William Tyndale

In 1524, a young English scholar slipped across the Channel to the Low Countries, carrying with him a dangerous ambition: to put the Bible into the hands of common people in their own tongue. What followed was a decade of exile, betrayal, and relentless intellectual warfare. James J. Ellis's 1890 biography captures William Tyndale's extraordinary crusade to translate Scripture from Hebrew and Greek into English, armed only with a printing press and an unshakeable conviction that God's word belonged to everyone, not just priests. Tyndale's translations ignited a firestorm. His New Testament and later biblical works became the foundation for every subsequent English translation, including the King James Bible. But his theological writings proved equally volatile: The Obedience of a Christian Man provided Henry VIII the intellectual grounds to break with Rome, while The Practice of Prelates, opposing the king's divorce, made him an enemy of both Church and Crown. Betrayed by a friend, imprisoned in a Flemish castle, Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake in 1536. His final prayer was that God would open the King of England's eyes. A story of courage, betrayal, and the transformative power of an idea, this biography traces the life of the man who gave English its first true vernacular Scripture and changed the course of religious history forever.