MAY 10 "WILLIAM TYNDALE & MARTIN LUTHER"
William Tyndale was the Captain of the
Army of Reformers, and was their spiritual leader. Tyndale holds the distinction
of being the first man to ever print the New Testament in the English language.
Tyndale was a true scholar and a genius, so fluent in eight languages that it
was said one would think any one of them to be his native tongue. He is
frequently referred to as the “Architect of the English Language”, (even more
so than William Shakespeare) as so many of the phrases Tyndale coined are still
in our language today.
Martin Luther had a small head-start on
Tyndale, as Luther declared his intolerance for the Roman Church’s corruption
on Halloween in 1517, by nailing his 95 Theses of Contention to the Wittenberg Church door. Luther, who would be exiled
in the months following the Diet of Worms Council in 1521 that was designed to
martyr him, would translate the New Testament into German for the first time
from the 1516 Greek-Latin New Testament of Erasmus, and publish it in September
of 1522. Luther also published a German Pentateuch in 1523, and another edition
of the German New Testament in 1529. In the 1530’s he would go on to publish
the entire Bible in German. William Tyndale wanted to use the same 1516 Erasmus
text as a source to translate and print the New Testament in English for the
first time in history. Tyndale showed up on Luther's doorstep in Germany
in 1525, and by year's end had translated the New Testament into English.
Tyndale had been forced to flee England ,
because of the wide-spread rumor that his English New Testament project was
underway, causing inquisitors and bounty hunters to be constantly on Tyndale's
trail to arrest him and prevent his project. God foiled their plans, and
in~1525-1526~the Tyndale New Testament became the first printed edition of the
scripture in the English language. Subsequent printings of the Tyndale New
Testament in the 1530's were often elaborately illustrated.
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