Origin of the
English Bibles

As he was burned at the stake, Wycliffe's final words were, "Lord open the King of England's eyes."

First Works

Tyndale was born during the Renaissance. He graduated with a Master's Degree in 1515 from Oxford, where he had studied the Scriptures in both Greek and Hebrew. Committed at the age of 30 to translating the whole Bible from original languages, he sought a place in London in 1523.

Failing to secure a suitable place of study from the Bishop, Tyndale found a friendly cloth merchant who gave him space. but within a year it was clear that the environment was not amenable to his work, so he went to Germany. There he was able to use the newly-invented printing press, providing mankind with the first Bible to be mass-produced and the first to be translated directly from the original languages.

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When the original edition of the King James Bible was published in 1611, roughly 6 million people spoke English as their first language.
By the mid-nineteenth century, there were 60 million English speakers, and now, some 350 million people speak primarily English.
Add to that all those who use English in business or information processing as a second or third language, and the figure tops 2 billion.
This makes English the most dominant tongue in history. Not since the Tower of Babel has any one language commanded such worldwide usage, and most of this growth has taken place since 1950. ^(*)

William Tyndale

Tyndale held views similar to Wycliffe, and like the latter, he actively published his views about the overweening Church authorities -- both in Rome and in England.

A clergyman hopelessly entrenched in Roman Catholic dogma once taunted Tyndale with the statement,

"We are better to be without God's laws than the Pope's."

Tyndale was infuriated by such Roman Catholic heresies, and he replied,

"I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause the boy that drives the plow to know more of the scriptures than you!"

At this time the English Church was still under the authority of Papal Rome, which was strongly opposed to putting the scripture in the hands of the laity, so Tyndale went to Germany. Whether or not Tyndale actually met Luther, he was well acquainted with Luther's German translation, and both men worked from the same Greek translation made by Erasmus in 1516.

One of Tyndale's associates commented that William was so adept at conversation in any of eight languages that one would be hard-pressed to know his native tongue.

His command of languages served him well on two fronts: Not only was it indispensable for the very sake of translation, but Tyndale was hunted by both secular authorities and the Pope's forces. His work is thought to have been produced mostly in Hamburg and Wittenburg; at any rate, it was always under cover of secrecy.

When he left England, Tyndale new little, if any, Hebrew. Nevertheless, he came to understand it so well as to produced the translation from the original language, the entire Pentateuch, the Books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings, First Chronicles, contained in Matthew's Bible of 1537, and of the Book of Jonah.

Also of important note, Tyndale's work was reproduced on a new medium: Johannes Gutenberg's 1440 invention of the moveable-type press made it possible to mass-produce the Scriptures in the format of the quarto, making binding far more efficient. The quarto is a format in which eight pages are printed on each side of full sheets, which are then folded two times so that sixteen pages result on eight leaves. These folded "signatures" are then collated, bound and trimmed to form the book, which finally measures about a foot in height, more or less. Quarto refers more specifically to the size rather than the number of pages in the signature, so "quartos in 8s" is the bibliographer's terms for the format Gutenberg used here.

Gutenberg's Bible, also known as the 42-line Bible, is acclaimed for its high aesthetic and technical quality. Only twenty-one complete copies survive.

As an ironic aside, one of the more lucrative projects of Gutenberg was the printing of thousands of indulgences for the Church!

Tyndale was betrayed by a friend, Philips, the agent either of Henry or of English ecclesiastics, or possibly of both. Tyndale was arrested and imprisoned in the castle of Vilvoorden for over 500 days of horrible conditions. He was tried for heresy and treason in a ridiculously unfair trial, and convicted. Tyndale was then strangled with a wire passed through the stake and around his neck and burnt at the stake in the prison yard, Oct. 6, 1536. died at Vilvoorden (6 miles north-east of Brussels), Belgium, Oct. 6, 1536. His last words were, "Lord, open the king of England's eyes." This prayer was answered three years later in the publication of King Henry VIII's 1539 English "Great Bible".

Wycliffe		Coverdale