William Tyndale - 1526 (24x36 poster)

This beautiful artist's rendering, in full-color, focuses on the soft yet steady sincerity that marked the ministry of William Tyndale. History reveals a man of honesty, integrity and deep intensity of devotion to proclaiming the truth of the Holy Scriptures. Tyndale was a scholar among scholars and yet his devotion and dedication was not to secular thought or scholastic achievement, but rather to a full knowledge of the Scripture. That, perhaps, was not intended for him alone, but for all educated and uneducated, to have access to Scripture, not of the church, but of the Bible, in the common tongue. He was influenced by Wycliffe, the lollards, the reformers of Europe, his own colleagues at Oxford, Cambridge, and the numerous institutions of his lectures.

Tyndale was a master of English, and not mildly fluent in the Biblical languages; speaking, reading, writing and translating them. Tyndale’s devotion and dedication compelled him at great personal loss to produce the first English translation of the Bible from the correct Hebrew and Greek texts now available (1516-22 Greek – 1525-26 Masoretic Hebrew).

Tyndale’s work would stand through the seven English translations which concluded with the Authorized King James Version of 1611. The authorship of the English text is without question, William Tyndale's, who paid the ultimate price for his labor; William Tyndale was betrayed by an agent of the Catholic church, charged with heresy, imprisoned until he could be condemned, strangled, and burned at the stake. With his dying words, Tyndale said, “Lord, open the eyes of the King of England." So it was from Tyndale’s first English New Testament of 1526 to the King's first authorization and license of the Matthews Bible of 1537, one decade and the people were hearing the Word of God in their own language.