William Tyndale (ca 1494 - 1536), an Oxford scholar, translated the New Testament from its original Greek into English for everyone to read. He worked at a time when, in England, to own a Bible in anything but Latin was punishable by torture and death. Very few people knew any Latin at all. With the exception of the popular narratives portrayed in mystery plays, much of the content of the Bible was unknown. In his native Gloucestershire, a cleric had told Tyndale that ‘We were better without God's law than the Pope's’, to which he famously replied that if God spared his life, before many years he would ‘cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of Scripture than thou dost.’

Though forced to work abroad, alone and in poverty and danger, Tyndale succeeded. His printed pocket-size New Testaments, smuggled into Britain from 1526, were eagerly read and heard, even by ploughboys.

When no other Englishman knew Hebrew, Tyndale learned the language in Germany, and his Old Testament translations — the first ever from Hebrew into English — were similarly received. Thousands of his Testaments, and other writings like The Obedience of a Christian Man, circulated in Britain, in spite of ruthless campaigns by the bishops to seize and burn them.

Before Tyndale could finish his Old Testament, he was arrested in Antwerp, and after 16 months in a prison cell, on 6 October 1536 he was strangled and burned for heresy.

With great bravery, Tyndale had opened the Book which could never be shut up again. Only months after his death, King Henry VIII licensed the first complete printed Bible in English, containing all his translations. Two years later Henry ordered an English Bible to be placed in every church so that people could read it for themselves. From that Bible, all the many thousands of versions of Bibles in English have followed, right up to today. Even the great 1611 ‘King James Version’ (the ‘Authorised Version’) is, in the New Testament, over 80% exactly Tyndales work, and Tyndale is strongly present in the English Old Testament, then and now.

Tyndale's solitary courage, and his skill with languages — including supremely, his own — enriched English history in ways still not properly examined, and then reached out to affect all English-speaking nations.