SOURCE: Pineas, Rainer. “William Tyndale: Controversialist.” Studies in Philology 60, no. 2 (April 1963): 117-32.

In the following essay, Pineas examines how Tyndale's “techniques of language, reasoning, form, and general economy of treatment” guided his controversy with the ecclesiastical establishment.

William Tyndale, whom his great opponent Thomas More called “the captain of our Englyshe heretikes,” has been studied as a translator of the Bible and as an advocate of doctrinal and moral reformation.¹ The specific polemical techniques he employed in his criticism of the existing ecclesiastical system and in his demands for the establishment of what he believed to be God's truth have received no attention. It is, therefore, the purpose of this paper to examine some of Tyndale's techniques of religious controversy.

Since adequate studies of Tyndale's polemical use of history and of the scriptures would be of such a length as to put them beyond the confines of this...