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“THE PROCESS OF THE TEXT”
THE REFORMATION HERMENEUTICS OF WILLIAM TYNDALE
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TIBOR FABINY
1he father of English Bible translation and thus of English Protestantism is,
undoubtedly, William Tyndale (1492?-1536). Several articles have already been
published on Tyndale as a biblical scholar’, as a translator’, as a maker of the
English language? but only a a few scholars have tried to explore Tyndale’s
hermeneutics’.
The issue of the literal sense is a frequently debated question in biblical
studies. The Old Testament scholar Brevard S. Childs in a 1976 article argued
that it was both an "ancient and modern problem". He pointed out that while
during the time of the Reformation the literal sense meant the explicative theo¬
logical sense of the text as well as the historical reference. However, for the
historical-critical method, emerging in the eigtheenth century, the sensus lit¬
teralis became simply sensus historicus, and this method was characterized by
a total commitment to this new understanding of the literal sense. The general
assumption has been that there is an unbroken line of continuity between the
Reformation and the eighteenth century with regard to the literal sense. Argu¬
ing against this mainstream, Hans Frei, in his The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative
(1974), has demonstrated the discontinuity between the Reformers and the
eighteenth and nineteenth century critics.f
| HAMMOND, Gerald, William Tyndale’s Pentateuch: Its Relation to Luther’s German Bible and the
Hebrew Original, Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980), 351-385.
2 CuMMINGS, Brian, The Theology of Translation, in J. T. Day — E. Lund — A. M. O’Donell (eds.),
Word, Church and State. Tyndale Quincentenary Essays, Washington D.C., The Catholic Uni¬
versity of America Press, 1998, 36-61.
Davies, Norman, William Tyndale’s English of Controversy, The Chamber Memorial Lecture
delivered 4 March 1971 at University College London, London, University College, 1971.
* PARKER, Douglas, Tyndale’s Biblical Hermeneutics, in Word, Church and State, 87-101.
5 BREVARD, S. Childs, The Sensus Literalis of Scripture: An Ancient and Modern Problem”, in
H. Donner at al. (eds.), Beiträge zur Altestamentliche Theologie, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1976, pp. 88-99.
° Frei, Hans, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century
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