William Tyndale is found to be a false prophet by Biblical definition. "11 Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core." We explore who Core (aka Korah) was in the OT and the application of the cautionary events for the Reformers and for us today.
Perhaps the most poignant tale of this era is that of William Tyndale. Tyndale lived from 1494–1536 and was martyred for translating the Bible into English. Tyndale, like Luther, translated directly from the Hebrew and the Greek, except presumably for cross-referencing and checking. He actually only finished the New Testament, completing about half of his Old Testament translation before his death. His was the first mass-produced Bible in English.
Tyndale originally sought permission from Bishop Tunstall of London to produce this work but was told that it was forbidden, indeed heretical, and so Tyndale went to the Continent to get the job done. A partial edition was printed in 1525 (just three years after Luther) in Cologne, but spies betrayed Tyndale to the authorities and, ironically, he fled to Worms, the very city where Luther was brought before a diet and tried. From there, Tyndale’s complete edition of the New Testament was published in 1526.
As Alister McGrath was later to note, the King James Version (KJV), or Authorized Version, of the early 1600s (in several editions including the 1611 one) was not an original translation of the Bible into English but instead a rather wholescale taking over of Tyndale’s translation with some help from the Geneva Bible and other translations. Many of the memorable turns of phrase in the King James—“by the skin of his teeth,” “am I my brother’s keeper?” “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” “a law unto themselves,” and so forth—are phrases Tyndale coined. He had a remarkable gift for turning biblical phrases into memorable English.
