William Tyndale

Voice of Iyov had been blogging on and off about the New Living Translation Bible from Tyndale House publishers. Which got me thinking about poor William...

William Tyndale (sometimes spelled Tindall or Tyndall; pronounced /ˈtɪndəl/) (c. 1494 – 1536) was a 16th-century Protestant reformer and scholar who translated the Bible into the Early Modern English of his day. While a number of partial and complete Old English translations had been made from the seventh century onward, and Middle English translations particularly during the 14th century, Tyndale's was the first English translation to draw directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, and the first to take advantage of the new medium of print, which allowed for its wide distribution. In 1535 Tyndale was arrested, jailed in the castle of Vilvoorde outside Brussels for over a year, tried for heresy and then strangled and burnt at the stake.

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In translating the Bible, Tyndale introduced new words into the English language, and many were subsequently used in the King James Bible:

* Jehovah (from a transliterated Hebrew construction in the Old Testament; composed from the Tetragrammaton YHWH and the vowels of adonai: YaHoWaH)
* Passover (as the name for the Jewish holiday, Pesach or Pesah),
* Atonement (= at + onement), which goes beyond mere "reconciliation" to mean "to unite" or "to cover", which springs from the Hebrew kippur, the Old Testament version of kippur being the covering of doorposts with blood, or "Day of Atonement".
* scapegoat (the goat that bears the sins and iniquities of the people in Leviticus, Chapter 16)

He also coined such familiar phrases as:

* let there be light
* the powers that be
* my brother's keeper
* the salt of the earth
* a law unto themselves
* filthy lucre
* it came to pass
* gave up the ghost
* the signs of the times
* the spirit is willing
* live and move and have our being
* fight the good fight

(source)