William Tyndale- Bible Translator and Martyr

William Tyndale (sometimes spelled Tindall or Tyndall; ) (c. 1494 - 1536) was a 16th-century Protestant reformer and scholar who, influenced by the work of Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther,Daniell, David (1994) William Tyndale: a biography. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, p. 114 translated considerable parts of the Bible into the Early Modern English of his day. While a number of partial and complete Old English translations had been made from the seventh century onward, and Middle English translations particularly during the 14th century, Tyndale's was the first English translation to draw directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, and the first to take advantage of the new medium of print, which allowed for its wide distribution. In 1535, Tyndale was arrested, jailed in the castle of Vilvoorde outside Brussels for over a year, tried for heresy and burned at the stake. He was strangled before his body was burnt.

Much of Tyndale's work eventually found its way into the King James Version (or "Authorised Version") of the Bible, published in 1611, which, as the work of 54 independent scholars revising the existing English versions, drew significantly on Tyndale's translations. The King James Version New Testament is 83.7 per cent Tyndale's work, with the KJV Old Testament 75.7 per cent Tyndale's.John Nielson and Royal Skousen, ?How much of the King James Bible is William Tyndale's?', Reformation, 3 (1998), pp. 49?74.

Whereas John Wycliffe had earlier produced an English translation of the Bible from Latin, Tyndale was the first to translate from the original Greek language. This was only made possible after Erasmus made the Greek New Testament available in Europe.