The Translation They Burned Became the Foundation

William Tyndale spent his final days in a cold Belgian prison cell in 1536, convicted of heresy for the crime of translating Scripture into English. Church authorities had burned his Bibles in public bonfires across London. Bishops denounced his work as dangerous. King Henry VIII's agents hunted him across Europe for years before finally catching him in Antwerp.

On October 6, executioners strangled him and burned his body at the stake. His last recorded words were a prayer: "Lord, open the King of England's eyes."

The builders had rejected the stone.

Yet within three years of Tyndale's death, Henry VIII authorized the Great Bible — printed in English, placed in every parish church in England, built overwhelmingly on Tyndale's translation. When the King James translators sat down seventy-five years later, scholars estimate they retained nearly eighty-four percent of Tyndale's phrasing. Every time an English-speaking congregation reads "the Lord is my shepherd" or "in the beginning was the Word," they are reading William Tyndale.