The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Reformation
William Tyndale
1494–1536 · English
The hunted translator whose English New Testament — made from the Greek — still echoes in every English Bible.
The life
William Tyndale asked permission to translate the New Testament into English and was refused, so he left England and did it anyway — from Erasmus's Greek text, not the Latin, a first for English. Printed at Worms in 1526, his New Testaments were smuggled into England in bales of cloth and burned by the bishop of London as fast as they were found.
Betrayed by a friend at Antwerp, Tyndale was imprisoned for sixteen months and executed in October 1536 — strangled at the stake, then burned — praying, witnesses said, 'Lord, open the King of England's eyes.' Within three years the king had licensed an English Bible built largely on Tyndale's work. Something like four-fifths of the King James New Testament is Tyndale's wording still.