the grass-roots spread of Wycliffe's Bible resulted in a death sentence for any unlicensed possession of Scripture in English—even though translations in all other major European languages had been accomplished and made available.[SUP]
[
Tyndale had to learn Hebrew in Germany due to England's active
Edict of Expulsion against the Jews. He worked in an age where Greek was available to the European scholarly community for the first time in centuries. Erasmus compiled and edited Greek Scriptures into the
Textus Receptus—ironically, to improve upon the Latin
Vulgate—following the
Renaissance-fueling
Fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the dispersion of Greek-speaking intellectuals and texts into a Europe which previously had access to none. Sharing Erasmus' translation ideals, Tyndale took the ill-regarded, unpopular and awkward
Middle-English "vulgar" tongue, improved upon it using Greek and Hebrew
syntaxes and
idioms, and formed an
Early Modern English basis that
Shakespeare and others would later follow and build upon as Tyndale-inspired
vernacular forms took over.[SUP]
[2][/SUP][SUP]
[4][/SUP] When a copy of
The Obedience of a Christian Man fell into the hands of Henry VIII, the king found the rationale to break the Church in England from the Roman Catholic Church in 1534.[SUP][4][/SUP][SUP][5][/SUP][SUP][page needed]
[/SUP]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 request that the King of England's eyes would be opened seemed to find its fulfillment just two years later with Henry's authorization of
The Great Bible for the Church of England—which was largely Tyndale's own work. Hence, the
Tyndale Bible, as it was known, continued to play a key role in spreading
Reformation ideas across the English-speaking world and eventually, on the global
British Empire.
Notably, in 1611, the 54 independent scholars who created the
King James Version drew significantly from Tyndale, as well as translations that descended from his. One estimate suggests the
New Testament in the King James Version is 83% Tyndale's, and the
Old Testament 76%.[SUP]
[6][/SUP] With his translation of the Bible the first ever to be printed in English, and a model for subsequent English translations, in 2002, Tyndale was placed at number 26 in the BBC's poll of the
100 Greatest Britons.[SUP]
[7][/SUP][SUP]
[8][/SUP][/SUP]
