William Tyndale was the Captain of the Army of Reformers, and was their spiritual leader. Tyndale holds the distinction of being the first man to ever print the New Testament in the English language. Tyndale was a true scholar and a genius, so fluent in eight languages that it was said one would think any one of them to be his native tongue. He is frequently referred to as the “Architect of the English Language”, (even more so than William Shakespeare) as so many of the phrases Tyndale coined are still in our language today.
http://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/william-tyndale.html
Every person who has been blessed through a sound English Bible through the past four centuries owes a large debt to the humble translator who was faithful unto death. The Tyndale Bible literally transformed the nation of England. Multitudes of commoners, for example, were driven to learn to read and thus arise out of illiteracy, by their motivation to study the Bible in their own tongue. The excitement and change which was wrought in British society by the distribution of the first printed English Bible cannot properly be described. The 16th century historian John Foxe, who carefully documented the persecutions of that era, noted, “Everybody that could bought the book or busily read it or got others to read it to them if they could not themselves, and divers more elderly people learned to read on purpose. And even little boys flocked among the rest to hear portions of the holy Scripture read.”
The Tyndale Bible changed the destiny of nations. It even created one out of whole cloth—the United States of America. The Bible brought to America by its first settlers in the early 1600s was the Geneva Bible, an edition of the Tyndale, and the Bible upon which America’s political documents were based in the late 1700s was the King James Bible, another edition of Tyndale.
http://www.wayoflife.org/articles/williamtyndale.htm
***William Tyndale was the Captain of the Army of Reformers, and was their spiritual leader. Tyndale holds the distinction of being the first man to ever print the New Testament in the English language.***
Y’all are really funny. Let’s be honest here and look at the history of English Bibles. And Wyclif preceded Tyndale by 150 years.
But John Wycliffe with his 1382 version of the Bible was not the first person to give English speaking people the Bible in their own tongue, as a popular misguided myth would have it. We have copies of the work of Caedmon from the 7th century, and that of the Venerable Bede, Eadhelm, Guthlac, and Egbert from the 8th (all in Saxon, the prevalent language at that time). From the 9th and 10th centuries come the translations of King Alfred the Great and Aelfric, Archbishop of Canterbury. Early English versions include that of Orm around 1150, the Salus Animae (1250), and the translations of William Shoreham, Richard Rolle (d.1349), and John Trevisa (c.1360).
Other languages are also represented in the list of “vernacular” Catholic Bibles. We can find a translation of the Bible from 1290, written in French, a translation into Dutch (about 1270), and a translation into German (about 1350). Between 1466 and the onset of the Protestant Reformation in 1517, at least fourteen editions appeared in High German, and five in Low German. From 1450 to 1550, for example, there appeared (with express permission from Rome) more than 40 Italian editions or translations of the Bible and eighteen French editions, as well as others in Bohemian, Belgian, Russian, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, and Hungarian. Spain published editions in Spanish starting in 1478.
It is important to remember, that ALL of these vernacular Bibles were “Catholic” Bibles. Remember, the Reformation had not yet occurred. The key issue for the Catholic Church was NOT translating the Bible into vernacular languages, as some say, but simply insuring that the translations were accurate translations.