The Translator They Burned

In 1536, William Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake outside Brussels. His crime? Translating the Bible into English so that, as he once told a clergyman, "the boy that driveth the plough" might know Scripture better than the priests. Church authorities had banned his work, burned his books in bonfires at St. Paul's Cross in London, and hunted him across Europe for over a decade. The builders of the religious establishment had examined this stone and rejected it utterly.

Yet within three years of Tyndale's execution, King Henry VIII authorized the Great Bible — a translation that drew heavily on Tyndale's work. Seventy-five years later, when forty-seven scholars assembled to produce the King James Bible, they kept roughly eighty percent of Tyndale's New Testament wording intact. The very phrases the authorities had tried to incinerate — "Let there be light," "the salt of the earth," "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" — became the bedrock of English-speaking Christianity.

"The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone." Psalm 118 sings of a God who specializes in divine reversals, taking what the powerful discard and making it foundational. Tyndale went to the flames whispering, "Lord, open the King of England's eyes." The Almighty answered that prayer beyond anything Tyndale could have imagined. His steadfast love truly endures forever.