TODAY IN HISTORY WILLIAM TYNDALE WAS STRANGLED AND BURNT ON THE STAKE FOR TRANSLATING THE BIBLE FOR ALL TO UNDERSTAND.

"Tyndale" (1494 – 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 as a translator of the Bible into English, influenced by the works of Erasmus of Rotterdam and Martin Luther.

Tyndale Bible
A number of partial English translations had been made from the 7th century onwards, but the religious ferment caused by 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 worked during a Renaissance of scholarship, which saw the publication of Reuchlin's Hebrew grammar in 1506. Greek was available to the European scholarly community for the first time in centuries, as it welcomed Greek-speaking intellectuals and texts following the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Notably, Erasmus compiled, edited, and published the Greek Scriptures in 1516. Luther's German Bible appeared in 1522.

Tyndale's translation was the first English Bible to draw directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, the first English translation to take advantage of the printing press, the first of the new English Bibles of the Reformation, and the first English translation to use Jehovah ("Iehouah" as God's name as preferred by English Protestant Reformers. 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.

A copy of Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), which some claim or interpreted to argue that the king of a country should be the head of that country's church rather than the pope, fell into the hands of the English King Henry VIII, providing a rationale to break the Church in England from the Catholic Church in 1534. In 1530, Tyndale wrote The Practyse of Prelates, opposing Henry's annulment of his own marriage on the grounds that it contravened Scripture.[6] Fleeing England, Tyndale sought refuge in the Flemish territory of the Catholic Emperor Charles V. 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 fulfilment just one year later with Henry's authorisation of the Matthew Bible, which was largely Tyndale's own work, with missing sections translated by John Rogers and Miles Coverdale.

Tyndale's translation of the Bible was plagiarized for subsequent English translations, including the Great Bible and the Bishops' Bible, authorised by the Church of England. In 1611, the 47 scholars who produced the King James Bible drew significantly from Tyndale's original work and the other translations that descended from his. One estimate suggests that the New Testament in the King James Version is 83% Tyndale's words and the Old Testament 76%. Hence, the work of Tyndale continued to play a key role in spreading Reformation ideas across the English-speaking world and eventually across the British Empire. In 2002, Tyndale was placed 26th in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.

LIFE
Tyndale was born around 1494 in Melksham Court, Stinchcombe, a village near Dursley, Gloucestershire. The Tyndale family also went by the name Hychyns (Hitchins), and it was as William Hychyns that Tyndale was enrolled at Magdalen Hall, Oxford. Tyndale's family had moved to Gloucestershire at some point in the 15th century, probably as a result of the Wars of the Roses. The family originated from Northumberland via East Anglia. Tyndale's brother Edward was receiver to the lands of Lord Berkeley, as attested to in a letter by Bishop Stokesley of London.

Tyndale is recorded in two genealogies as having been the brother of Sir William Tyndale of Deane, Northumberland, and Hockwold, Norfolk, who was knighted at the marriage of Arthur, Prince of Wales to Catherine of Aragon. Tyndale's family was thus descended from Baron Adam de Tyndale, a tenant-in-chief of Henry I. William Tyndale's niece Margaret Tyndale was married to Protestant martyr Rowland Taylor, burnt during the Marian Persecutions.

At Oxford
Tyndale began a Bachelor of Arts degree at Magdalen Hall (later Hertford College) of Oxford University in 1506 and received his B.A. in 1512, the same year becoming a subdeacon. He was made Master of Arts in July 1515 and was held to be a man of virtuous disposition, leading an unblemished life. The M.A. allowed him to start studying theology, but the official course did not include the systematic study of Scripture. As Tyndale later complained:

They have ordained that no man shall look on the Scripture, until he be noselled in heathen learning eight or nine years and armed with false principles, with which he is clean shut out of the understanding of the Scripture.

He was a gifted linguist and became fluent over the years in French, Greek, Hebrew, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, in addition to English. Between 1517 and 1521, he went to the University of Cambridge. Erasmus had been the leading teacher of Greek there from August 1511 to January 1512, but not during Tyndale's time at the university.

Tyndale became chaplain at the home of Sir John Walsh at Little Sodbury in Gloucestershire and tutor to his children around 1521. His opinions proved controversial to fellow clergymen, and the next year he was summoned before John Bell, the Chancellor of the Diocese of Worcester, although no formal charges were laid at the time. After the meeting with Bell and other church leaders, Tyndale, according to John Foxe, had an argument with a "learned but blasphemous clergyman", who allegedly asserted: "We had better be without God's laws than the Pope's.", to which Tyndale responded: "I defy the Pope, and all his laws; and if God spares my life, ere many years, I will cause the boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost!"

Tyndale left for London in 1523 to seek permission to translate the Bible into English. He requested help from Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall, a well-known classicist who had praised Erasmus after working together with him on a Greek New Testament. The bishop, however, declined to extend his patronage, telling Tyndale that he had no room for him in his household.Tyndale preached and studied "at his book" in London for some time, relying on the help of cloth merchant Humphrey Monmouth. During this time, he lectured widely, including at St Dunstan-in-the-West at Fleet Street in London.

IN EUROPE

The beginning of the Gospel of John, from Tyndale's 1525 translation of the New Testament.
Tyndale left England for continental Europe, perhaps at Hamburg, in the spring of 1524, possibly travelling on to Wittenberg. There is an entry in the matriculation registers of the University of Wittenberg of the name "Guillelmus Daltici ex Anglia", and this has been taken to be a Latinisation of "William Tyndale from England". He began translating the New Testament at this time, possibly in Wittenberg, completing it in 1525 with assistance from Observant Friar William Roy.

In 1525, publication of the work by Peter Quentell in Cologne was interrupted by the impact of anti-Lutheranism. A full edition of the New Testament was produced in 1526 by printer Peter Schöffer in Worms, a free imperial city then in the process of adopting Lutheranism. More copies were soon printed in Antwerp. It was smuggled from continental Europe into England and Scotland. The translation was condemned in October 1526 by Bishop Tunstall, who issued warnings to booksellers and had copies burned in public. Marius notes that the "spectacle of the scriptures being put to the torch... provoked controversy even amongst the faithful." Cardinal Wolsey condemned Tyndale as a heretic, first stated in open court in January 1529.

From an entry in George Spalatin's diary for 11 August 1526, Tyndale apparently remained at Worms for about a year. It is not clear exactly when he moved to Antwerp. The colophon to Tyndale's translation of Genesis and the title pages of several pamphlets from this time purported to have been printed by Hans Lufft at Marburg, but this is a false address. Lufft, the printer of Luther's books, never had a printing press at Marburg.

Tyndale, before being strangled and burned at the stake in Vilvoorde, cries out, "Lord, open the King of England's eyes". Woodcut from Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563).
Following the hostile reception of his work by Tunstall, Wolsey and Thomas More in England, Tyndale retreated into hiding in Hamburg and continued working. He revised his New Testament and began translating the Old Testament and writing various treatises.

Opposition to Henry VIII's annulment
In 1530, he wrote The Practyse of Prelates, opposing Henry VIII's planned annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in favour of Anne Boleyn, on the grounds that it was unscriptural and that it was a plot by Cardinal Wolsey to get Henry entangled in the papal courts of Pope Clement VII. The king's wrath was aimed at Tyndale. Henry asked Emperor Charles V to have the writer apprehended and returned to England under the terms of the Treaty of Cambrai; however, the emperor responded that formal evidence was required before extradition. Tyndale developed his case in An Answer unto Sir Thomas More's Dialogue.

THE BETRAYAL AND DEATH
Eventually, Tyndale was betrayed by Henry Phillips to the imperial authorities, seized in Antwerp in 1535, and held in the castle of Vilvoorde (Filford) near Brussels.[36] Some suspect that Phillips was hired by Bishop Stokesley to gain Tyndale's confidence and then betray him. He was tried on a charge of heresy in 1536 and was condemned to be burned to death despite Thomas Cromwell's intercession on his behalf. Tyndale "was strangled to death while tied at the stake, and then his dead body was burned". His final words, spoken "at the stake with a fervent zeal, and a loud voice", were reported as "Lord! Open the King of England's eyes." The traditional date of commemoration is 6 October, but records of Tyndale's imprisonment suggest that the actual date of his execution might have been some weeks earlier. Foxe gives 6 October as the date of commemoration (left-hand date column), but gives no date of death (right-hand date column).Biographer David Daniell states the date of death only as "one of the first days of October 1536".

Within four years, four English translations of the Bible were published in England at the king's behest, including Henry's official Great Bible. All were based on Tyndale's work.

Hmmmm OP you tried!

interesting read.

Nice one @ op.

Thank you

YoonSung20:
Hmmmm OP you tried!

Thank you but this man is a legend

sylve11:
interesting read.

Nice one @ op.

will never reach FP

God no go shame us

Siberia01:



will never reach FP

Never mind people who would instead pretend that God instead used the likes of King James to bring the common man the Bible - i refer to those who worshipped, maybe until recently, the King James translation as if God Himself had a brother called King James.

It was after the rule of these corrupt and bias kings that King James I became king and with his power influence and money made the Bible get to the nuke and crannies of his kingdom and beyond. So he help made it available for you and me.

Kobojunkie:
Never mind people who would instead pretend that God instead used the likes of King James to bring the common man the Bible - i refer to those who worshipped, maybe until recently, the King James translation as if God Himself had a brother called King James.

fanenene:
It was after the rule of these corrupt and bias kings that King James I became king and with his power influence and money made the Bible get to the nuke and crannies of his kingdom and beyond. So he help made it available for you and me.

After the rule of corrupt and biased Kings? And was King James not himself one of the corrupt and biased Kings of the time?

He benefited greatly from those corrupt and biased kings who came before him as he was able to inherit a church of England, thanks to his grandfather. The bible he translated was meant for the church that he was king over, not for all of the world.

But at least it made the Bible available for all.

Kobojunkie:
After the rule of corrupt and biased Kings? And was King James not himself one of the corrupt and biased Kings of the time?

He benefited greatly from those corrupt and biased kings who came before him as he was able to inherit a church of England, thanks to his grandfather. The bible he translated was meant for the church that he was king over, not for all of the world.

fanenene:
But at least it made the Bible available for all.

I would not say that if I was you. The King James Bible also allowed for the proliferation of Charlattans/false prophets. Yes, to this day, we have so many who of them champion the old king James version yet cannot even read and comprehend a note of Shakespeare (English of the same time).

What I am saying is that it gave room/opportunity for individual translator to translate the Bible into serveral translation, thereby making it readily accessable to the general public.

Kobojunkie:
I would not say that if I was you. The King James Bible also allowed for the proliferation of Charlattans/false prophets. Yes, to this day, we have so many who of them champion the old king James version yet cannot even read and comprehend a note of Shakespeare (English of the same time).

The Church fathers accused William Tyndale of corrupting God's word and violating the tradition not to tamper with God's word. William wanted everyone to read and understand God's word in the English language but due to all the traditions added to the Christendom faith the Church fathers feel it's going to cause division in the church.
William was strangled and burnt with all his work only a copy was smuggled and it's kept in the museum till today!
The Church tradition of attacking those who tried to ascertain the truth is still ongoing, but due to America's freedom of speech expression and worship, nobody can arrest anyone again like the Muslims are doing with their Qur'an till today.
Back then the church and the Muslims had almost the same attitude towards what they call blasphemy!

True

MaxInDHouse:
The Church fathers accused William Tyndale of corrupting God's word and violating the tradition not to tamper with God's word. William wanted everyone to read and understand God's word in the English language but due to all the traditions added to the Christendom faith the Church fathers feel it's going to cause division in the church.
William was strangled and burnt with all his work only a copy was smuggled and it's kept in the museum till today!
The Church tradition of attacking those who tried to ascertain the truth is still ongoing, but due to America's freedom of speech expression and worship, nobody can arrest anyone again like the Muslims are doing with their Qur'an till today.
Back then the church and the Muslims had almost the same attitude towards what they call blasphemy!