William Tyndale Issue 16 | 1987 Purchase this issue

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That William Tyndale translated and published, in 1526, the first-ever mechanically-printed New Testament in the English language?

That he did this in an era when the English Catholic church had in effect a law that made it a crime punishable by death to translate the Bible into English, and when on one day in 1519, the church authorities publicly burned a woman and six men for nothing more than teaching their children English versions of the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Apostles’ Creed?!

That Tyndale’s translations (he produced multiple editions) were so fundamentally correct and so generally smooth in word flow that more than 90 percent of his wordings appeared in the King James Version that was published nearly 100 years later, and more than 75 percent of his wordings appear in the Revised Standard Version of 1952?

That at about the age of 42, he was strangled and then burned at the stake for the heresies of translating the Bible into English and questioning the authority of the pope and the established church?

That many of the English Catholic parish priests in Tyndale’s day were so corrupt that they were widely known as “common drunkards” and regular hosts at their abbeys to “brothel women”? Even Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the pope’s personal representative in England, lived with a “wife” for several years and had two children, then gave her away to another man, complete with dowry!

That in their efforts to suppress circulation of Tyndale’s first edition of an English New Testament, the English Catholic authorities wasted the equivalent of several thousand dollars trying to buy up and burn all the copies he’d had printed? And they did this twice! The waste to them was that their ...