William Tyndale, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

William Tyndale

Bible translator and reformer from England

Date of Birth: 06-Oct-1494

Place of Birth: Gloucester, England, United Kingdom

Date of Death: 06-Sep-1536

Profession: writer, translator, theologian, linguist, Bible translator

Nationality: United Kingdom

Zodiac Sign: Libra


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About William Tyndale

  • William Tyndale (; sometimes spelled Tynsdale, Tindall, Tindill, Tyndall; c.?1494 – c.?6 October 1536) was an English scholar who became a leading figure in the Protestant Reformation in the years leading up to his execution.
  • He is well known for his (incomplete) translation of the Bible into English. Tyndale was influenced by the work of Desiderius Erasmus, who made the Greek New Testament available in Europe, and by Martin Luther.
  • A number of partial translations had been made from the seventh century onward, but the spread of Wycliffe's Bible in the late 14th century led to the death penalty for anyone found in unlicensed possession of Scripture in English, although translations were available in all other major European languages.Tyndale's translation was the first English Bible to draw directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, the first English translation to use Jehovah ("Iehouah") as God's name as preferred by English Protestant Reformers, the first English translation to take advantage of the printing press, and first of the new English Bibles of the Reformation.
  • It was taken to be a direct challenge to the hegemony of both the Catholic Church and the laws of England maintaining the church's position.
  • In 1530, Tyndale also wrote The Practyse of Prelates, opposing Henry VIII's annulment of his own marriage on the grounds that it contravened Scripture.Reuchlin's Hebrew grammar was published in 1506.
  • Tyndale worked in an age in which Greek was available to the European scholarly community for the first time in centuries.
  • Erasmus compiled and edited Greek Scriptures following the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.
  • Constantinople's fall helped to fuel the Renaissance and led to the dispersion of Greek-speaking intellectuals and texts into a Europe which previously had no access to them. A copy of Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christian Man, which advocated the idea that the king of a country should be the head of that country's church rather than the pope, fell into the hands of Henry VIII, providing the king with the rationale to break the Church in England from the Catholic Church in 1534.
  • In 1535, Tyndale was arrested and jailed in the castle of Vilvoorde (Filford) outside Brussels for over a year.
  • In 1536, he was convicted of heresy and executed by strangulation, after which his body was burnt at the stake.
  • His dying prayer was that the King of England's eyes would be opened; this seemed to find its fulfillment just one year later with Henry's authorization of the Matthew Bible, which was largely Tyndale's own work – missing sections supplemented with translations by John Rogers and Miles Coverdale.
  • Following this came the Great Bible and then the Bishop's Bible, authorized by the church of England.
  • Hence, the work of Tyndale continued to play a key role in spreading Reformation ideas across the English-speaking world and, eventually, to the British Empire. In 1611, the 47 scholars who produced the King James Bible drew significantly from Tyndale's work, the Matthew Bible, as well as from translations that descended from his.
  • One estimate suggests that the New Testament in the King James Version is 83% Tyndale's and the Old Testament 76%.
  • His translation of the Bible was the first to be printed in English and to be translated from the original languages to English; it became a model for subsequent English translations.
  • In 2002, Tyndale was placed at number 26 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.

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