Quote From William Tyndale

“Christ desires his mysteries to be published abroad as widely as possible. I would that [the Gospels and the epistles of Paul] were translated into all languages, of all Christian people, and that they might be read and known.”
—William Tyndale

A game changer in Christian history

William Tyndale was one of the most important figures of the English Reformation and Western history as a whole. His English translation was the first complete Bible to be translated directly from the Greek and Hebrew into English. Coupled with the invention of the printing press, that translation made the Tyndale Bible the first-ever mass-produced English Bible—and made Scripture available to commoners for the first time in history.
Tyndale’s impact on the modern Bible can’t be overstated—research suggests that 83% of the King James Bible’s New Testament was taken verbatim from Tyndale’s work, and 76% of the Old Testament.
Despite Tyndale’s positive impact on spreading Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church saw his making the Bible available to commoners as a direct challenge to its authority. Because of this, in 1535, Tyndale was betrayed by a friend and turned into the authorities, and on October 6, 1536, he was condemned as a heretic and burned at the stake. Tyndale’s dying wish was that God would “open the King of England’s eyes,” and just two years later, his wish came to fruition: King Henry VIII authorized the “Great Bible,” largely made up of Tyndale’s work, to be read aloud in the Church of England.