SEPTEMBER 2 "CATHOLIC OPPOSITION - TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE"
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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