Tyndale and the Text in the Heart

Abstract

Tyndale's polemic is remarkably preoccupied with reading, looking beyond doctrinal minutiae to the fundamental matter of how to read the scriptures. His vernacular "plain-text" translations of the Bible required a correspondingly accessible way to read plainly. This plain reading had to negotiate long-standing religious tensions between mediation and transgression, and reject the scholastic traditions of intertextuality. Tyndale's solution was "the text in the heart."This article will explore how Tyndale aligns scholastic reading with fragmentation and transgressive mimesis, and how his own theory of reading arises as a reaction to this. I will argue that the text in the heart offers an alternative by transforming reading into the private experience of despair tempered by faith in God's love. This shift enables the reader to transcend the scriptural text and its issues of mediation and transgression, so that he himself can become the perfect expression of God's imagination.