Born sometime in the 1490s, William Tyndale died this day, 1536. His was a violent death at a young age: he was strangled and burned at the stake for what the Roman Catholic Church considered heresy: translating the Bible into the English language.

Tyndale was considered by his peers to be a linguistic genius, but his studies of the Scriptures led him to agree with and endorse the emerging Protestant Reformation, bringing him into conflict with Rome and with the Church of England.

Forbidden from translating the Bible into English in his native England and inspired by Luther’s German translation, Tyndale fled to Germany, where he translated the New Testament and had begun to translate the Old when he was lured out of hiding, caught, condemned as a heretic, and put to death in Belgium.

You might be interested to know that the King James version of the Bible is at least 80% Tyndale’s work. Bible scholar Leland Ryken explains Tyndale’s legacy:

“Tyndale’s translation in any case was the foundation of all subsequent translation of the Reformation era and beyond.”

The English language was farily unrefined when Tyndale wrote, so he had to invent words to convey theological meaning from the original languages. We owe him for: peacemaker, passover, intercession, scapegoat, and atonement, to name a few.

His last words: “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.” We have Bibles we can read in our own English in large part because of William Tyndale and many others like him who literally died to make it possible. Let us thank God that we are able to read, understand, and study the Bible in English. That isn’t true for all who live in the world today.

(Source: Wikipedia and The Word of God in English by Leland Ryken)

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