William Tyndale

Born in 1494 in Gloucestershire, William Tyndale was a Protestant martyr and humanist, but his name is particularly memorable as one of the innovators in the English translations of the Bible. He was educated at Oxford and later at Cambridge. After concluding his University career he went for a project of an English translation of The Bible which was then in Latin for the Englishmen. But finding no support and particularly opposition from the Church of England, he left England for the continent in 1524, never to return again. He settled in Cologne in 1525 and started his work of the translation of the New Testament. He completed the same in the same year at Worms in the same year after finding problems at Cologne. His translation of the New Testament won commendation and was to become the basis for the Authorised Version, planned by King James.

William Tyndale

Doctrinally, he was close to Luther, whom he met at Wittenberg, on justification by faith, but Zwinglan, in his view of the Eucharist. His view of the king as the sole authority in the state was expressed in his The Obedience of a Christian Man, which won him the approval of Henry VIII. Nonetheless Tyndale later opposed the king's divorce. A translation of Erasmus's Enchiridion Militis Christianae as The Manual of the Christian Knight is attributed to him. Tyndale was arrested for heresy at Antwerp, imprisoned at Vilvorde near Brussels, and strangled and burned at the stake in 1536.