TYNDALE, or TINDALE, WILLIA31, an eminent English reformer and martyr, well known as a translator of the Bible, was b. about 1484. He was educated first at .Oxford, and afterward at Cambridge, and was, from his youth, as Foxe says, " singularly ad dicted to the study of the Scriptures." After leaving Cambridge, he became tutor and chaplain in the house of sir John Walsh, a knight of Gloucestershire, where he fre quently engaged in religious disputes with the clerical dignitaries of the neighborhood, and soon incurred their wrath by what they deemed the heresy of his opinions. He went to London about the middle of 1523, bent upon the fulfillment of his desire of translating the New Testament into English. Failing, however, to obtain the patronage he expected in carrying out this intention, he retired to Germany in 1524. Here his translation of the New Testament was published in 1525 or 1526, and conveyed into England. This work, although denounced by government, was yet so eagerly received by the English, that several reprints of it were produced by the Dutch printers within the next few years. Tyndale continued on the continent, writing tracts in ad
vocacy of the reformed doctrines; in 1530 he published a translation of the Pentateuch, and in 1531 one of the prophet Jonah. In 1533 he took up his abode in Antwerp, where, iu 1534 and 1535, he published two revised editions of his New Testament. In 1535 lie was treacherously arrested, and, after a confinement of 16 months, was publicly strangled and burned as a heretic at Antwerp in 1536.
Tyndale was a man of great learning as well as talent, and his own writings, in ad dition to his translations, show how well adapted he was for the great work of his life, so fearlessly carried out. Our modern version of the New Testament is substantially Tyndale's translation with modernized spelling. See William Tyndale, by rev. it. De maus, M.A. (1871).