The Ploughboy’s Bible

“Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” — Psalm 119:105 (KJV)

William Tyndale was a brilliant English scholar who knew several languages. In the 1520s it was still illegal in England to translate the Bible into English without the church’s permission. Tyndale believed that was a disaster, and he got into an argument with a learned churchman about it.

At one point the churchman said something shocking: “We were better to be without God’s laws than the pope’s.” Tyndale was furious. Foxe says he replied that if God spared his life, “ere many years he would cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than he did.”

That was his life’s goal: a Bible that an ordinary farm boy could read and understand. He couldn’t do it safely in England, so he left, and worked in hiding in Germany and the Low Countries. He translated the New Testament from the original Greek into clear, beautiful English, and printed copies were smuggled into England, where the authorities burned every copy they could find.

He was eventually betrayed by Henry Philips, an Englishman who made friends with him in Antwerp, and arrested and imprisoned in a castle at Vilvorde for a year and a half. Even there, people noticed his life. Foxe says the people who guarded him reported that “if he were not a good Christian man, they knew not whom they might take to be one,” and it is said he led his jailer and the jailer’s daughter to faith.

In 1536 he was condemned and put to death. His last words were a prayer:

“Lord! open the king of England’s eyes.”

Not a curse on his enemies. A prayer for the king who had opposed him. And within a few years, the king of England did allow an English Bible to be placed in every church, and much of it was Tyndale’s translation. Many of the phrases you know from the Bible in English, like “Let there be light” and “the powers that be,” come from him.

Tyndale also said this about his work: “I never altered one syllable of God’s Word against my conscience, nor would do this day, if all that is in earth, whether it be honor, pleasure, or riches, might be given me.” He handled God’s word with deep respect, because he knew what it was worth.

The Bible on your shelf or phone was paid for in part by men like Tyndale. The best way to honour that is to read it.

One thing to do this week: pick a book of the Bible you have never read all the way through, perhaps Mark or James, and read the whole thing this week, a little each day. You are the ploughboy Tyndale had in mind.