William Tyndale

William Tyndale was born in Gloucestershire around 1494, studied at Magdalen Hall, Oxford (later Hertford College), and took his MA at Cambridge in 1515. He was a brilliant linguist — fluent in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, and Spanish — and an unusually careful reader of Erasmus's 1516 Greek New Testament. By his late twenties he had become convinced that the people of England could never be evangelized properly while they had no Bible in their own language. He told a learned clergyman in a Gloucestershire dispute that, if God spared his life, he would cause a plough boy to know more of Scripture than the priest did.

The English ecclesiastical authorities refused to license a vernacular New Testament. In 1524 Tyndale left England — he would never return — and made his way to Hamburg, Wittenberg (where he probably met Luther), and finally Cologne, where the first sheets of his English New Testament began to come off the press in 1525. A raid forced him to flee with his pages to Worms, where the printing was completed in 1526. The book was an octavo — small, portable, dangerous. Copies were smuggled across the Channel hidden in bales of cloth. Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall of London bought them up to burn them, accidentally financing Tyndale's next print run.

Tyndale settled in Antwerp around 1528 and spent the rest of his life there as a fugitive — at one point sheltering with the English Merchant Adventurers, at one point a pensioner of Henry VIII's agent Stephen Vaughan, always one step ahead of arrest. He revised his New Testament in 1534 (the version preserved word-for-word in the King James and the Authorized Bibles), translated the Pentateuch (Genesis through Deuteronomy, published in Antwerp 1530), and was working through the historical books from Joshua to 2 Chronicles when he was finally betrayed by an English Catholic informer named Henry Phillips. He was arrested in Antwerp in May 1535, imprisoned at Vilvoorde castle for sixteen months, tried for heresy, and executed on October 6, 1536. He was strangled at the stake and then burned. His last recorded words were: "Lord, open the king of England's eyes."

The eyes were opened within twelve months. Henry VIII authorized the Coverdale Bible (1535) and the Matthew Bible (1537), which were substantially Tyndale's translation — published under another name because Tyndale's own was still officially proscribed. The Great Bible of 1539, the Geneva Bible of 1560, the Bishops' Bible of 1568, and ultimately the Authorized King James Version of 1611 all rest on Tyndale's foundation. Modern textual analyses estimate that approximately 84% of the New Testament and 76% of the Old Testament portions Tyndale completed pass through verbatim into the King James. The English language itself — the phrases "my brother's keeper," "the powers that be," "the salt of the earth," "a law unto themselves," "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" — was shaped by Tyndale as it has been by no other writer except possibly Shakespeare. He died for a translation that the English-speaking world has been reading ever since.