LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

56 LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW XV
Matthew (1533) contains translations of sermons by Luther; 6 The Exposition
of 1 John (1531) points in the same direction. 7 Just in the course of preparing
this paper I have uncovered a couple of unpaid debts to Luther. 8
Thus, it seems the Lutherans in Kentish Town, London, were not without
justification in naming their church Luther-Tyndale—nor were they the first
to make the connection. The Catholic Humanist Thomas More (d. 1535)
dismissed Tyndale’s writings as mere rehashed Luther. George Joy,
Tyndale’s co-worker from their days on the Continent (of Peterhouse,
Cambridge), once remarked: “I heard him praise his exposition of the 5 th , 6 th
and 7 th chapters of Matthew so much that mine ears glowed for shame to
hear him, and yet it was Luther that made it and Tyndale only by translating
it and powdering it here and there with his own fantasies.” 9
What we know of Tyndale’s life confirms Luther’s direct influence. He
matriculated at Wittenberg, 27 May 1524, under the name “Guilelmus
Daltin” (Daltin being an anagram of Tindal). It was here that he came into
contact with his Jewish translation assistant William Roy, Luther, and
presumably Melanchthon. We do not know how long Tyndale resided in
Wittenberg, but by March 1526 he and Roy had produced at Worms the first
printing of the English New Testament.
Tyndale’s theological debt to the German Reformation appears obvious,
and the matter would have remained closed had he not departed significantly
from Luther’s teaching on the real, corporeal presence in the Eucharist. We
do not know when this shift may have occurred, or even whether it can be
called “a shift”—we might suppose that Tyndale had initially held to a more
substantive, real presence view as Thomas Cranmer once had. 10 But by 1532
when Frith had returned to England from his sojourn in the Low Countries
with Tyndale and was imprisoned for his Eucharistic views, Tyndale advised
his friend to conceal his heretical views on the sacrament—even from their
fellow reformers:
Of the presence of Christ’s body in the sacrament, meddle as little as you can,
that there appear no division among us. Barnes will be hot against you. The
6 E. G. Rupp, Studies in the Making of the English Protestant Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1947), 51.
7 Rupp, English Protestant Tradition, 51.
8 Tyndale’s understanding of the Law in his prologues to the Old Testament (Marburg,
1530) is generally reliant upon Luther’s understanding of the same in his Prefaces to the Old
Testament, first published in Wittenberg, 1523, but revised six times by 1528. Tyndale’s
tripartite division of Natural Law, the Law of Moses, and the Law of Christ in The Obedience
of the Christian Man (Marburg, 1528; Works 1:181-85) draws specifically on Luther’s
Prefaces to the Old Testament (WA DB 8:27= AE 35:245-46).
9 Rupp, English Protestant Tradition, 50.
10 Peter Newman Brooks demonstrated Cranmer’s “Lutheran phase” in Cranmer’s Doctrine
of the Eucharist (London: Macmillan, 1965).