English scholar (c. 1494-1536) who produced the first printed English translation of the New Testament from the original Greek (1526), and who was executed for doing it. Contrary to popular belief, Tyndale's crime was not translating the Bible per se — earlier Latin-English paraphrases had circulated — but printing an accurate vernacular New Testament from Greek, using simple Saxon-root English, aimed at the plowboy. His famous retort to a priest who dismissed lay Bible reading: "If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost."
Tyndale's influence on the English language and the English Bible is staggering. Approximately 75-90% of the King James New Testament (1611) is Tyndale's wording lightly revised. Phrases he coined or Englished — "the powers that be," "my brother's keeper," "the salt of the earth," "a man after his own heart," "signs of the times," "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak," "eat, drink, and be merry," "fight the good fight," "no man can serve two masters" — have saturated English for five centuries. He worked in exile on the Continent, smuggled copies into England in bales of cloth, and was hunted for years. Betrayed by an Englishman named Henry Phillips, he was arrested in Antwerp, imprisoned for sixteen months in Vilvoorde castle near Brussels, and finally strangled and burned at the stake on October 6, 1536. His last words, reported by a witness: "Lord, open the King of England's eyes." Within three years, Henry VIII authorized an English Bible in every parish church.