Strangled And Burned For Translating The Bible

In 1523, a scholar named William Tyndale asked the Bishop of London for permission to translate the New Testament into English. The request was refused. The Church’s position was absolute: Scripture stayed in Latin. Ordinary people were not to read it for themselves.

Tyndale replied: “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy who drives the plough to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost.”

He meant it. He left England and never returned alive.

THE HORROR Tyndale fled to the continent — to German cities, to Antwerp, into the uneasy safety of Reformation territory — and began translating. Working from Greek and Hebrew rather than from the Latin Vulgate, he produced an English New Testament of extraordinary clarity and rhythm.

He wrote phrases that are now welded to the language itself:

“Let there be light.”

“The salt of the earth.”

“A law unto themselves.”

“The powers that be.”

“Am I my brother’s keeper?”

“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

“Eat, drink, and be merry.”

Every one of these lines, which drift through everyday speech and literature, was coined in an English Bible being hunted as contraband.

From 1526 onward, copies of Tyndale’s New Testament were smuggled into England — hidden in bales of cloth, stuffed into wine casks, slipped into merchant cargo. The Bishop of London organised public burnings and even bought copies in bulk to destroy them. Tyndale reportedly laughed when he heard: the money from those purchases paid for new printings. The burning funded the next edition.

For roughly eleven years, Tyndale lived as a fugitive: translating, revising, printing, smuggling, always moving ahead of royal and ecclesiastical agents sent to seize him. In 1535, he was betrayed by an English acquaintance, Henry Phillips, who befriended him in Antwerp and then walked him straight into an ambush in a narrow street.

Tyndale was arrested and imprisoned in the fortress of Vilvoorde near Brussels. He was held for over a year, tried for heresy and condemned.

On 6th October 1536, he was led out to a stake. He was given one last chance to recant. He refused.

A chain was fastened around his neck. As it tightened, he shouted his final prayer: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!”

He was strangled. Then his body was burned.

Within two years, Henry VIII — the same king whose officials had pursued Tyndale — authorised an English Bible in every parish church. The version used was the Great Bible of 1539, prepared by Miles Coverdale.

Coverdale’s Bible was largely built on Tyndale’s work. Whole books were taken over; wording was kept; the basic translation was his. The kingdom that had executed him adopted his text.

In 1611, King James I commissioned a new English Bible: the Authorized Version, known as the King James Bible. Modern textual studies show that roughly 80–85% of its New Testament and a large portion of its Old Testament prose are Tyndale’s phrasing, carried over with only slight adjustment. The cadences that shaped English law, literature, politics and worship for centuries are essentially his.

The most influential book in the English‑speaking world is, in large part, the work of a man judicially killed for trying to write it.

THE MODERN RELIC The King James Bible has been printed in billions of copies. It sits in hotel drawers, on lecterns in courts, on altars and bedside tables. Its phrases surface in wedding vows and funeral eulogies, political speeches and pop songs.

Behind those familiar words is a man strangled with a chain and burned at a stake outside a fortress in what is now Belgium.

William Tyndale has a memorial near Vilvoorde and a statue on London’s Victoria Embankment, holding an open Bible within sight of Parliament. His name is on plaques and in church histories.

His prayer — “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes” — was, in a brutal way, answered. The eyes opened. The English Bible was printed. The words for which he died became the words millions read.

The man is ash. The book is everywhere.

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