{"id":13883,"date":"2025-12-26T20:37:30","date_gmt":"2025-12-26T20:37:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=13883"},"modified":"2025-12-26T20:37:30","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T20:37:30","slug":"william-tyndale-and-the-500th-anniversary-of-the-christmas-story-in-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=13883","title":{"rendered":"William Tyndale and the 500th anniversary of the Christmas story in English"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n \u00a0(Photo: Getty\/iStock)<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u2026<\/p>\n

The man behind our Christmas vocabulary<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u201clo\u201d and \u201cbehold\u201d, or \u201cMagi\u201d, we can thank William Tyndale. When churches read phrases like \u201cwith child\u201d, \u201cfear not\u201d, \u201cbring forth a son\u201d, \u201cknew her not\u201d, \u201cwise men\u201d, \u201cchief priests and scribes\u201d, \u201cgold, frankincense and myrrh\u201d, and \u201cangel of the Lord\u201d, they are using phrases stitched together by William Tyndale. When churches use clauses like \u201cthey called his name Jesus\u201d, \u201cwhere is he that is born King of the Jews\u201d, \u201cwe have seen his star in the East\u201d, \u201csearch diligently for the child\u201d, \u201clo the star which they saw in the east went before them\u201d, and \u201cthen was fulfilled that which was spoken by the prophet\u201d, they are reading constructions put together 500 years ago by William Tyndale, but which still sound contemporary today.<\/p>\n

Tyndale\u2019s ear for everyday English<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Tyndale in mainland Europe<\/strong><\/p>\n

William Tyndale came from south Gloucestershire and was likely influenced by the Lollards, who were England\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

By 1525 Tyndale was in Cologne (K\u00f6ln) 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.<\/p>\n

The Cologne Fragment<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This is now known as the \u201cCologne Fragment\u201d, and it was Tyndale\u2019s 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\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Chapter 1<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chapter one of Tyndale\u2019s 1525 Matthew starts with the genealogy: \u201cTHys ys the boke of the generacion of Iesus Christ the sonne of David\u201d, and then, after the genealogy, it reads, \u201cThe byrthe of Christ was on this wyse\u201d, and the chapter finishes with \u201cand called his name Iesus\u201d. Then Mary \u201cwas founde with chylde\u201d.<\/p>\n

Chapter 2<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chapter two of Tyndale\u2019s 1525 Matthew starts: \u201cWHen 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\u201d. An asterisk in front of \u201cwyse men\u201d points the reader to Tyndale\u2019s helpful side note: \u201cOf 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\u201d, so Tyndale gave us both the phrase \u201cwise men\u201d and the word \u201cMagi\u201d.<\/p>\n

How Tyndale\u2019s Christmas language spread<\/strong><\/p>\n

Over time, Tyndale\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Digital edition<\/strong><\/p>\n

The only known surviving copy of the Cologne Fragment can be found in the Grenville Collection of the British Library in London \u2014 you can see a copy of the original here.<\/p>\n

The Cologne Fragment has been keyboarded by the Tyndale Society, so you or your church can read the Christmas story from Tyndale\u2019s 1525 edition of Matthew this Christmas. You can access it for free in original spelling and in more readable modernised spelling.<\/p>\n

For more information about William Tyndale, see the Tyndale Society website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0(Photo: Getty\/iStock) 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 \u2026 The man behind our Christmas vocabulary William Tyndale never wrote a Christmas carol, yet many of the words and phrases on our lips<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13884,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[4067,2392,813,1751,660,4066,4065],"class_list":["post-13883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-christian-living","tag-500th","tag-anniversary","tag-christmas","tag-english","tag-story","tag-tyndale","tag-william"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}