Contributions
William Tyndale is the man who gave English its Bible. An Oxford-trained humanist and a reader of Erasmus, he conceived the forbidden project of translating Scripture into the language of the people, directly from Hebrew and Greek rather than from Latin. Refused in England, he went into continental exile: his English New Testament appeared at Worms in 1526 and entered the realm in secret, hidden in bales of cloth. He went on to translate the Pentateuch and other books of the Old Testament. Hunted by the agents of Henry VIII and the Church, he was betrayed at Antwerp, imprisoned in the castle of Vilvoorde, then strangled and burned in 1536. His work, condemned in his lifetime, became the foundation of every later English version: the King James Bible of 1611 keeps, for much of its New Testament, the very prose of Tyndale.
Significance
Few men have shaped a language so powerfully with so little glory in their lifetime. By forging a clear, rhythmic English biblical prose, meant to be read by ploughman and scholar alike, Tyndale shaped modern English almost as much as Shakespeare. Phrases he coined or fixed - "the powers that be," "the salt of the earth," "let there be light," "my brother's keeper" - belong to the common treasury of the language, often without readers knowing their source. The King James Bible is reckoned to preserve a very large proportion of his wording. But his audacity was also a political challenge: to translate Scripture was to take it from the monopoly of the clergy and place it in every hand. That act, which authority judged seditious, cost him his life. He died a martyr in 1536, abroad, not knowing that two years later an English Bible - built on his labour - would be set by royal order in every church in the realm. His shadow lies in the harshness of the polemicist, severe toward his opponents; his light, in the tenacity of a man who staked his life on a sentence put within reach of all.
Influence
He founded the tradition of the English Bible: Coverdale, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible and above all the King James Version inherit his prose directly. Beyond religion, he lastingly shaped the vocabulary and cadence of the English language, and inspired the Protestant claim to direct, personal access to Scripture.
Anecdote
Challenged by a churchman who held it useless to put the Bible into the hands of the unlearned, Tyndale is said by the martyrologist John Foxe to have retorted that if God spared his life he would cause a boy who drives the plough to know more of Scripture than his adversary did. The promise outlasted his death. Strangled at the stake of Vilvoorde before being burned, he cried out, again according to Foxe, a last prayer for the very king who had condemned him.