Tyndale’s drive to follow in Wycliffe’s footsteps, both as to the work of translation and as to many points of doctrine, placed him in grave danger from both Church and secular leaders at the time, in particular Sir Thomas More, a lay Catholic who had ascended to one of the most powerful posts in the realm advising Henry VIII - a monarch who, ironically, at the time considered himself a primary defender of the Catholic faith. The Church of Tyndale’s day, particularly in England since Wycliffe’s work, prohibited reading the scriptures in English, or even personally reading them at all. The translations and essays Tyndale produced throughout the course of his work demonstrate that God had revealed to him, like Nephi, that “it is wisdom in God that we should obtain these records, that we may preserve unto our children the language of our fathers And also that we may preserve unto them the words which have been spoken by the mouth of all the holy prophets, which have been delivered unto them by the Spirit and power of God, since the world began, even down unto this present time” ( 1 Nephi 3:19-20).
But he fully consecrated his entire life to the work of translating the Bible into English for the express purpose of assisting devout Christians to know the Lord. (with the addition of a few other prophets’ writings that have apparently not survived, possibly because they were not ultimately included by the Deuteronomistic school in their compilation and redaction of the Hebrew Bible after the Babylonian captivity). Tyndale’s mission in life was no less perilous than Nephi’s own calling to return to Jerusalem after his family had already fled the city so that he could petition their relative Laban to surrender to Nephi’s family the “brass plates,” which we understand to have contained most of what is contained in our current Old Testament, up to approximately 600 B.C. As an ordained Catholic priest, Tyndale wished to replace the outdated and, by the early 1500s, already virtually unintelligible Wycliffe translation of 1382 (which had appeared before the invention of the printing press and mostly circulated in manuscript pages that were unreliable as to provenance) with his own English translation.
Sculpted Head of William Tyndale from St Dunstan-in-the-West Church, London (source: ).*Tyndale’s voluminous writings, penned while in exile from England and a fugitive from Hapsburg imperial justice at the insistence of both Henry VIII and the Catholic clergy both in England and on the European Continent, reveal that he was profoundly moved upon by the Spirit (in the Mormon lexicon) to apply his considerable intellect and talent with languages to the translation of the Bible into the vernacular English.
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