Books, Arts & Manners: Burn, Tyndale, Burn

THE William Tyndale exhibition, recently on view at the New York Public Library’s main building on 42nd Street, was perfectly splendid. Located in a small gallery on the main entrance level, its material displayed in accessible glass cases with excellent accompanying commentary, it offered a fine opportunity to reconsider Tyndale (1490-1536), a figure of great historical and literary importance.

A graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford, and a Roman Catholic priest, Tyndale was a prodigious scholar. Working directly from the Hebrew and Greek-rather than like previous translators, from the Latin of the Vulgate-he translated into English the complete text of the New Testament (1525), and had finished about half of the Old Testament by 1536 when he was arrested by Church authorities, stripped of his priesthood, painfully imprisoned, and then finally attached to a stake, strangled, and burned in Vilvorde in the Netherlands. This was a tragedy, but not quite the utter outrage that it must seem today.

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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Religious Persecution

THE William Tyndale exhibition, recently on view at the New York Public Library’s main building on 42nd Street, was perfectly splendid. Located in a small gallery on the main entrance level, its material displayed in accessible glass cases with excellent accompanying commentary, it offered a fine opportunity to reconsider Tyndale (1490-1536), a figure of great historical and literary importance.

A graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford, and a Roman Catholic priest, Tyndale was a prodigious scholar. Working directly from the Hebrew and Greek-rather than like previous translators, from the Latin of the Vulgate-he translated into English the complete text of the New Testament (1525), and had finished about half of the Old Testament by 1536 when he was arrested by Church authorities, stripped of his priesthood, painfully imprisoned, and then finally attached to a stake, strangled, and burned in Vilvorde in the Netherlands. This was a tragedy, but not quite the utter outrage that it must seem today.