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from his friend Erasmus, who found himself twice snared in these disputes. Luther claimed him for a master although Erasmus opposed Luther’s violent expression of their joint position and disassociated himself from the bloody consequences of the German wars. Now Thomas More saw Erasmus as an ally. Yet Erasmus wanted the Bible to be translated into every language and read as widely as possible. More’s frenzy against Tyndale was nourished by his concern for the future of the ancient position of the Church and monarchy. He saw it threatened and his liberal humanism was thrown overboard.
    More savaged Tyndale’s translation. He even claimed it was not the New Testament but a forgery. He brought no proof and nor could he substantiate in any but the most minor way ‘its faults . . . wherein there were noted wrong above a thousand texts’.
    Tyndale’s reply, Answer Unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue , carefully refuted the false claims of Henry VIII’s bulldog. More’s counter-response, Confutation of Tyndale’s answer , included descriptions of Tyndale as ‘a beast’ discharging ‘a filthy foam of blasphemies out of his brutish beastly mouth’, a ‘hellhound’ fit for ‘the dogs of hell to feed on’. He called him the son of the devil himself.
    Whenever Tyndale challenged him on detail, More’s method was to bluster. And he descended into a sort of madness. In his defence of Roman Catholicism, he claimed, for instance, that, as some miracles had it, the heads of saints could be buried in two places.
    More was fighting for the rights of the Roman Catholic position to be infallible and to be whatever it decided it wanted to be.
He saw it as sanctified by time and service. Any change, he thought, would inevitably destroy the sacrament of Holy Truth, the papacy and the monarchy. Everything must be accepted as it had been. To dislodge one pebble would be to set off the avalanche.
    The vitriol against Tyndale’s translation and the burning and murdering of anyone offering the slightest disagreement to the Old Church’s view show what was at stake. Power was to be taken from those who had held it for so long that they believed that it belonged to them by right. Their authority had been exercised for so many centuries that the prospect of its being diminished in any way was felt to be fatal. They wanted the populace to be subservient, silent and grateful. Anything else was unacceptable. Tyndale’s print-popular New Testament had breached the fortifications of a privilege so deeply founded in the past that it seemed God-given and unchallengeable. It was not to be tolerated.
    While this battle of the pamphlets was going on and Tyndale was being harried from town to town in Europe, evading both the King’s spies and the agents of the Holy Roman Emperor, he began to translate the Old Testament. To do this he found a way to learn Hebrew, a language in which he rejoiced. ‘Where did Tyndale learn Hebrew?’ asks David Daniell in his biography. ‘The straightforward answer is that we do not know. Because so little Hebrew was known in England in the 1520s, he must have learnt it somewhere on the Continent, where Hebrew studies were gathering pace.’
    He would have had access to a Hebrew grammar and a dictionary and ‘a printed Hebrew text of scripture would not have been too hard to come by from a German bookseller.’ And we know he was ‘unusually skilled with languages’. Tyndale saw a close affinity between Hebrew and the English form. ‘The manner of speaking in both is one,’ he wrote, ‘so that in a thousand places there needs not but to translate it into the English, word for word.’
He found similarities with Anglo-Saxon and used Hebraic contractions and words so boldly they are now embedded in English.
    To the first five books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy,