William Tyndale

In 1526, English authorities burned three thousand copies of a single book over three days at Paternoster Row. Ten years later, they burned the man who wrote it. Within two years of his death, that same book was mandated in every parish church in England.

This is the story of William Tyndale, the Gloucestershire farmer's son who defied the most powerful religious institution in Europe to put the words of the Bible into the hands of ordinary English readers, and paid for it with his life.

Born at the end of a century that had already burned hundreds for the crime of reading Scripture in their own language, Tyndale grew up in the shadow of that persecution. He carried it with him to Oxford and Cambridge, where his encounter with Erasmus's Greek New Testament and the earliest currents of the Reformation sparked a conviction he would spend the rest of his life pursuing: that a plowboy deserved to know Scripture as well as any priest.

When England offered him no path to fulfill that vow, Tyndale left his homeland forever, translating the New Testament from Greek while evading capture across Germany and the Low Countries. He survived a raided printing press in Cologne, a shipwreck that cost him an early Old Testament manuscript, and years of narrow escapes, before a trusted friend finally betrayed him into the hands of his enemies.

This book follows Tyndale's complete story, from his childhood in the Severn valley through his years of clandestine translation and smuggling, his imprisonment and execution, and the extraordinary afterlife of his work. It traces how his translation became the foundation of the Geneva Bible and the Authorised King James Version, how his choices shaped the English language itself, and how his methods carried forward into the work of missionary translators across Asia and Africa. It also examines why the question Tyndale gave his life to answer, whether Scripture should be translated word for word or interpreted for the reader, remains a living debate among Bible translators today.

Readers will come away with a clear understanding of one of the most consequential and least widely known figures in English history, a sense of what it actually cost to place a Bible in an ordinary reader's hands, and a fuller appreciation for how deeply Tyndale's work shaped the language and faith of the English speaking world.

Tyndale never lived to see most of what his translation accomplished. This book tells the story of the man who changed a language and a nation, and who did not live to know it.