God's Bestseller

William Tyndale, Thomas More, and the Writing of the English Bible—A Story of Martyrdom and Betrayal

Brian Moynahan

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781466866508
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

The English Bible--the most familiar book in our language--is the product of a man who was exiled, vilified, betrayed, then strangled, then burnt.William Tyndale left England in 1524 to translate the word of God into English. This was heresy, punishable by death. Sir Thomas More, hailed as a saint and a man for all seasons, considered it his divine duty to pursue Tyndale. He did so with an obsessive ferocity that, in all probability, led to Tyndale's capture and death.The words that Tyndale wrote during his desperate exile have a beauty and familiarity that still resonate across the English-speaking world: "Death, where is thy sting?...eat, drink, and be merry...our Father which art in heaven."His New Testament, which he translated, edited, financed, printed, and smuggled into England in 1526, passed with few changes into subsequent versions of the Bible. So did those books of the Old Testament that he lived to finish.Brian Moynahan's lucid and meticulously researched biography illuminates Tyndale's life, from his childhood in England, to his death outside Brussels. It chronicles the birth pangs of the Reformation, the wrath of Henry VIII, the sympathy of Anne Boleyn, and the consuming malice of Thomas More. Above all, it reveals the English Bible as a labor of love, for which a man in an age more spiritual than our own willingly gave his life.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Notice
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface On the Burning of Heretics
• 1. Youth
• 2. Decision
• 3. London
• 4. The New Testament
• 5. Printing
• 6. ‘Lyfe, love, faveour, grace, blessinge…’
• 7. Auguries
• 8. ‘A filthy foam of blasphemies…’
• 9. The Fish Cellar
• 10. Wicked Mammon
• 11. Manhunt
• 12. Obedience
• 13. The Flight to Hamburg
• 14. Eye for Eye, Tothe for Tothe
• 15. The Shorte Fyre
• 16. ‘My name is Tyndale’
• 17. The Confutation
• 18. ‘The Lord forgive Sir Thomas More!’
• 19. ‘Let not your body faint’
• 20. ‘A fellow Englishman, who is everywhere and nowhere’
• 21. Judas
• 22. The Paymaster
• 23. ‘Though I gave my body even that I burned…’
• 24. Aftermath
• Sources
• Notes
• Index
• Also by Brian Moynahan
• Copyright