A Friend of mine, Franklin Sanders, posted this:
On 6 October 1536 Anglican priest William Tyndale, having been captured at Antwerp, was tried, strangled, and burnt at the stake for translating large parts of the Bible into English. Printing the Bible in the people’s own language was accounted a crime by church & state.
To give an idea how well Tyndale worked, it’s estimated that the Authorized or King James Version is 83% Tyndale’s in the New Testament, and 76% his in the Old Testament. Before he died, he cried out with a loud voice, “Lord! Open the King of England’s eyes!” Within four years, at the order of the same king, four English Bible translations were published in England, all based on Tyndale’s work.
