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William Tyndale And The 1526 English Bible: 500 years later

William Tyndale And The 1526 English Bible: 500 years later

Last updated on: September 8, 2026 at 10:04 am by Pastor Kelly M. Williams

William Tyndale And The 1526 English Bible: 500 years later 2026-09-08T10:04:27-06:00 Pastor Kelly M. Williams

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As a Southern Baptist pastor at Vanguard Church in Colorado Springs for almost three decades, it is hard to imagine a church world without an English Bible. | Image provided by author.

As an English-speaking person from the United States, it is hard to imagine an internet world without English.

As a Southern Baptist pastor at Vanguard Church in Colorado Springs for almost three decades, it is hard to imagine a church world without an English Bible.

Yet five hundred years ago the world did not have an English Bible. This is the world William Tyndale grew up in and chose to change by publishing the first printed New Testament in English in 1526.

As I write this article, I am seated at the William Tyndale House at Cambridge University in Cambridge, England. My wife, Tosha, and I are beginning preparations for me to study and to write and research the topic of Women’s Dreams in Antiquity at the University of Edinburgh in Edinburgh, Scotland, under the guidance of Professor Paul Foster. I intend to conduct an exhaustive comparative literary, socio-historical, and gendered framework study leading to a theological re-examination of Pilate’s wife’s dream in Matthew 27:19.

It is my hope, as a good English-speaking male Southern Baptist Pastor from Colorado, to clear the way for females who have been given divine dreams to advance the Gospel of Jesus Christ as told in the Gospel narrative of Matthew. I realize my SBC proponents disagree. They have politely asked me to go away. I can’t. I was made for this by God like Tyndale. I must see this through, that is, if I am going to be obedient to God’s call on my life and ministry.

Why did Matthew choose an unnamed Gentile woman to speak to a predominantly Jewish audience about faith in Jesus?

Why did Matthew choose the book end dream motif of the Wise Men and Pilate’s wife to convey the deity of Jesus through the Gospel of Matthew?

When you look back through history, the God of the Bible rarely tells His stories like we would tell them. Sometimes He reveals His whys and sometimes He leaves them in the shadows of history.

The “why” of God is rarely told in one generation or through the story of one person. Usually, He uses many people in many generations throughout history to weave a tapestry. William Tyndale was one of those many people and here I am seated at the William Tyndale House to begin my PhD journey exactly five hundred years after William Tyndale completed his primary purpose for being on planet earth.

William Tyndale was born in 1494. He was a brilliant English scholar, linguist, and priest who became a leading figure of the Protestant Reformation. He was born in Gloucestershire. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Oxford University. He was fluent in seven languages including Latin, Greek and Hebrew.

Tyndale’s family belonged to the rising class of wealthy yeoman farmers and clothiers. This background provided the financial means to afford a high-level education for him. Young William Tyndale had several career options due to his family’s wealth and his own elite education. In early 16th-century England, a Master of Arts from Oxford opened doors to the highest levels of professional society. Yet, like Moses, he chose to suffer with God’s people than enjoy the pleasures afforded him by his status. The calling of God on a person’s life is usually costly to the privilege that lies before them. The rejection of selfish pleasure or the refusal to stroke one’s own ego is usually the first evidence of a divine calling upon a person’s life. The truth of God rarely benefits the one proclaiming it at the benefit of those who receive it.

Tyndale’s choice to become an outlaw translator was a deliberate rejection of safer, highly lucrative career paths. He knew he would have to forgo personal pleasure to fulfill His divine purpose. Tyndale often commented explicitly on his divine purpose and the heavy physical and emotional toll it exacted from him. His letters, books, and private correspondence provided a vivid, firsthand look at a man who was acutely aware of his mission and entirely prepared to pay for it with his life.

Early on while working as a tutor in Gloucestershire, Tyndale became frustrated by the biblical ignorance of the local clergy. During a heated debate with a fellow priest, Tyndale famously vowed that if God spared his life, he would make sure a boy who drives a plow would know more of the Scripture than the priest did. This vow set the stage for the rest of his life and life work.

As I sit here at the Tyndale House exactly five hundred years later, it is not lost on me that this plowboy, son of a bi-vocational dairy farmer/SBC pastor from Kentucky, has been given a mission to fight for females to have a voice in God’s house as means of delivering the divine message to God’s people across the world. As a father of four daughters and the husband of one woman, it is my desire to use the rest of my life to advance a mission that is not primarily about me. I feel an authenticity with Tyndale.

Thanks to Tyndale, I can be on my 108th reading of my English Bible. I began this journey of reading ten chapters a day at Liberty University in 1989. I can’t describe to you in words what this many readings have done for my understanding of the plan of God found in His Word. I am beginning to see the matrix of the text. The synthesizing of the text in my mind’s eye has accelerated for me at a rapid pace the tapestry of His design. I am beginning to see the connections between the historical text, the stories through history, and the ever present calling the Father has placed on my life personally. What I, nor anyone, including Tyndale, cannot see, is how God will use these three in the future to advance His kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

Tyndale has now been in heaven for four hundred and ninety years. He only got to watch God use his English text on earth for ten years and that spent mostly in a prison before he was betrayed by one, he should have been able to trust. Much of his view of his purpose has been seen from heaven. I wonder how Tyndale feels about a plowboy from Kentucky reading an English text a hundred and eight times? I hope it makes him proud to know his sacrifice was not in vain. As I begin this PhD study on women’s dreams in antiquity, I hope if the world tarries, God allows my sacrifices for Him to be used by godly females five hundred years from now.

The remarkable thing about divine purpose is, we have no way of knowing what God’s intent is in the future compared with what we do now in the present for Him. And this is why history; God’s view of history is so important to our faith in Him. He knows why He asks us to do what we do and be who we are. He knows the delicate details of our existence that connects the next generation to what His intent is for all of humanity. He sent us here now to be the light of Jesus and to shine our lives by making sacrifices that will pave the way for those who will come after us.

I am so grateful for a man, who lived five centuries ago, who decided to fulfill his vow to make the Bible plain for Kentucky plowboys like me.

Tyndale viewed translation not as an academic exercise, but as a direct, spiritual imperative to rescue people from ignorance. Tyndale explained that his ultimate purpose was to reveal the true Gospel, which was hidden behind Church rituals. He wrote that he was moved to translate because he perceived it was impossible to ground laypeople in the truth without the Scriptures in their mother tongue.

Tyndale maintained he never compromised Scripture for personal gain or political favor, calling God to record that he never altered a single syllable against his conscience for all the riches or honor on earth. I feel the same way about my thirty years of efforts, readings, and study to rightly divide the Word of God regarding female teachers and pastors in the local church. You can read more about that here: https://www.christianpost.com/voices/biblical-conservatism-and-women-pastors.html

It is my hope that my efforts regarding women’s dreams in antiquity will come forth to free females to be all God intended for them to be in the communication of God’s Word to God’s people.

Tyndale lived as a hunted fugitive for twelve years, acutely feeling the sting of poverty, isolation, and danger. He detailed the severe human cost of his mission, noting his bitter exile, poverty, absence from friends, and constant peril. Writing from his freezing dungeon at Vilvoorde Castle in 1535, Tyndale described his physical deterioration, suffering from the cold, worn-out clothing, and weariness of sitting in the dark. Despite his desperation, his primary plea was not merely for comfort, but for his Hebrew study materials to continue his work.

I am so glad he did.

This plowboy from Kentucky, who has now pastored a Southern Baptist Church in Colorado for the past thirty years, sits at the Tyndale House and says, “Lord, make me like Tyndale. Give me the grace to sacrifice my life for those who come after me, especially females who are called by God to discharge the Word of God to God’s people.”

Like Tyndale, I may not see the revolution in my time, but maybe someday in 2526, God will use my efforts to encourage women to be who God made them to be and do what God has called them to do.

In 1526, the first complete printed English New Testament was produced.

In October 1536, Tyndale was convicted of heresy. He was strangled to death at the stake, and his body was subsequently burned. His famous last words were, “Lord! Open the King of England’s eyes.”

Within three years of Tyndale’s death, King Henry VIII authorized the Great Bible for public use in England, which was largely comprised of Tyndale’s work.

Tyndale’s precise, beautiful prose fundamentally shaped the English language. Scholars estimate that up to eighty percent of the King James New Testament (published later in 1611) was copied directly from Tyndale’s phrases, including famous idioms like “the powers that be” and “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

On this five hundredth anniversary of William Tyndale’s English Bible, thank you, William, for believing in the need for a plowboy to be able to read the Bible in English. May the Lord give me the grace to use that English Bible to give voice to females across the world called by God to take the truth of His Word to the people of God.

Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp, made Friedrich Nietzsche’s quote famous in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning. He quoted Nietzch, “He who has a “why” to live can bear with almost any “how.”

As Frankl, as Tyndale, so you and me now for the glory of God and the good of His people.

May the plowboys now make room for the plowgirls for Jesus; the future advancement of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is dependent upon it.

Blessings,

Pastor Kelly

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