William Tyndale and Congregation: More than Defensible

William Tyndale in his translation of Matthew 16:18 rendered it this way,  “And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter: and upon this rock I will build my congregation.  And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”  David Daniell, author of the introduction to the 1989 Yale University Press edition of the Tyndale Bible said 

“The Bishop of London hunted down and burned many thousands of Tyndale’s successive New Testaments and Pentateuch’s with fanatical thoroughness, a ruthlessness that seems close to hysteria – only a dozen in all survive.  King Hevry VIII’s chancellor, Sir Thomas More, showed himself less than gentile, reasoned, saintly and urbane in his long, and indeed violent polemics against Tyndale.  He calls him in his Confutation, ‘a beast’, as one of the ‘hell-hounds that the devil hath in his kennel’, discharging a ‘filthy foam of blasphemies out of his brutish beastly mouth’.  Elsewhere, More calls him a deceiver, a hypocrite; puffed up with the poison of pride, malice and envy’.  Yet the best that More, in all the great length of his tirades, can summon against Tyndale, when all is boiled down, is the he translated the Greed word for ‘elder’ as elder, not priest and the Greek word for ‘repentance’ as repentance, not do penance, the Greek word for ‘congregation’ as congregation not church…Even Erasmus, More’s friend, had translated the Greek  ekklēsia, as congregation, not church. Every change that Tyndale makes is more than defensible: it is correct.”