William Tyndale: Early Reformer & Bible Translator Issue 16 | 1987 Purchase this issue

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How pleased we are to devote an issue to William Tyndale! His name is vaguely familiar to many modern Christians, but the majority of details about his fascinating life are familiar only to church history and literary scholars. Yet we will see with him, as we’ve seen with others treated in Christian History, that though he founded no modern movement, he nonetheless profoundly influenced our history and placed us enormously in his debt.

Tyndale’s main opposition during his lifetime came from the Roman Catholic Church’s supporters in England, with Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More being among his most formidable foes. Thus, a special word of notice is in order for what the Catholic University of America Press is currently doing. CUAP is in the process of preparing newly revised editions of all of Tyndale’s polemical works. This series of books, to be called “The Independent Works of William Tyndale,” is scheduled for publication between 1992 and 1998.

Another notable part of this project is that Dr. Donald Smeeton, a contributor to this issue of Christian History, is set to coedit a major work in the series. Smeeton, a Protestant, is assistant dean at the International Correspondence Institute, a Christian correspondence school based in Brussels, Belgium. His doctoral dissertation was about Tyndale and, interestingly, he received his doctorate from the Catholic University of Louvain, the same school that Tyndale’s betrayer attended long ago.

We see with Tyndale, as with so many other figures we’ve treated, how God used an individual devoted to the rigors of research to advance His work—a point worth considering by young Christians making career decisions, in an age when, even in religious circles, the trend often seems to be to ...