Tuesday, November 3, 2026 · 天火 · tianmu.org

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William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536) translated the New Testament into English from the Greek and parts of the Old Testament from the Hebrew. His first New Testament was printed at Worms in 1526, smuggled into England and burned there. Working in exile at Antwerp, he published the five books of Moses in 1530 and Jonah about 1531. In November 1534 he issued the New Testament "dylygently corrected and compared with the Greke", the revision that later English Bibles, the King James Version among them, drew heavily on. He was arrested at Antwerp in 1535 and executed at Vilvoorde in October 1536.

This room gives those three printings complete. The text comes from the transcriptions keyed by the Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) from copies in the British Library and Cambridge University Library. Every book keeps Tyndale's spelling and, where the print has them, his prologues and margin notes. The New Testament also keeps its front matter, the Old Testament lessons read in church and the table of epistles and gospels. The 1534 print has no verse numbers; they are added here from a verse-numbered electronic text of the same edition distributed by eBible.org. The Pentateuch and Jonah keep the paragraphs of the print, without verse numbers. Words that the transcribers could not read in the printed book are marked ⟨illegible⟩. In the Pentateuch and Jonah they stay marked. In the verse text of the New Testament, 869 such places have been supplied from the eBible.org text, a later electronic transcription of Tyndale's New Testament whose transcriber is not named. Each supplied letter is set in square brackets, as in y[ᵉ] or fal[c]e, and each colophon gives the count for its book. The books follow the familiar order, although the 1534 print places Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation after the epistles of John.

The historical books from Joshua to 2 Chronicles are not here. Tyndale translated them but never printed them. After his arrest the translation passed to John Rogers, who published it in 1537 in the Bible issued under the name "Thomas Matthew", and scholars generally accept it as Tyndale's. This room holds only the three printings named above. The earlier 1526 Worms New Testament is a separate edition and is not part of it either.

The Pentateuch (1530) and Jonah (c. 1531)

The New Testament (1534)

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