The Strangled Scholar Who Set England on Fire

In October 1536, William Tyndale was led from his prison cell in Vilvoorde Castle near Brussels to a stake surrounded by bundled sticks. His crime was translating the New Testament into English so that, as he once told a clergyman, "the boy that driveth the plough" might know more scripture than the priests. His final words, shouted loud enough for the gathered crowd to hear, were a prayer: "Lord, open the King of England's eyes."

Tyndale had spent over a decade in exile — hunted, betrayed by a friend, sleeping in safe houses across Germany and the Low Countries — all to put the gospel into the hands of ordinary people. He could have lived comfortably as a Cambridge-educated priest. Instead, he smuggled thousands of pocket-sized New Testaments into England hidden in bales of cloth and barrels of flour. Church authorities burned the books in public bonfires at St. Paul's Cross in London. But they could not burn fast enough. The words kept coming.

Within three years of Tyndale's death, King Henry VIII authorized an English Bible — built largely on Tyndale's translation — to be placed in every parish church in England. The gospel Tyndale refused to be ashamed of reshaped an entire nation.

Paul wrote to the Romans that the gospel is "the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes." Tyndale staked his life on that conviction. The power was never in the man. It was always in the message.