This Christmas is the five hundredth anniversary of when unusual men and ladies 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 most of the words and phrases on our lips every Christmas reach us through his selection of English. When churches read Matthew and use words like “lo” and “behold”, or “Magi”, we are able to thank William Tyndale. When churches read phrases like “with child”, “fear not”, “bring forth a son”, “knew her not”, “clever men”, “chief priests and scribes”, “gold, frankincense and myrrh”, and “angel of the Lord”, they’re using phrases stitched together by William Tyndale. When churches use clauses like “they called his name Jesus”, “where is he that’s born King of the Jews”, “we’ve seen his star within the East”, “search diligently for the kid”, “lo the star which they saw within the east went before them”, and “then was fulfilled that which was spoken by the prophet”, they’re reading constructions put together 500 years ago by William Tyndale, but which still sound contemporary today.
Tyndale’s ear for on a regular basis English
What makes these Christmas phrases so durable shouldn’t be only their familiarity but their texture. Tyndale deliberately avoided the heavy, Latinate wording of late mediaeval religion and selected strong, homely English. He grew up with the spoken language of the marketplace and the farmstead, and he put together on a regular basis words that an unusual ploughboy could grasp and remember. Working from the Greek text of the New Testament, he crafted short, memorable expressions that may very well be heard, read, and repeated, which have stood the test of time.
Tyndale in mainland Europe
William Tyndale got here 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 a minimum of 1522. With Church authorities alerted to what he was doing, in 1524 Tyndale fled England and travelled down the River Rhine in what’s now Germany.
By 1525 Tyndale was in Cologne (Köln) with a accomplished New Testament able to print. It was a dangerous world, playing cat and mouse with the authorities, where religious opinions may very well 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 thus far and headed south down the River Rhine to Worms.
The Cologne Fragment
Tyndale and Roye escaped with the dear first section (called an octavo) of 62 pages. This included his prologue and a contents page, which shows it was meant to be a part of the entire 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 often known as the “Cologne Fragment”, and it was Tyndale’s first printed translation work. It was smuggled into England and sure arrived 500 years ago, in late 1525. It was the primary printed a part of the Bible in English to return into people’s hands.
The Cologne Fragment was only 22 chapters, but it surely also included marginal notes and helpful cross-references to the Old Testament, and it gave people an appetite for what was to return. It looks a bit different from a contemporary Bible because there have been no verse numbers, and the spelling was not only different but inconsistent, with contractions and ligatures not familiar to people today. However, almost all the words and phrases, when read aloud or put into modern spelling, are still perfectly good English today. Within that Gospel may very well be found the Christmas story in the primary two chapters, as recorded by Matthew. Therefore, the top of 1525, 500 years ago, was likely the primary Christmas when unusual English people could read or hear the Christmas story from Matthew in plain English from a printed edition.
Chapter 1
Chapter one in all Tyndale’s 1525 Matthew starts with the genealogy: “THys ys the boke of the generacion of Iesus Christ the sonne of David”, after which, 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, within 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 within the est, philosophers conynge in naturall causes and effects, and in addition the prestes, were so callyd”, so Tyndale gave us each the phrase “clever men” and the word “Magi”.
How Tyndale’s Christmas language spread
Over time, Tyndale’s New Testament was drawn into the Great Bible after which evenly edited for the famous King James Version, ensuring that his Christmas wording reached parish churches, cathedrals, and houses across the English-speaking world. From there, his words and phrases seeped into rhyme and thence into hymnals, carol books, and repair 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 contemporary version of the Bible, similar to the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) or the English Standard Version (ESV), they’re effectively updated, modernised, barely revised Tyndale.
Digital edition
The only known surviving copy of the Cologne Fragment will be present in the Grenville Collection of the British Library in London — you’ll be able to see a duplicate of the unique here.
The Cologne Fragment has been keyboarded by the Tyndale Society, so that you or your church can read the Christmas story from Tyndale’s 1525 edition of Matthew this Christmas. You can access it without cost in original spelling and in additional readable modernised spelling.
For more details about William Tyndale, see the Tyndale Society website.
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