled and burned at the stake. His last words are traditionally said to have been: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” The irony is painful: within a few years the King authorised an English Bible - much of it based on Tyndale’s work.
Perhaps the story of Tyndale is not just a story about religion but a story about language, access and power. It asks who gets to speak, who gets to understand, and who gets to decide what words mean. New phrases may come and go. “Voice pilling” may vanish before it has properly arrived. But Tyndale’s words have lasted for five centuries because they did something extraordinary: they brought the divine into the language of ordinary life. In doing so, they helped shape not only the English Bible, but English itself.
In Oxford Corpus Christi College is hosting an interactive concert celebrating the anniversary on Friday 30th October, and Christ Church College has an exhibition called Translating the Bible open on Tuesdays 10am-1pm and Wednesdays 1pm–4pm until December 16th.
