Gayla Marks's Reviews > Tyndale: the Man Who Gave God an English Voice

Absolutely stellar! Tyndall was an absolute marvel. This biography explores Tyndale’s one sole object in life: to translate the Bible, not from the Latin Vulgate version that others, including John Wycliffe, had done, but from the more original sources in the Greek and Hebrew languages. Tyndale’s economy with words, as he worked and reworked the translation, was meant to produce an English version that was more correct and which could be easily understood by even the common English farm worker. He labored continually to use the most correct English wording to get across the concepts he found in the original Greek/Hebrew. He worked at a time when his efforts were outlawed, he had to flee England to,the Continent to continue his work. There was a price on his head and he was eventually betrayed, captured, and was sentenced to death as a result.
I was gobsmacked to find so many common everyday phrases and aphorisms that we use today were first written by Tyndale. My favorite quote from the book: “Without Tyndale there would have been no Shakespeare”. The number of those phrases, originally written by Tyndale that appear in Shakespeare’s work is really astounding. The King James Version of the Bible can be considered an homage to Tyndale when one considers that approximately 83% of the New Testament snd 87% of the Old Testament were taken directly from his (Tyndale’s) Bible, with no alteration at all.
This was one terrific read!