The Obedience of a Christian Man

WILLIAM TYNDALE was born in Gloucestershire in 1494. He spent over ten years at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and may then have gone on to Cambridge. By the early 1520s Tyndale was back in Gloucestershire serving as tutor to the children of Sir John and Lady Walsh, for whom he translated Erasmus’s Enchiridion. He was ordained priest. Using Erasmus’s newly-printed Greek text, Tyndale began to translate the New Testament into English, at that time a forbidden, heretical undertaking. Having failed in an attempt to gain the support of the Bishop of London for his endeavours to print an English New Testament for the first time, he left England for Germany in about 1524. In Cologne in 1525 his printing was stopped by the authorities. In 1526, Tyndale, now living in Worms, printed his English translation of the New Testament, which was smuggled into England in bales of cloth. It was swiftly denounced in Britain as heretical and many copies were burned. In Antwerp in 1530, having by then learnt Hebrew (impossible in England), he produced his Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament), which, like his other works, was then smuggled into Britain. His knowledge of Hebrew also lay behind his revised edition of the New Testament in 1534, this time including prologues and notes. In May 1535, having completed his translation of the remainder of the Old Testament historical books, Tyndale was tricked into arrest and imprisoned in Vilvoorde Castle near Brussels. He was interrogated by Catholic heresy-hunters for sixteen months. Denounced as a heretic, he was passed to the secular authorities, and, on 6 October 1536, having been stripped of his priesthood, he was publicly strangled and burned.

His treatise The Obedience of a Christian Man was first printed in Antwerp in October 1528. In it he set down the religious principles that made it one of the most important books of the first phase of the English Reformation. His Parable of the Wicked Mammon, published earlier that same year, and other books, strongly influenced English religious life. Seventy-five years after his death, his translation of the New Testament was taken almost unchanged, and what he had translated of the Old Testament only slightly altered, into the King James Version (the ‘Authorized Version’).

DAVID DANIELL is Emeritus Professor in the University of London, and Honorary Fellow of Hertford College Oxford. He read English, and then Theology, at Oxford. His Ph.D., in Shakespeare, is from London. He has published extensively on Shakespeare (including the Arden edition of Julius Caesar), on John Buchan and on the English Bible. His editions of Tyndale’s New and Old Testaments and his biography of Tyndale were published by Yale University Press. He is Chairman of the Tyndale Society, which has members worldwide.

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ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

It is commonly said that William Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man, published in 1528, was the first, and the most important, book in the earliest phase of the English Reformation.

That is true – except that it does not take into account what had happened shortly before. In 1525, Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament, the first from the original Greek rather than from the church’s Latin version, and the first to be printed, was on Peter Quentell’s presses in Cologne. The work was stopped as heretical by the city authorities. The materials were confiscated. Some sheets of the Prologue and the translation as far as Matthew 22 reached England, and became the first printed Lutheran tracts in circulation in London.¹ A year later, in 1526 and in Worms, Tyndale successfully saw through the press of Peter Schoeffer his complete New Testament, this time without Prologue or notes. Several thousand of these small books were smuggled into England in bales of cloth. This English New Testament, in its accuracy, simplicity and grace, has been the foundation of most English versions that followed. It gave English readers and hearers at every social level full access to the whole of New Testament theology, without restriction or intermediary. That access, building on the Lollard movement which had been continuously active during the hundred and fifty years before Tyndale, was the first significant popular ‘Protestant’ development in the British Isles.²

It is in the light of the sudden availability of the New Testament in English that Tyndale’s books must be seen. Tyndale’s Obedience was first printed in Antwerp on 2 October 1528, but it was not his first large essay. Five months before, on 8 May 1528, the same Antwerp press had produced Tyndale’s The Parable of the Wicked Mammon. (The parable referred to is known to us as ‘The Unjust Steward’, Luke 16.) It is Tyndale’s declaration of the New Testament teaching – as the first line of the first leaf has it (there is no title page): That faith the mother of all good works justifieth us, before we can bring forth any good work’. Although this is what the New Testament teaches, in 1528 it was startling, strange – and heretical, as thought to be developed from Luther. But Tyndale’s pages are rich with New Testament quotations in English, effectively making scripture speak for itself. Good works are necessary, but follow faith as the fruit comes from the tree.Mammon(riches) is wicked ‘principally because it is not bestowed unto our neighbour’s need’. Tyndale’s new vision of the oldest roots of Christian life is central also to the Obedience, which runs alongside and overlaps Mammon, as will be seen. Mammon is a thoughtful working-out of the teaching of Christ, and to a lesser extent Paul, about such deeds as should follow faith. It is a systematic analysis of what ordinary Christian living should be, entirely according to what the New Testament (and not the church) says – and says in English. Tyndale writes for inquiring believers on, for example, fasting, watching, prayer, almsgiving (not just how much to donate; Christ teaches that ‘everyman is other’s debtor since love maketh all things common’ – Christian society is still trying to catch up with that). A low-key book in appearance, it was revolutionary. Circulating secretly in England, it was soon officially banned. It continued to be widely read in spite of severe interrogations and punishments.

The Obedience of a Christian Man is on a larger scale than Mammon. As the title declares, Tyndale looks, again systematically, at English social and political life through New Testament doctrine. Martin Luther had written sixteen pages On the Liberty of a Christian Man, in November 1520. The third, and shortest, of his three treatises in that year – the other two were the better-known Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation and The Babylonian Captivity of the Church – it was dedicated to Pope Leo. The first sentence, ‘A Christian man is a free lord over everything and subject to no one’, became a rallying-call to his supporters. The second sentence, however, is ‘A Christian man is an obedient servant in everything and subject to everyone.’

There is, says Tyndale in his own book of Obedience, one social structure, created by God, to which everyone has to be obedient simply by being God’s creature – you cannot exist on earth without having a father and mother: he begins his treatise, movingly, with the moment of the reader’s conception. The God-given structure is a simple one of ‘degrees’ (that is, steps or ranks). From children obedient to parents, through the obedience of wives to husbands and servants to masters, to subjects obedient to ‘Kings, Princes and Rulers’ – already we see that what he writes will be strange to readers in the twenty-first century. Tyndale pauses at this point to explain the New Testament doctrine of social responsibility: what do you do if the King, Prince or Ruler is evil? He answers by out-Luthering Luther: you must disobey, but not resist, even tyrannical rulers, lest God in his wrath make it worse. Into the discussion of this New Testament question there cuts a long jagged point which has nothing to do with the New Testament at all: what do you do with ‘the Pope’s false power’?

Seeing obediences from below, however, from children and subjects, is only a way in. The book then turns round, going from ‘them that are under power and rule’ to ‘how the rulers ought to rule’ (p. 59). Discussion of the offices of fathers, husbands and masters leads briefly to the duty of landlords, and then, at length, the duty of ‘kings, and of the judges and officers’. These, in all the diversity of callings, are personally responsible to God. At this point the jagged problem again intrudes. Those whose place is to be pastors and teachers have left those vocations and become rulers. ‘To preach God’s word is too much for half a man. And to minister a temporal kingdom is too much for half a man also. Either other requireth an whole man. One therefore cannot well do both’ (p. 68). There has been laid across English society an alien structure, in no way authorized by the New Testament. This has had two effects: it has meant that the God-given rulers are interfered with at every moment, unable to be as God made them – good or bad – because they are controlled by the Pope and his prelates. And it has meant that there are two nations, not one. The split between church and state has given the former the authority both to intervene at every level and to be exempt from all challenge. Worse, the bishops themselves claim that the Pope is authorized by the New Testament, even created by Christ himself – a dogma challenged by Martin Luther. So Tyndale in a long digression attacks the Bishop of Rochester for a sermon, delivered at a burning of Luther’s books, stating just that.

At root is the clash over works, on which ‘the Pope’s false power’ ‘depends. As Tyndale had explained in his ‘book of the justifying of faith’, which is Mammon, the New Testament teaches as its strong main current that it is faith alone that justifies – this is what is unique about the New Testament. Good works should follow personal faith, but a Christian is not saved by performing ceremonies, paying money or listening to Latin. He is saved by the work of Christ in his undeserving heart, which favour then leads to his understanding and growth as he searches and knows God’s word.

Tyndale explains in Obedience that two things should happen. First, the unity of God’s kingdom should be declared. ‘The most despised person in his realm is the king’s brother and fellow member with him and equal with him in the kingdom of God and of Christ’ (p. 63). As always, Tyndale makes his own, and extends, the thinking of Luther. There should not be two kingdoms, one secular and one run by the Pope and the prelates. ‘The powers that be are ordained by God’. Secondly, England should wake up to the extent of the evil intrusion of pope and prelates into daily life, national and ordinary, and to the thoroughness with which the gospel has been distorted. Powerfully, Tyndale’s Obedience does both these things. Explaining that the Pope does the work of an ‘Antichrist’, Tyndale analyses at length the falsehoods that control the church’s teaching on the sacraments and other practices, and ends with a long attack on the source of all the distortions: the authorized, and by then traditional, misreading and misinterpreting of scripture by seeing everything as an allegory, making it mean whatever you want.

While scripture was entirely in Latin, few could object. Now, however, the Bible was arriving printed in English, and eagerly, indeed desperately, being read and heard. That changed everything. Tyndale did not write from himself. His Obedience is made of scripture. The Bible is everywhere, in the words and the phrases, in the stories quoted and the references made. Sometimes, as in the first paragraphs of the book, and elsewhere, they are very thick on the page, but they are never far away. Scripture, in English, abundantly known and quoted, is the authority by which Tyndale refutes error, whether the widespread corruptions of popes, bishops or clergy, or that sermon by the Bishop of Rochester. (To Fisher’s apparent error of Latin grammar, reversing the New Testament doctrine of faith, Tyndale responds with two pages of solid Pauline and Johannine theology in quotation: pp. 79–81.) Tyndale understood his authority: he was an outstanding scholar of the original, Greek, New Testament, and by 1528 it seems he was already reading the Hebrew scriptures in the original, almost the only Englishman to do so at the time.

As Tyndale writes, ‘the scripture giveth record to himself, and ever expoundeth itself by another open text’ (p. 172). For that to happen, of course, the whole of scripture has to be freely available. It is striking that while usually expositing and spelling out scripture passages, Tyndale also expects his readers to know the Bible well. How they did that when the Constitutions of Oxford of 1408, forbidding access to any Bible in English, were still so powerfully in force is a question even now awaiting adequate answer. By the last years of our twentieth century, the Bible printed in English has been for so long automatically available, and to many so familiar, that it needs saying strongly that in 1528 to know a Bible in English was both arrestingly new, and dangerous.

For Tyndale and all the Reformers, the Bible – the whole Bible – was the first and only authority for belief and practice. This needs to be re-emphasized here for two reasons. First, Tyndale is packing his text with the Bible not for affectation or ornament, as someone might use quotations from Virgil or Ovid, or (later) Shakespeare. Tyndale’s Bible is the living Word. To make whole paragraphs out of Bible sentences is for Tyndale to declare that what he writes is God’s truth – and God’s truth as it is now accessible to every reader and hearer of English. Secondly, the Catholic church for centuries had claimed another authority altogether. Since Tyndale in the Obedience spends many pages attacking what he finds as the false doctrine of the Bishop of Rochester in his sermon against Luther, we might conveniently quote that sermon to set out the standard Catholic doctrine:

A marginal note refers to the ‘Unwritten traditions left to the church by Christ and the apostles’. Another, beside a reference to the third-century theologian Origen on observances, has ‘kneeling towards the east, words, gestures, questions, answers in the sacrament’.³

The Reformers were absolutely against this. For them, the only authority was what was in the Bible – and the whole Bible, not selected texts. The whole Bible, they believed with passion, could interpret itself, particularly through the guidance of the Holy Spirit working to edify local congregations in the working-out of faith. So every man, woman and child should have access to the whole Bible in their own tongue, to read it or hear it read, for their own salvation. All the Reformers scorned the claim by the great hierarchical structure that was the church that it had an alternative, superior and secret authority stemming from what another marginal note in Fisher’s sermon calls ‘the traditions of the great Bishop Christ’ – especially as those traditions were a mesh of practices, observances, gestures, or whatever, which the Reformers saw had nothing to do with the New Testament and its central doctrine of justification by faith alone.

The second thing to recognize is that Tyndale was an outstanding writer of English prose: that is, prose in English, not, as characteristic of the early 1500s, in the vocabulary and heavily subordinated syntax dependent on Latin, on top of an uncertain form that was half Saxon and half Norman French. His Bible translations, of which his Gospel narratives, and especially the parables, are models, can be shown to have affected the general development of an English Plain Style in the decades that followed. In his Obedience, as everywhere in his writings, he used the tropes and figures of classical rhetoric. When Tyndale was young, this craft was freshly taught to English boys by Erasmus in his schoolbook De Copia. That book and that craft were in Latin. Tyndale made a prose in English. Remarkable enough in 1528, it still feels both effective and modern, crying out to be spoken aloud. See for example the paragraph beginning ‘To preach God’s word…’, p. 68; and the passages on extortion of money from the poor (pp. 91–4).

Tyndale had something clear to say, of course, which always helps. Part of the power of his prose comes from his wide landscape, dense with thought and life, rich with existential experience. In these pages is high theology and pastoral wisdom, from Paul and the Gospels. Here is much of the New Testament, and also the Old. Here are the Fathers, from Origen to Aquinas; the late medieval schoolmen, and the squabbling metaphysicians. Literature in England, and English history, are part of his picture. Above all, here in a broad unrolling tapestry is the contemporary church in so many of its practices, from pope to deacon, through bishop, priest, monk and friar, limiter and pardoner, and not all of them condemned. The national structure of civil law, too, from judges to ‘sheriffs, baily-errants and constables’ is set in the domestic structure of husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and servants. This daily life of England in detail is often a list of gross abuses of the common people by the church. This is the now neglected side of English life at the time. A powerful modern view has given us a picture of bewildered people in mourning for the loss of their beloved religious practices at the hands of a few noisy politicians who made the English Reformation.⁴ Tyndale, throughout his writings, is ruthless and thorough in his attack on the church o f which he was a priest. Spiritual leaders did not trust in God, or preach his gospel. They had been seduced at every level by worldly power. Internationally, popes and prelates successfully schemed to their own advantage, accumulating vast wealth at a huge cost in lives and livelihoods. Large numbers of ‘the spirituality’ were pursuing only their own comfort and power. In every town and village, a root of hypocrisy could be the clergy’s official celibacy – and the scriptures, it was being discovered, said that priests should be married (for instance 1 Timothy 3:2). At every level, abuses of power were a scandal. Powerfully expressed anticlericalism had a history in England from at least the time of Chaucer and Langland in the 13 80s. It reached print in England with Tyndale’s Obedience. His strong and extensive New Testament theology gives him a cogency in attacking the corruptions in the church o f his day that puts him well above other printed works that followed: for example The Supplication of Beggars (1529), attributed to Simon Fish, and even Robert Barnes in his short What the church is and Men’s constitution, both also of 1529. Tyndale is in a different league from the doggerel Rede me and be not wroth (1527), probably by Jerome Barlow and William Roye – the latter a former helper of Tyndale’s whom he was glad to lose.

Because almost all the English nation, including the priesthood, was ignorant of almost all the Bible, and nobody taught it, traditional religion had often become superstition. In a passionate early passage in Answer, Tyndale wrote:

In saying all this: giving laymen the Bible in English, pointing out that the church could err, Tyndale’s Obedience, like his Mammon, was forbidden, and read dangerously in secret.

Stylistically, his immersion in scripture means that it is easy to see that the writer of the Obedience has translated the New Testament. When he is not directly quoting he is often, or even usually, echoing biblical words and phrases. This is a very different thing from the ‘biblical rhythms’ sometimes noted in modern writers, where ‘the + noun + of + the + noun’ forms (‘the fish of the sea’, ‘the fowls of the air’), which are English shapes made from Hebrew, are used for sentimental effect. Tyndale’s ‘biblical rhythms’ are not surface imitation so much as the result of Bible forms having seeped far down into his mind. Moreover, Tyndale’s ‘biblical’ sentences are made of hard theological truths. Consider the following, from Tyndale’s section ‘Of anoiling’:

The words ‘God’, ‘promise’ and ‘anchor’ echo Hebrews 6:17–19; ‘saveth’ and ‘in all temptations’ pick up statements in Hebrews before (3:8, 5:7), and after (7:25). ‘If all the world be against us’ echoes Romans 8:31. The ‘word/world’ opposition is from John 1 and elsewhere. And so on – the same tracing of the origins of the vocabulary can be done throughout the passage, as throughout many paragraphs of the book. But look also at the forms of the sentences. They are founded on New Testament Greek syntax. In Greek the verb is paramount: ‘If the world kill us’ (unlike Latin, where the noun dominates, producing as it might be ‘cause our deaths’). New Testament Greek syntax, like English, is a basic subject–verb–object sequence, ‘The promise of God is the anchor’, without elaborate subordination which Latin prefers. The three sentences beginning with ‘If’ imitate many sentences by Paul – see 1 Corinthians 15:12–19, to look no further. ‘Hereby seest thou…’ reflects forms in 1 John 3 and 4 (for example,1 John 4:13, ‘Hereby know we, that we dwell in him…’). More than this: the pattern of logical argument, saying ‘this, therefore that’ or ‘not this, that’, or ‘this, then not that’, ringingly echoes Paul, as that same passage from 1 Corinthians 15 shows.

Though in the notes that follow the text in this edition many of his phrases are given their scripture origin, it would have become tedious to try to locate in the Obedience – as in any book by Tyndale – every single New Testament word or phrase which is echoed. Occasional small discrepancies between his quotations and what appears in his own translations suggest that he is quoting from memory, which is not unlikely.⁶ And of course there are in his book long stretches of attack on corrupt dealings or superstitions or peasant suffering where scripture is irrelevant to his subject – significantly so, indeed.

Life

To understand his work better, and in particular this book of Obedience, we should know something of Tyndale’s life. He was born in Gloucestershire in 1494. He spent more than ten years at Magdalen Hall, Oxford (which later became Hertford College), where in the course of his BA and MA he learned the new, good, humanist Latin, and Greek, then newly being taught in Oxford. He may have gone on to Cambridge, where Greek had been taught by Erasmus. Though it seems unlikely that they met, that great scholar permanently influenced Tyndale in several important ways. It is probable that Tyndale is the author of the English translation of the Enchiridion militis Christiani (‘A Handbook for a Christian soldier’) in the course of which Erasmus argues that the scriptures in the vernacular should be available to everyone. Erasmus in1516 had published in Basel his Novum instrumentum, a ‘new instrument’ in the work of reforming the church from within. This was his own translation of the New Testament into Latin, a challenge to the church’s ‘common version’, the Latin Vulgate, which had been the only Bible the church had known, or permitted, since the fourth century. Erasmus’s translation was influential: but far more powerful in its effect on Europe was his printing of the original Greek alongside the Latin. This Greek ‘Textus Receptus’, as it became, is in some details flawed: but that the movers of reform throughout Europe could use an easily available Greek New Testament for translation into national vernaculars was effective in ways that remain incalculable. Luther led the way in 1522 with his German ‘September Testament’: by 1526 Tyndale had followed.

In the early 1520s Tyndale, back in Gloucestershire from Oxford and possibly Cambridge, and ordained priest, had served as tutor to the children of Sir John and Lady Walsh. His duties were light. His work with the Greek New Testament text sealed his vocation to bring that book to the English. To one learned clergyman at the Walshes’ table who remarked that ‘we were better without God’s law than the Pope's’, Tyndale famously retorted, ‘I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the scripture than thou dost.’ Reading any part of the Bible in English (that is, in the manuscript ‘Lollard’ versions from the Latin made in the 1380s, popularly ascribed to John Wyclif and still circulating), never mind freshly translating, were activities, uniquely in Britain, punishable by the severest penalties, including being burned alive. Needing a bishop’s permission, Tyndale left Gloucestershire to carry out his intentions. He took with him his translation (since lost) of the difficult Greek of an oration by Isocrates as a demonstration of his skill, and hoped to approach the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall (who had, incidentally, helped to find Greek manuscripts of the New Testament for Erasmus). Tunstall would not see him. Tyndale recognized that, as he wrote, ‘there was no place in all England’ for such work, and he left for Germany in about 1524. In 1525 he was in Cologne, and in 1526 in Worms, as we saw. In Britain, possession of a copy of his 1526 New Testament meant punishment. The Bishop of London collected all he could, and in a ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral, burned them.⁷ Tunstall himself preached a sermon denouncing Tyndale’s New Testaments as heretical. From these events we can date Tyndale’s more aggressive anticlericalism.

Probably in Germany, Tyndale learned Hebrew. In Antwerp in 1530 he produced his Pentateuch, again smuggled into Britain. These small volumes had prologues, woodcuts and some explanatory marginal notes, a few of them (no more) anti-papal. His Hebrew understanding meant that as he revised his New Testament, Tyndale became aware of the Hebrew affecting the Greek, a new insight at the time. This 1534 revision of his New Testament, also from Antwerp, now had prologues and marginal notes: the often-reported offensiveness of those notes is largely a modern invention, handed on by those who cannot have studied a copy. A greater number of these New Testaments survived, including one owned and inscribed by Queen Anne Boleyn.

Tyndale had printed his translation of Jonah, and already in manuscript was his translation of the Old Testament historical books, Joshua to 2 Chronicles, when in May 1535 he was tricked into arrest and incarcerated in Vilvoorde Castle, outside Brussels. Attempts from the English court to get him released were blocked locally. Leading heresy-hunters, principally from the Catholic University of Leuven, interrogated him over sixteen months: they confirmed him a heretic, and handed him over to the secular arm. On the morning of 6 October 15 36, having been degraded from the priesthood, he was led out before a grand assembly, strangled and burned.

On Tyndale’s death, John Rogers, Chaplain to the English House at Antwerp (and seventeen years later to become himself the first martyr under Queen Mary), gathered up all Tyndale’s translations, that is, his revised New Testament and half the Old Testament. Adding the rest of the Old Testament from the work of Miles Coverdale, Rogers had the whole Bible printed in 15 37 to carry forward Tyndale’s versions, even obtaining a licence from King Henry VIII. Tyndale the heretic could not be mentioned, so Rogers used the names of two disciples, Thomas and Matthew, to make ‘Thomas Matthew’s Bible’. The story of the succession of Tyndale’s Bible translations after this volume, through sixteenth-century versions, and even until today, does not belong here. It has to be understood, however, that Tyndale’s texts went forward, often little changed, as the foundation of all succeeding English Bibles, including the celebrated 1611 Authorized Version, or King James Version, of which the New Testament is 83 per cent Tyndale.⁸ Thus the wide dissemination across the globe for nearly four hundred years of that version has assured the transmission of Tyndale’s original translations, frequently taken over by King James’s scholars word for word. Tyndale has reached more people than Shakespeare.

Other works

Tyndale wrote a number of other books, all attacked in England and denounced as heretical. From Worms in 1526 came a development of his prologue to the abandoned 1525 Cologne translation, A compendious introduction, prologue or preface unto the epistle of Paul to the Romans. This small, slim book, of which one copy exists,⁹ is based fairly freely on the prologue to Romans which appeared in all editions of Luther’s German New Testament. Tyndale expanded it into the prologue to Romans in his own 1534 New Testament. The popular Reformation in Europe can be summarized as ‘people studied Paul’, whose Epistle to the Romans was the most important document for all reformers. That epistle dominates Tyndale’s further extension of the 1525 prologue into A Pathway to Holy Scripture of 1531. Tyndale published in Antwerp two other biblical commentaries, The Exposition of the First Epistle of John in 1531, and An Exposition upon the V, VI, VII Chapters of Matthew (that is, the Sermon on the Mount), in 1533.

Four more books came from Tyndale in Antwerp. The first, The Parable of the Wicked Mammon, also partly dependent on Luther, we have considered above. Two years after Mammon and Obedience, in 1530, Tyndale’s short book, The Practice of Prelates, ostensibly argued that Henry VIII could not divorce Catherine of Aragon. It is an attack on a historic European Catholic conspiracy, as he sees it, to manipulate princes and rulers everywhere to the prelates’ own advantage. A recurrent image is the pope’s ivy strangling a nation’s living tree. ‘Practice’ carries, as well as its meaning as the exercise of a profession, the Shakespearean meaning of scheming through trickery. In 15 28, the London lawyer Thomas More, who had been knighted in 1521 and was already a seasoned opponent of Luther in Latin, received permission by Cuthbert Tunstall to read heretical books in English. More found it in his heart to crush heretics, ‘if need be to burn heresy out of England with fire’.¹⁰ The first result was his Dialogue Concerning Heresies of 1529, in which some of the third book, with heavy hitting elsewhere, is More’s wholesale attack on Tyndale’s 1526 New Testament as a Lutheran book. To this Tyndale replied two years later, in 15 31, with An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue, in which, after an introductory essay, Tyndale replied point by point. More, who within weeks of the publication of the Dialogue had been made Chancellor, replied to Tyndale’s Answer the following year, 1532, with his endless Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer totalling (even unfinished) half a million words. More’s Apology and his Debellation of Salem and Bizance, both of 1533, still attacked Tyndale. Tyndale had made no further reply after his 80,000-word Answer. All More’s writings against Tyndale, almost three-quarters of a million words – frequently intemperate, as even his supporters, early and late, acknowledge¹¹ – can be boiled down to his objection to Tyndale’s translation of six words. In place of the standard ‘priest’, ‘church’, ‘charity’, ‘grace’, ‘confess’ and ‘do penance’ from the fourth-century Latin, deeply built in to the church’s practice for centuries, Tyndale from the original New Testament Greek gave ‘senior’ (later ‘elder’), ‘congregation’, ‘love’, ‘favour’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘repent’.¹² The difference between Tyndale and More was absolute and irreconcilable. More insisted that the church could not err in one jot or one tittle, and scripture had to be interpreted by the infallible church. Tyndale declared, from scripture itself, that scripture belongs to the whole body of Christian people, guided by the Holy Spirit in their congregations, and the activities of the church have to be based on, and judged by, scripture. Moreover, for Tyndale scripture can be, indeed has to be, reinterpreted in every generation. He speaks for all believers together in an open, expanding, Christian society.¹³ This is why he is still important. He was releasing theology, looking forward. As will be seen, his understanding of the scriptural view of the common life of Christians is still, at the end of the twentieth century, a challenge – and has been almost totally ignored.

Thus three strands should run through discussion of The Obedience of a Christian Man: that the book is rooted in scripture; that the book contains English prose remarkable for 1528; and that the book was part of Tyndale’s larger enterprise, breaking new ground in expounding the biblical Christian commonwealth, necessarily challenging the established order of the Catholic church.

The book

Like all Tyndale’s books, his Obedience is a small volume. It is octavo, measuring about five and a half inches by four, the size of smaller prayerbooks found in Anglican church pews. It was made to be held in the hand. It has just over three hundred cleanly printed black-letter pages with wide margins which are often empty: sometimes they have one or two (occasionally more) marginal notes. The restraint in Tyndale’s margins is important. After further editions following his death in 1536, some printed in London, the prolific London Protestant printer John Day issued in 1572 a new edition as part of his The Whole Works of W. Tyndall, John Frith, and Doct. Barnes, three worthy Martyrs… in double-column folio, with introductory matter from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (which Day also printed). It had some tiny variants in the text, and some new marginal notes obviously not by Tyndale. This version was the basis for the most used edition to date, that made by Henry Walter for the Parker Society in 1848.¹⁴ Walter not only added unauthorized notes (even some of those he marks ‘W.T.’ are misplaced), and coyly omitted a mild scurrility (see below, p. 138). Worse, he promoted single subheadings in the text to running heads over many pages, altering the emphasis: for example, his eleven pages headed ‘Against the pope’s false power’ would be better headed ‘Christian responsibility’. Worse, he silently emended, changing ‘to’ to ‘unto’ for example, ‘exempt’ to ‘except’, ‘stole’ to ‘stool’, ‘antetheme’ to ‘antitheme’, ‘chopological’ to (once) ‘tropological’ (thus killing Tyndale’s joke there), ‘mighty’ to ‘naughty’, ‘bells tink’ to ‘bellies think’, and so on. Worse still, he put into the margins Tyndale’s internal biblical references, giving the impression they were somehow secondary. Worst of all, he interfered with every phrase and sentence by introducing heavy Victorian punctuation. This rash of commas on every page, with many semicolons (not invented in Tyndale’s day) and the frequent lowering of full stops to colons (thus recasting sentences entirely), destroys the possibility of response to Tyndale’s phrasing and rhythms. The original Antwerp printer’s punctuation is erratic, but spare – not an impression a reader receives from Walter’s pages. Nevertheless we must be grateful to him, for without the three Parker Society volumes of all Tyndale’s works (and two that we now know were not by Tyndale) outside the Bible translations, any version of the Obedience and the rest would have been difficult for the general public to find. (A facsimile of the first 1528 edition has been available, without modern introduction or notes and in the original black letter, since 1977.) ¹⁵

At the end of Tyndale’s own 1528 edition, after fourteen pages of index and half a page of errata, the colophon reads, ‘At Marlborow in the land of Hesse The second day of October .Anno.M.CCCCC.xxviij by me Hans Luft’. There was a Hans Luft of Wittenberg, of course, who was Luther’s assiduous and wealthy printer: but ‘Hans Luft of Marlborow’ is an invention. Such a fiction was a frequent device of the printers of ‘Protestant’ books – another example is ‘Adam Anonymous, Basel’. The invisible printer ‘Hans Luft of Marlborow’ (his name means ‘John Air’) was until recently thought to have been Johannes Hoochstraten of Antwerp. He is now more plausibly understood to have been Martin de Keyser (‘Martin L’Empereur’), one of the main Antwerp printers of ‘Lutheran’ books, and the printer of Tyndale’s Mammon, Practice, Answer – and, as we now know, of his 1530 Pentateuch, as well as his 1534 New Testament.

The original 1528 title page of the Obedience calls, rather loudly, for comment. The central title block is reasonably straightforward. Where the author’s name might have been, the space is blank, not uncommon in books of the time. The woodcut panels bordering it, however, show little else but thirteen naked ladies. The bottom block has, scratched on, the Greek word χaριτες (charites), that is, the three Graces: not that that helps much, and a fourth is bathing in a fountain. The top block possibly shows them dancing before Apollo, the movement continued in the side blocks. Martin de Keyser, for his own reasons, used crudely locked blocks which had already, as frequently happened, passed from printer to printer. These rather shop-worn nymphs had already appeared round the titles of books in Germany as well as Antwerp, Catholic and Protestant, and would go on to decorate the titles of others – seven in all. There seems to have been no greater significance in their use beyond the supposed attraction of faintly fetching decoration.

On publication, the Obedience was strongly received in Britain. (About ten copies of the original 1528 edition have survived, out of a print-run of unknown size.) It appeared regularly, with all Tyndale’s other works, on official lists of banned books.¹⁶ John Foxe, in his Acts and Monuments, tells, for example, the story of James Bainham, a virtuous London lawyer, who was arrested, kept imprisoned at Sir Thomas More’s house at Chelsea, and tortured. The nine articles of his interrogation by John Stokesley, Bishop of London, printed by Foxe, conclude with his confession that he had ‘the New Testament translated by William Tyndale.’He also ‘had in his keeping… the Wicked Mammon, the Obedience of a Christian Man, the Practice of Prelates, the Answer of Tyndale to Thomas More’s Dialogue’ and books by John Frith and George Joye. ‘Neither did he ever know (said he) that Tyndale was a naughty fellow.’ After months in prison, and under great pressure (his wife had been imprisoned elsewhere, and their goods confiscated) he abjured and did public penance, and was allowed home. His conscience, however, would not let him rest: within a month he had recanted his abjuration, and the next Sunday after, he came to St Austin’s, with the New Testament in his hand in English, and the Obedience of a Christian Man in his bosom, and stood up there before the people in his pew, there declaring openly, with weeping tears, that he had denied God.¹⁷

He wrote a letter to the Bishop, was again arrested and, according to Foxe, interrogated further and ‘very cruelly handled’. On 1 May 1532 he was burned at the stake.

Foxe also possessed a manuscript, first printed by Strype in his Ecclesiastical Memorials in 1821, which told the romantic story connecting Tyndale’s Obedience, Anne Boleyn, and her husband-to-be, Henry VIII. It is corroborated by a history of Anne Boleyn published in the 1590s. Briefly, it tells how Anne loaned her personal copy of the Obedience to a young lady in her service, whose suitor took the book and was found reading it. Cardinal Wolsey confiscated it. Anne went to the king, who had the book restored to her. She then ‘besought his grace most tenderly to read it. The king did so, and delighted in the book. For, saith he, this is a book for me and all kings to read.’¹⁸

Structure

The Obedience has two preliminary sections (like later divisions, each begins with an illuminated capital letter). First is a preface entitled ‘William Tyndale other wise called William Hychins unto the Reader’, thirty-six pages long in the original, about a tenth of the whole volume. The tenor of this preface (pp. 3–25) is the double point that reading the scriptures (which everyone should be able to do) reveals the amazing power of God, and that the expositions of biblical faith on these pages are a personal address to each reader from ‘William Tyndale other wise called William Hychins’ – the author, who uses both his names, is not hiding. It is important not to disregard the bravery of Tyndale, and of other ‘Lutherans’ of the time like John Frith, in putting a name to work which attracted inevitable, and fearful, punishment.¹⁹

This is followed by ‘The prologue unto the book’, eight pages long in the original (pp. 26–30). This locates disobedience not in the teaching of God’s word, as the church then had it, but in ‘the bloody doctrine of the Pope which causeth disobedience, rebellion and insurrection.’.

The book proper, also starting with an illuminated letter, has the heading, ‘The obedience of all degrees proved by God’s word and first of children unto their elders’. In working with the doctrine of degree, Tyndale was of his time. Sir Thomas Elyot, for example, in his famous The book named the governour (1531), essentially a plan for bringing up gentlemen’s sons, elaborated how ‘God… had set degrees and estates in all his glorious works’.²⁰ Luther had written that the secular authorities must be obeyed.²¹ Tyndale characteristically makes an abstract remark startlingly concrete. His book starts with God, like the Epistle to the Hebrews, but far less grandly: it also starts from living human beings. New in this book is Tyndale’s intermeshing of God’s amazing presence, expressed in scripture, and lived experience.

The book has three large sections. The first (pp. 31–59) explains God’s law of obedience, from which no one is exempt. The second (pp. 59–108) sets out how to rule as father, husband, master, landlord, king or judge. The third (pp. 108–191) discusses signs: true like those sacraments that are scriptural, or false like the worship of saints; true like the literal sense of scripture, or false like the allegorizing of it. The whole treatise is then summarized in the last twenty pages, and the fourteen pages of ‘The table of the book’ make an index.

The immediacy of the tone of Tyndale’s voice can conceal the careful scheme. It is easy to demonstrate in a diagram the systematic headings, subheadings and further subdivisions, often balancing in pairs. Tyndale was a clever Oxford man of the time, trained in both late-medieval schemes of expression and the new humanist ways of logic and rhetoric. It would be unusual if he were not writing to a firm and detailed pattern of argument.²²

A&M	The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, edited by George Townshend, 8 vols. ( 1843–9); revised and corrected by J. Pratt, with an introduction by J. Stoughton (1887)
Answer	An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue… by William Tyndale, edited for the Parker Society by Henry Walter (Cambridge University Press, 1850)
Duffy	Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England1400–1580 (Yale University Press, 1992)
Mammon	The Parable of the Wicked Mammon by William Tyndale, edited for the Parker Society by Henry Walter (Cambridge University Press, 1848)
OED	Oxford English Dictionary
PS	Doctrinal Treatises, etc., by William Tyndale, edited for the Parker Society by Henry Walter (Cambridge University Press, 1848–50). This volume includes the Obedience
Practice	The Practice of Prelates by William Tyndale, edited for the Parker Society by Henry Walter (Cambridge University Press, 1849)
TNT	Tyndale’s New Testament: a modern-spelling edition (Yale University Press, 1989)
TOT	Tyndale’s Old Testament: a modern-spelling edition (Yale University Press, 1992)
WTB	David Daniell, William Tyndale: a Biography (1994)

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION