WHO WAS WILLIAM TYNDALE?

Tyndale was born at some time in the period 1484-1496 in Melk-Sham Court, Stinch-Combe, a village near Dursley, Gloucester-Shire.
The Tyndale family also went by the name Hychyns (Hitchins), and it was as William Hychyns that he was enrolled at Magdalen Hall, Oxford.
The family derived from North-Umber-Land via East Anglia (a tribe originated in Ang-Elm, Northern Germany. NorthUmberLand was long a wild county, where outlaws and Border Reivers hid from the law. It subsided after the Union of the Crowns of Scotland and England under King James I and VI in 1603. It expanded greatly in the Tudor period(1485-1603). As evidence of its violent history, the county has more castles than any other county in England. The county is noted for its undeveloped landscape of high moorland and is the most sparsely populated county with only 62 people per square kilometer.
The Tyndale family moved to Gloucester-Shire at some point in the 15th century. Tyndale's brother, Edward, was receiver to the lands of Lord Berkeley as attested to in a letter by Bishop Stokesley of London.
Tyndale is recorded in in two genealogies as having been the brother of Sir William Tyndale, of Deane, NorthUmberLand, and Hockwald, Norfolk, who was knighted at the marriage of Arthur, Prince of Wales to Catherine of Aragon. Tyndale's family was thus derived from Baron Adam de Tyndale, a tenat-in-chief of Henry I. William Tyndale's niece, Margaret Tyndale, was married to the Protestant Rowland Taylor, burnt during the Marian Persecutions.
Tyndale was an eager linguist, over the years he became fluent in French, Greek, Hebrew, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, in addition to English. He became chaplain at the home of Sir John Walsh at Little Sudbury and tutor to his children around 1521. His opinions proved controversial to fellow clergymen, and the next year he was summoned before John Bell, the Chancellor of the Diocese of Worcester. After the harsh meeting with Bell and other church leaders, and near the end of Tyndale's time at Little Sudbury, John Foxe (historian) describes an argument with a clergyman who had asserted to Tyndale that "We had better be without God's laws than the Pope's." Tyndale responded:"I defy the Pope, and all his laws; and if God spares my life, ere many years, I will cause the boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures than you do!"
Tyndale left for London in 1523 to seek permission to translate the Bible into English. He requested help from Bishop Cut-Hbert Tun-Stall, a well-known classicist who had praised Erasmus after working together with him on a Greek New Testament. The bishop, however, declined to extend his patronage, telling Tyndale he had no room for him in his household. Tyndale preached and studied "at his book" in London for some time, lecturing widely.
Tyndale left England and landed on continental Europe, Ham-Burg, in 1524. At this time he began translating the New Testament, completing it in 1525 with the assistance from the Observant friar William Roy. In 1525 the publication was interrupted by the impact of anti-Lutheranism. A full edition of the New Testament was produced in 1526 by the printer Peter Schoeffer in Worms, a free imperial city then in the process of adopting Lutheranism. More copies were soon printed in Ant-Werp. The book was smuggled into England and Scotland. Then it was condemned in 1526 by Bishop Tunstall, who issued warning to booksellers and had copies burned in public. The spectacle of the translation of the Scriptures being put to the torch provoked controversy even among the faithful. Cardinal Wolsey condemned Tyndale as a heretic. Tyndale apparently remained at Worm for about a year. Possible he intended to carry on his work from Ham-Burg in about 1529. He revised his New Testament and began translating the Old Testament and writing various treatises.
He opposed publicly to Henry VIII's planned divorce from Catherine of Aragon in favor of Anne Boleyn on the grounds that it was unscriptural, and was a plot by Cardinal Wolsey to get Henry entangled in the papal courts of Pope Clement VII. The King's wrath was aimed at Tyndale. Eventually Tyndale was betrayed by Henry Philips to the imperial authorities, and seized in Ant-Werp in 1535, and held in the castle of Vil-Voorde (FilFord) near Brussels. He was tried on a charge of heresy in 1536 and condemned to be burned to death. His final words, spoken "at the stake with a fervent zeal, and a loud voice," were reported as "Lord! Open the King of England's eyes". Within four years four English translations of the Bible were published in England at the King's behest, including Henry's official Great Bible. All were based on Tyndale's work. In translating the Bible, Tyndale introduced new words into the English language; many were subsequently used in the King James Bible:
- Passover as the name for the Jewish holiday, Pesach or Pesah.
- Scapegoat.
The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic did not approve some of the words and phrases introduced by Tyndale, such "overseer," where it would been understood as "bishop," "elder" for "priest," and "love" rather than "charity." Tyndale, citing Erasmus, contended that the Greek New Testament did not support the traditional Roman Catholic readings. More controversially, Tyndale translated the Greek "ekklesia,"(literally "called out ones") as "congregation" rather than "church." It has been asserted this translation choice "was direct threat to the Church's ancient -but so Tyndale here made clear, non-scriptural- claim to be the body of Christ on earth.
In response to allegations of inaccuracies in his translation in the New Testament, Tyndale in the Prologue to his 1525 translation wrote that he never intentionally altered or misrepresented any of the Bible, but that he had sought to interpret the sense and the meaning of the spirit.