Justified True Belief

(●) The scholar who put the Bible into English out of the Greek and the Hebrew, and was strangled and burned for it. + Most people who have never heard of William Tyndale quote him several times a week. If you have said that somebody is the salt of the earth, or a law unto themselves, or that you are fighting the good fight, or that it came to pass, you were speaking his English. He is the reason English-speaking Christians say Passover and scapegoat and mercy seat, because he made those words up when the Hebrew had no English equivalent to hand. He is on a Christian apologetics site for a simpler reason than his prose. Tyndale believed that an ordinary person, given the text of Scripture in plain English, could understand the Christian faith without a licensed expert standing between the reader and the text. That belief was illegal in the England of his day. He acted on it anyway: he left the country, learned Hebrew, translated, smuggled the printed books home in bales of Gloucestershire cloth, and was hunted, betrayed, tried and killed for it before he was much past forty. Here is the fact worth remembering. Nearly seventy years after his death the King James translators sat down to make the Bible that would shape the English language, and scholars have since done the obvious experiment, setting the two texts side by side, passage after passage, and counting how much of the newer one is really the older. Roughly eighty-four per cent of the King James New Testament comes back as Tyndale’s words still standing, and roughly seventy-six per cent of the Old Testament portions Tyndale lived to finish. He himself never saw a complete Bible of his own in print. Of the first edition he did see, three copies survive anywhere in the world.

(●) c. 1494 AD: He was born in the Gloucestershire wool country, in a family that answered to two surnames. + Tyndale was born somewhere in the Vale of Berkeley, in western Gloucestershire, around 1494. Both halves of that sentence are softer than they look. The year is an estimate worked backward from his Oxford degrees, and the village is disputed: North Nibley has claimed him since the nineteenth century and put a tower on the hill above it in 1866 to say so, while Stinchcombe and Slimbridge have claims of their own, and the parish registers that would settle it do not exist. The family used two names, Tyndale and Hychyns (sometimes spelled Hutchins), a habit not unusual in a family that had moved and wanted to keep both histories. They were substantial rather than grand: farmers and clothiers, which meant they bought fleeces, put them out to spinners and weavers, and sold the finished cloth at the end of it. One brother, Edward, managed estates for the lords of Berkeley. Keep the cloth in mind, because it comes back. The Cotswold wool trade ran from these valleys down to Bristol and across to Antwerp, and English merchants kept houses at the far end of that route. The same bales that carried Gloucestershire cloth to the Low Countries would one day carry Gloucestershire’s most wanted book home again.

(●) 1512 AD: Oxford gave him his degrees and his lasting complaint about how theology was taught. + He went up to Oxford as a boy, to Magdalen Hall, and took his Bachelor of Arts in 1512 and his Master of Arts in 1515. Somewhere in those years he was ordained a priest. He was, by every account including his enemies’, an extraordinary linguist, and the description of that gift which has lasted came to us at second hand. In August 1526 a German scholar named Hermann Buschius told Luther’s friend Georg Spalatin that the Englishman behind the new English Testament was so skilled in seven tongues, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, English and French, that whichever he spoke you would take it for his native language. Spalatin wrote it down in his diary, which is the only reason the compliment survives at all. What he remembered about Oxford was not the learning but the order of it. A student could not proceed to the study of Scripture until he had spent the better part of a decade on philosophy first, so a young man who had come to read the Bible spent his twenties reading everything else, and Tyndale thought the delay was not accidental. Years later, in The Practice of Prelates, he was still angry about it: "In the universities they have ordained that no man shall look on the scripture, until he be noselled in heathen learning eight or nine years, and armed with false principles; with which he is clean shut out of the understanding of the scripture." To be "noselled" is to be nursed on something, fed it until you cannot taste anything else. By the time a man was finally allowed at the sacred page, Tyndale thought, he had already been taught what he would find there. He may have gone on to Cambridge afterward, where Erasmus had taught Greek until 1514 and where a circle of young men met at the White Horse Inn to read the new learning, which meant Greek, Hebrew, and the old texts read in the languages they were written in rather than in translation. The evidence for that is thin and mostly later, so it is best left as likely rather than certain. What is certain is the book that changed his working life. In 1516 Erasmus published the New Testament in its original Greek with a fresh Latin translation beside it, and for the first time a scholar in England could read what the apostles actually wrote rather than what a thousand years of Latin copying had made of it.

(●) c. 1522 AD: Tutoring in a manor house, he argued Scripture with the local clergy and set himself to put the Bible into English. + By about 1522 he was back in Gloucestershire, living at Little Sodbury Manor as tutor to the children of Sir John Walsh, a knight who kept an open table. Local clergy came to dinner, and the young tutor argued with them over the food. John Foxe, who says he had the household’s story from Richard Webb, once a servant of Hugh Latimer, reports that Tyndale would lay Erasmus’ Greek New Testament on the table and show them, verse by verse, that what they were defending was not there. Foxe also reports the sentence everyone remembers. A learned man told Tyndale it would be better to be without God’s law than the Pope’s, and Tyndale answered that he defied the Pope and all his laws, and that if God spared his life, "ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost." That story reaches us through Foxe rather than from Tyndale’s own pen, and Foxe was writing decades later with a case to make, so a careful reader holds it a little loosely. It is worth holding anyway, because everything Tyndale did for the rest of his life was that sentence carried out. The ploughboy was not a figure of speech to him. He meant a boy in a Gloucestershire field, and he meant that the boy should be able to read Romans.

(●) 1523 AD: London refused him a desk, and he concluded there was nowhere in England to do the work. + Translating the Bible into English without a bishop’s licence had been a crime in England since 1409, when the church, badly frightened by John Wycliffe’s followers and their handwritten English Bibles, forbade it outright. Tyndale did not want to be an outlaw. He wanted a patron, so in the summer of 1523 he went to London to ask Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London, for a place in his household. Tunstall was a humanist scholar, which in 1523 meant a man at home in Greek and in the ancient texts read in the languages they were written in, and Erasmus had praised him, which is exactly why Tyndale thought he might say yes. Tunstall said no, politely: his house was full. Tyndale spent close to a year in London preaching at St Dunstan’s and lodging with Humphrey Monmouth, a cloth merchant with reforming sympathies who later went to the Tower for it, and in that year he understood what the polite refusal had meant. He put it plainly afterward in the preface to his Pentateuch, his English version of the first five books of the Bible, where he says he understood at the last "not only that there was no room in my lord of London’s palace to translate the new Testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all England." So in the spring of 1524 he took ship for Germany, and he never came home.

(●) 1526 AD: The first printed English New Testament from the Greek reached England hidden in cargo, and the bishops burned it. + The first attempt failed in the most cinematic way. In 1525 Tyndale was in Cologne, and the sheets of a New Testament were already coming off the press: a quarto, which is the large page size a book gets when it is meant to be read at a desk, with his own notes running down the margins. Then a German scholar named Johann Dobneck, who wrote under the name Cochlaeus, got the printers talking over drink and learned what was in the shop. He went to the authorities. Tyndale and his assistant gathered the printed sheets and fled up the Rhine. Thirty-one leaves of that first attempt survive, one fragment, in the British Library, and it stops in the middle of Matthew 22. At Worms, a city that had gone over to the Reformation, he started again, and this time he finished. What came off the press in 1526 was a small octavo New Testament, the printer’s sheet folded down again to something that fits in a hand, and it carried no notes at all, so that it stayed small enough to hide. It came into England the way everything else came into England, in the cargo of the cloth trade, packed in bales and barrels and sacks of flour by merchants who knew what they were carrying. The response was fire. Bishop Tunstall preached against it and had copies burned at Paul’s Cross in London in October 1526, the first time in England that printed Scripture in English was publicly destroyed. Three years later the same bishop tried a quieter method, if the chronicler Edward Hall is to be trusted, and Hall is the only witness for it, with Foxe doing no more than repeating him. In 1529, Hall says, Tunstall was in Antwerp and arranged through a London mercer, a merchant in fine cloth, named Augustine Packington to buy up the whole remaining stock so as to burn it, not knowing that Packington was Tyndale’s friend. Tyndale took the money, paid his debts, and printed a better edition. Of the 1526 Worms New Testament, three copies survive: one nearly complete, which the British Library bought in 1994 for about a million pounds, one badly incomplete at St Paul’s Cathedral, and a fragment in Stuttgart. Everything else was burned.

(●) 1530 AD: In Antwerp he taught himself Hebrew, published the Five Books of Moses, and traded blows with Thomas More. + The exile years were productive past belief for a hunted man. From 1528 he was mostly in Antwerp, in and around the English merchants’ house, and the books came steadily: The Parable of the Wicked Mammon and The Obedience of a Christian Man in 1528, the Pentateuch in 1530, The Practice of Prelates the same year, Jonah and the Answer unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue in 1531, and a thoroughly revised New Testament in 1534. The Pentateuch is the astonishing item. Hebrew was barely taught anywhere in England, and Tyndale learned it well enough on the continent to render Genesis into English prose that has never been improved on. He also discovered, as translators do, that the language he needed did not exist yet, so he built it: Passover, scapegoat, mercy seat. The book was printed with a false imprint, which is the line on the title page naming the printer and the town where he worked: "at Malborow in the lande of Hesse, by me Hans Luft". None of it was true, and it was there to protect the real printer in Antwerp. Meanwhile Sir Thomas More, the finest Latinist of his generation, had been licensed by the Bishop of London in 1528 to read heretical books in order to refute them. He opened with the Dialogue Concerning Heresies in 1529, the year he became Lord Chancellor of England. Tyndale replied with his Answer in 1531. More came back after that with the enormous Confutation. It was the great English theological duel of the century, conducted between a man with the machinery of the state behind him and a man with a price on his head, and neither of them was gentle. One of Tyndale’s books cost him his one chance of a pardon. The Practice of Prelates attacked Henry VIII’s attempt to divorce Catherine of Aragon. Whatever hope there had been of the king protecting a useful enemy of the Pope died with that page.

(●) 1536 AD: Betrayed by a man he had befriended, he was strangled and burned outside Brussels. + In 1535 an Englishman named Henry Phillips arrived in Antwerp, well dressed and short of money, and worked his way into Tyndale’s confidence. Who paid him has never been established. In May of that year Phillips walked Tyndale out of the safety of the English merchants’ house into a narrow passage where officers were waiting, and pointed him out. Tyndale was taken to the castle of Vilvoorde, six miles from Brussels, and held there for about sixteen months. From that cell comes the only piece of his handwriting anyone has ever found, a letter in Latin to the governor, discovered centuries later in the Brussels archives. He asks for a warmer cap, because his head is cold and he has a constant catarrh, the streaming nose and chest of a man who cannot get dry; a warmer coat, because the one he has is thin; cloth to patch his leggings. Then he asks for the thing he actually wants: his Hebrew Bible, his Hebrew grammar, and his Hebrew dictionary, so that he can go on working. He was condemned as a heretic and then degraded from the priesthood, a public ceremony in the summer of 1536 in which the marks of a man’s ordination are stripped off him one by one and the church declares that he is no longer its own. After that he was handed to the secular arm, which is the phrase for what came next: the church did not put men to death itself, so it gave the condemned man to the civil officers, who did. Early in October, on the day traditionally given as the sixth, he was tied to the stake at Vilvoorde, strangled, and his body burned. Foxe records that he cried out at the last, with a loud voice, "Lord, open the King of England’s eyes." He was about forty-two. Within a year an English Bible built mostly out of his work was circulating in England under royal licence.

What He Taught

(T1) Ordinary people cannot be settled in the truth until they can read the Bible in their own language. + Think of what it is like to be told, in a language you do not speak, what a contract you are signing says. You may trust the person telling you. You still cannot check. That was the ordinary English Christian’s position with the Bible in 1520: the text existed, in Latin, and what it said reached you only through someone else’s summary. Tyndale’s argument was not that priests were all liars. It was that a person who cannot see the text cannot follow the argument of the text. He kept using the same three words for what a reader needs: the process, the order and the meaning, by which he meant the flow of a book, how its parts fit, and what it is driving at. You get those from reading a letter through, not from hearing a verse of it quoted at you. He also thought he had Paul on his side. Writing to a church where people were speaking in tongues nobody could follow, Paul says he would rather say five words that people understand than ten thousand they cannot (1 Corinthians 14:19). Tyndale read the whole Latin-only system as that problem made permanent. Rome’s answer, that an untrained reader will misread and multiply sects, was not silly, and the following century gave it plenty of evidence. Tyndale’s reply was that the cure for bad reading is more reading, and that Scripture was given to the church, not to its clerks.

(Q) "I had perceived by experience, how that it was impossible to establish the lay-people in any truth, except the scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue, that they might see the process, order, and meaning of the text." + Source: Tyndale, preface to the Pentateuch, 1530, "W. T. To the Reader" (Parker Society, Doctrinal Treatises, ed. Henry Walter, 1848). He is explaining, to readers holding the first five books of the Bible in English, why he left the country to make it. The sentence sits a few lines from his account of Bishop Tunstall’s refusal to find him a desk in London.

(T2) The gospel is good news before it is a command, and it is received by faith rather than earned. + A messenger runs into a besieged town and shouts that the siege is lifted. Nobody in the square asks what they now owe him. They cheer, and then they open the gates. That is roughly how Tyndale wanted the word gospel heard, and he spends the opening pages of A Pathway into the Holy Scripture making sure the reader hears it that way: the Greek evangelion means glad tidings, news of something already done, and his example is the shout that went round Israel when the giant was down and David was walking back with the head. From that he draws the doctrine the Reformation is named for. If the gospel is news of a finished rescue, then a person is put right with God by trusting it, not by accumulating enough good works to deserve it. That is what justification means, and the word is worth pausing on, because it is a courtroom word before it is a church one: to be justified is to have the verdict go in your favour, to be declared in the right, which is something done to you rather than something you build up. Tyndale states it in the strongest terms. Faith alone justifies, and the works follow as a healthy tree bears fruit, because they are what a rescued person now wants to do. He is not, however, a straight copy of Luther, and readers who expect him to be are surprised. Tyndale’s favourite frame is the covenant, a promise with terms written into it, the way a marriage vow is a promise that also says what the two people will now do for each other. God binds himself by promise, and the promise carries obligations that a believer takes seriously rather than shrugs at. He can sound sterner about obedience than Wittenberg did, and scholars have argued for a century about whether Tyndale is developing Luther, or is simply a sterner man saying the same thing, or is drifting away from it. What is not in doubt is where he put the foundation. The believer’s standing rests on Christ’s work received by faith, not on the believer’s performance (Galatians 2:16).

(Q) "Evangelion (that we call the gospel) is a Greek word; and signifieth good, merry, glad and joyful tidings, that maketh a man’s heart glad, and maketh him sing, dance, and leap for joy." + Source: Tyndale, A Pathway into the Holy Scripture, opening paragraph (Parker Society, Doctrinal Treatises, ed. Henry Walter, 1848). The Pathway is a revised and expanded version of the prologue he wrote for the interrupted Cologne New Testament of 1525, reissued on its own as a short introduction to reading the Bible. The sentence continues into the story of David and Goliath, which is his illustration of what glad tidings sound like.

(T3) Scripture has one sense, the plain sense its words bear, and that sense is the anchor. + Medieval teachers read the Bible in four senses at once. A single verse about Jerusalem could mean the literal city, and the church, and the individual soul, and heaven, and a trained preacher was expected to find all four. The system was not invented to deceive anyone; it grew out of a real conviction that Scripture is inexhaustible. But it had a practical effect that Tyndale could see from where he stood. If a text can mean four things, the question of which one it means today is settled by whoever holds the office, and an ordinary reader with the plain words in front of him is always out of his depth. So Tyndale cut it down to one. The literal sense is what the writer, using the words as people use words, actually said, and everything else has to be measured against it. He was not banning imagery: he knew perfectly well that a parable is a parable and that "I am the door" is not carpentry, and he says so. His point is that the figure of speech is part of the plain sense, not an escape hatch from it. This is the hinge on which the whole vernacular project turns. If the Bible has one sense, a ploughboy who can read it can get at that sense. If it has four, he cannot, and the argument for putting it in his hands collapses.

(Q) "Thou shalt understand, therefore, that the scripture hath but one sense, which is the literal sense. And that literal sense is the root and ground of all, and the anchor that never faileth, whereunto if thou cleave, thou canst never err or go out of the way." + Source: Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, 1528, in the section on the four senses of Scripture (Parker Society, Doctrinal Treatises, ed. Henry Walter, 1848). He has just described the fourfold method and its effect on ordinary readers, and this is his replacement for it (T3).

(T4) The New Testament’s own words are congregation, elder and love, not church, priest and charity. + Here is where the fight got personal, and it is worth seeing why a handful of word choices could be treated as heresy. Three Greek words were at issue. Ekklesia is an assembly of people called together; Tyndale rendered it congregation. Presbyteros means an older man, a senior; he rendered it senior, then thought better of it and settled on elder. Agape is the self-giving love the New Testament keeps talking about; he rendered it love. Thomas More saw immediately what those choices did. Say church and an English reader in 1526 pictures a building and an institution with courts, lands and clergy. Say congregation and he pictures the people in the room. Say priest and he pictures a man ordained to offer sacrifice. Say elder and he pictures an older Christian. Tyndale was not smuggling a doctrine in under cover of philology; he was arguing that the Greek says what it says, and that the institutional weight English had loaded onto the traditional words was not in the text. He also had a plain answer on charity: the word had drifted in English toward almsgiving and forbearance, and it no longer covered what agape covers, so it was the wrong word now whatever it had been once. More thought that giving up the old vocabulary gave up the visible church with it, and that this was precisely the point. Both men understood the stakes exactly.

(Q) "Therefore in the translation of the new Testament, where I found this word ecclesia, I interpreted it by this word congregation." + Source: Tyndale, An Answer unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue, 1531, in the chapter headed "Why Tyndale used this word congregation, rather than church, in the translation of the new Testament" (Parker Society edition, ed. Henry Walter, 1850). His reason, given in the lines around it, is that the clergy had taken over a word that belonged to the whole body of believers, so that an English reader hearing "church" no longer heard what the Greek said (T4).

(T5) A Christian obeys the king as God’s officer, disobeys him only where God commands otherwise, and never rebels. + Tyndale is usually remembered as an enemy of authority, and the reputation is half wrong. The Obedience of a Christian Man is a book about submission, written partly to answer the charge that reading the Bible in English turns people into rebels. The German Peasants’ War of 1525 had ended in tens of thousands of deaths, with both sides quoting Scripture, and everyone in Europe knew it. His case runs from Romans 13. The governing authorities are appointed by God, so obeying the magistrate is a religious duty and not merely prudence (Romans 13:1). Where he differs sharply from Rome is in what follows: if the king is God’s officer directly, then no churchman stands between him and God, and clergy are subjects like everyone else, answerable in the king’s courts and liable to the king’s taxes. That is why a book by a hunted heretic was welcome reading at court. He does leave one door open, and only one. When a ruler commands what God forbids, the Christian refuses, in the pattern of the apostles before the council: "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). But refusing is where it stops. The Christian who refuses then suffers the penalty, and does not take up arms. Tyndale held that line to the end, and it cost him his life without a single act of resistance.

(Q) "Hereby seest thou that the king is, in this world, without law; and may at his lust do right or wrong, and shall give accounts but to God only." + Source: Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, 1528, on the obedience of subjects to princes (Parker Society, Doctrinal Treatises, ed. Henry Walter, 1848). "At his lust" means at his own pleasure. He is denying that any earthly power, and he means the papacy, may sit in judgment on a king. What the sentence also does, as later readers noticed, is leave a wicked king with no earthly check at all (T5).

(Q) "But above all, I beg and entreat your clemency earnestly to intercede with the lord commissary, that he would deign to allow me the use of my Hebrew Bible, Hebrew Grammar, and Hebrew Lexicon, and that I might employ my time with that study." + Source: Tyndale’s letter from the castle of Vilvoorde, written in Latin in the winter of 1535 to the governor of the castle (English translation by J. I. Mombert, 1884). The original was found in the Brussels state archives in the nineteenth century and is the only surviving example of his handwriting. The lines just before it ask for a warmer cap, a warmer coat, and cloth to mend his leggings, because he is cold and ill. Then comes this. He had translated the Pentateuch and Jonah and had carried Joshua through 2 Chronicles into English; with a Bible, a grammar and a dictionary he could have gone on with the prophets in a cell.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Every English Bible that followed was built on his, and the King James Version is mostly still his words. + The books came fast once he was dead. In 1537 an English Bible appeared under the name of "Thomas Matthew", assembled by Tyndale’s friend John Rogers out of Tyndale’s New Testament, Tyndale’s Pentateuch, Tyndale’s unpublished manuscript of Joshua through 2 Chronicles, and Miles Coverdale’s work for the rest. Henry VIII licensed it. Less than a year after the king’s government had let its most wanted translator burn, the king’s licence sat on the front of his translation under an assumed name. From there the line runs straight. The Great Bible of 1539, made to satisfy Thomas Cromwell’s injunction of 1538 that every parish church set up a Bible in English, was a revision of Matthew. The Geneva Bible of 1560, which the Puritans and Shakespeare read, revised that line again. The Bishops’ Bible of 1568 was the official answer to Geneva, and the King James translators of 1611 were instructed to follow the Bishops’ Bible where they could. So when Jon Nielson and Royal Skousen worked through eighteen sample passages in 1998, setting the King James text beside Tyndale’s surviving work, the result was less surprising than it sounds: about eighty-four per cent of the New Testament, and about seventy-six per cent of the Old Testament sections he finished, are still his words. Read the Christmas story in the King James Version and you are reading a man who was killed for writing it.

(†) English itself kept his sentences, even where the church overruled his vocabulary. + Tyndale had a gift that is hard to teach: he wrote for the ear. He preferred the short native word to the long Latin one, he kept his clauses in the order a speaker would say them, and the result is prose that a person can hear once and remember. "Let there be light." "Am I my brother’s keeper?" "The powers that be." "Ye are the salt of the earth." "Fight the good fight." "A law unto themselves." Those are his, and they went into the language and stayed. Where he did not win was the church vocabulary. When King James’ translators were given their rules in 1604, the third of them settled the old quarrel by decree: the old ecclesiastical words were to be kept, and the word church was not to be translated congregation. More had lost the war and won the argument over the words, nearly seventy years after both men were dead. So the King James Bible is a curious monument. Its sentences are overwhelmingly Tyndale’s, and a handful of its most contested nouns are the ones he was condemned for refusing. He also left the language words it did not have. There was no English for the Hebrew pesach, so he made Passover. There was none for the goat that carries the sins away, so he made scapegoat. There was none for the golden lid of the ark where God met Israel, so he made mercy seat. Nearly five centuries later they are ordinary English.

(†) He gave English Protestantism its doctrine of Scripture and its best remembered martyr-scholar. + What Tyndale handed on was not only a text but a way of treating a text. His prologues taught English readers to ask what a book of the Bible is about as a whole, to distinguish law from promise, and to expect the plain sense to be reachable. Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, which set English Christians reading whole books of Scripture aloud in course, straight through from the first chapter to the last rather than in scattered verses picked out for the day, works on assumptions Tyndale had spent his life defending. Then there is Foxe. When John Foxe published his Acts and Monuments in 1563, Tyndale stood in it as the scholar-martyr, and for generations of English-speaking Protestants the picture of a man asking for a Hebrew dictionary in a cold cell did more than any argument to make the case that this was learning rather than mischief. Foxe is a partisan witness and should be read as one, but the letter from Vilvoorde is not Foxe’s invention. It is in Tyndale’s hand. The wider church has come round slowly and substantially. The Church of England commemorates him on 6 October. The Catholic scholarship of the last century, working through the More controversy, has generally granted what More would not, that Tyndale’s New Testament was a serious piece of Greek scholarship and not a forgery, whatever it thinks of his theology. Vernacular Scripture, the thing he was killed for, is now the settled practice of every part of Christendom.

(†) Where his own record is open to criticism: a king with no earthly check, and a tongue that gave no quarter. + Two things in his own writing deserve the criticism they have had. - The king without law. Tyndale set out to protect the crown from the papacy and ended by giving the crown more than he meant to. A king who is "in this world, without law" and accountable to God only has no earthly restraint, and Tyndale allows subjects nothing but refusal and suffering, never resistance, however monstrous the ruler. Henry VIII read the book with pleasure, which should give a reader pause. Later Christians who admired Tyndale, including the Scottish reformers and the English Puritans, found they could not hold that line, and Scripture itself is more textured than his rule: Romans 13 sits beside the apostles who kept preaching after being ordered to stop (Acts 5:29). Tyndale honoured his own doctrine to the death, which is more than most theorists of obedience manage, and the doctrine is still too simple. - The polemic. The Practice of Prelates is not careful history. It is a caricature of Cardinal Wolsey and the bishops in which the worst construction is always the true one, and Tyndale routinely assumed the venal motive in his opponents, More included, rather than the honest mistake. More gave as bad as he got and worse, so this is not a contest anyone wins. It is still a fault, and honesty records it. There is also a live question rather than a fault. Tyndale leans harder than Luther on covenant and on the obligations a believer takes on, and readers since have disagreed about whether that enriches justification by faith or strains it. That is a genuine dispute among people who take his own words seriously, and it goes down as a dispute rather than as a charge.