The Man Who Could Not Keep Silent

William Tyndale could read the Bible in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. But that wasn't enough. While serving as a tutor in a Gloucestershire manor in the early 1520s, he sat at table with local clergymen who barely knew Scripture themselves. Meanwhile, the plowmen and servants working the surrounding fields had no access to God's word in their own language. Something kindled in Tyndale that no threat could extinguish — God's word had been written on his heart, and he could not keep it locked inside.

When one clergyman insisted that common people were better off without the Bible, Tyndale fired back his famous vow: "If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than thou dost."

He fled to the continent, translating the New Testament from the original Greek into plain, muscular English. For over a decade he moved between safe houses in Germany and the Low Countries, always one step ahead of agents sent to silence him. He was betrayed in 1535, imprisoned in a damp fortress near Brussels, and strangled at the stake the following year.

Yet Tyndale's lips could not be restrained. His words poured into the King James Bible and placed Scripture into millions of hands for centuries afterward.