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This Christmas is the 500th anniversary of when ordinary men and women could first hear the Christmas story being read from print in plain English. This is the story …
The man behind our Christmas vocabulary
William Tyndale never wrote a Christmas carol, yet many of the words and phrases on our lips every Christmas reach us through his choice of English. When churches read Matthew and use words like “lo” and “behold”, or “Magi”, we can thank William Tyndale. When churches read phrases like “with child”, “fear not”, “bring forth a son”, “knew her not”, “wise men”, “chief priests and scribes”, “gold, frankincense and myrrh”, and “angel of the Lord”, they are using phrases stitched together by William Tyndale. When churches use clauses like “they called his name Jesus”, “where is he that is born King of the Jews”, “we have seen his star in the East”, “search diligently for the child”, “lo the star which they saw in the east went before them”, and “then was fulfilled that which was spoken by the prophet”, they are reading constructions put together 500 years ago by William Tyndale, but which still sound contemporary today.
Tyndale’s ear for everyday English
What makes these Christmas phrases so durable is not only their familiarity but their texture. Tyndale deliberately avoided the heavy, Latinate wording of late mediaeval religion and chose strong, homely English. He grew up with the spoken language of the marketplace and the farmstead, and he put together everyday words that an ordinary ploughboy could grasp and remember. Working from the Greek text of the New Testament, he crafted short, memorable expressions that could be heard, read, and repeated, which have stood the test of time.
Tyndale in mainland Europe
William Tyndale came from south Gloucestershire and was likely influenced by the Lollards, who were England’s first evangelical movement. Tyndale trained as a priest and, while working as a chaplain, was likely working on his translation of the New Testament into English from at least 1522. With Church authorities alerted to what he was doing, in 1524 Tyndale fled England and travelled down the River Rhine in what is now Germany.
By 1525 Tyndale was in Cologne (Köln) with a completed New Testament ready to print. It was a dangerous world, playing cat and mouse with the authorities, where religious opinions could be deadly. He was alerted that he was about to be arrested, so Tyndale and his assistant, a Franciscan friar called William Roye, rescued the section that had been printed so far and headed south down the River Rhine to Worms.
The Cologne Fragment
Tyndale and Roye escaped with the precious first section (called an octavo) of 62 pages. This included his prologue and a contents page, which shows it was meant to be part of the whole New Testament. It then contained most, but not all, of the Gospel According to St Matthew and stopped in Matthew 22:12.
This is now known as the “Cologne Fragment”, and it was Tyndale’s first printed translation work. It was smuggled into England and likely arrived 500 years ago, in late 1525. It was the first printed part of the Bible in English to come into people’s hands.
The Cologne Fragment was only 22 chapters, but it also included marginal notes and helpful cross-references to the Old Testament, and it gave people an appetite for what was to come. It looks a bit different from a modern Bible because there were no verse numbers, and the spelling was not only different but inconsistent, with contractions and ligatures not familiar to people today. However, almost all of the words and phrases, when read aloud or put into modern spelling, are still perfectly good English today. Within that Gospel could be found the Christmas story in the first two chapters, as recorded by Matthew. Therefore, the end of 1525, 500 years ago, was likely the first Christmas when ordinary English people could read or hear the Christmas story from Matthew in plain English from a printed edition.
Chapter 1
Chapter one of Tyndale’s 1525 Matthew starts with the genealogy: “THys ys the boke of the generacion of Iesus Christ the sonne of David”, and then, after the genealogy, it reads, “The byrthe of Christ was on this wyse”, and the chapter finishes with “and called his name Iesus”. Then Mary “was founde with chylde”.
Chapter 2
Chapter two of Tyndale’s 1525 Matthew starts: “WHen Iesus was borne in bethlehem a toune of iury, in the time of kynge Herode, beholde, there cam wyse men from the este to Ierusalem”. An asterisk in front of “wyse men” points the reader to Tyndale’s helpful side note: “Of mathew they ar callid Magi, and in certeyne countreis in the est, philosophers conynge in naturall causes and effects, and also the prestes, were so callyd”, so Tyndale gave us both the phrase “wise men” and the word “Magi”.
How Tyndale’s Christmas language spread
Over time, Tyndale’s New Testament was drawn into the Great Bible and then lightly edited for the famous King James Version, ensuring that his Christmas wording reached parish churches, cathedrals, and homes across the English-speaking world. From there, his words and phrases seeped into rhyme and thence into hymnals, carol books, and service sheets. The vocabulary he forged in exile now gave us the vocabulary of Christmas and shaped how generations have sung and spoken of the birth of Christ. Even where spelling and pronunciation have shifted, the underlying phrases remain, giving a remarkable continuity between the Christmas of 1525 and the Christmas services of today. If you read a modern version of the Bible, such as the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) or the English Standard Version (ESV), they are effectively updated, modernised, slightly revised Tyndale.
Digital edition
The only known surviving copy of the Cologne Fragment can be found in the Grenville Collection of the British Library in London — you can see a copy of the original here.
The Cologne Fragment has been keyboarded by the Tyndale Society, so you or your church can read the Christmas story from Tyndale’s 1525 edition of Matthew this Christmas. You can access it for free in original spelling and in more readable modernised spelling.
For more information about William Tyndale, see the Tyndale Society website.
