ABSTRACT: In 1526, William Tyndale produced the first printed English New Testament, a small book with enormous consequences—both immediate and long term. Tyndale’s text profoundly shaped future biblical translations and introduced many enduring neologisms into the English language. Thomas More and other anti-Lutheran contemporaries charged that Tyndale’s translation drew heavily on Martin Luther and his groundbreaking 1522 New Testament ( Septembertestament ). This still-dominant view has eclipsed Erasmus’s influence and privileged the Protestant rather than humanist origins of the English New Testament. Analyzing the philological evidence from Erasmus’s 1516, 1519, and 1522 New Testaments and Annotations, as well as Luther’s 1522 translation, this article demonstrates that Tyndale’s 1526 text shows little to no indebtedness to Luther. On the contrary, Tyndale’s translation project seems to have begun before Luther’s publication and drew more extensively on Erasmus’s texts and annotations than has been recognized. Rather than simply replacing Luther’s supposed dominant influence with Erasmus’s, however, this article reveals considerable innovation and independence in Tyndale’s translation choices. His pathbreaking text should thus be understood not as a product of English Lutheranism but as the achievement of a Renaissance philologist with a particular artistry for converting the layered syntax of ancient Palestine into English idiom.
