Metaglossia: The Translation World

Tyndale House Publications in Carol Stream celebrates its 50th anniversary.

When Ken Taylor started Tyndale House Publishers 50 years ago, he named it after the scholar William Tyndale, whose translation of the Bible into English in the 1500s helped lead to him being strangled and burned at stake.

Opposition to Taylor’s paraphrase of the Bible into everyday English wasn’t nearly so virulent, but it did have its critics. Scripture in the vernacular seemed less sacred, less authoritative than King James English and established publishers declined to touch it.

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The Living Bible, of course, became a best-seller for several years running and since then Tyndale House has published numerous other best-sellers in both fiction and nonfiction. The company celebrates its golden anniversary this year as one of the largest independent Christian publishers in the world.

But no one knew the future back in 1962.

In the early 16th century, an age of treachery and religious oppression, William Tyndale made the Holy Scriptures available to the English masses by translating them into a language they could understand, even though it was against the law in England.

"Tyndale ennobles our tongue. He gave us majesty where there was none," the author says. "English was at the bottom of the pond, and the beauty about that and another takeaway is that Tyndale had to translate the English Bible while on the run. He was an outlaw. It was against the law. He had a target on his back and a price on his head."

Scholars estimate as much as 90 percent of the New Testament and up to 50 percent of the Old Testament in the King James Version of the Bible can be attributed to Tyndale.

"So, think about this -- when he's translating Romans 8 (verse 35), for instance, 'Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, persecution, or famine, nakedness, peril, or sword,' he's actually living those very things," Teems points out. "So it has a living, a prophetic imprint on Scripture itself."

The author adds that William Shakespeare even used words coined by Tyndale in his writings. In fact, scholars have an old adage to that effect: "Without Tyndale, no Shakespeare."