William Tyndale
- Lived
- c. 1494–1536
- Era
- Reformation
- Where
- England and the Low Countries
- Tradition
- Anglican
The English New Testament, and death for making it
An English scholar who, refused permission to translate the Bible into English, left for the continent and did it anyway, printing the New Testament from Greek in 1526 and smuggling it home in bales of cloth. He was betrayed near Brussels, strangled and burned.
Why it matters
He translated from Greek and Hebrew rather than from the Vulgate, and his ear was extraordinary: the phrases are still in use — let there be light, the powers that be, the salt of the earth, a law unto themselves. Something like five-sixths of the King James New Testament is his wording, carried through by translators working under the authority that had killed him seventy years earlier.
In the record
-
1534–1559 AD Reform
The English Reformation
Executed before it; his wording carried into the English Bible regardless
All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.