William Tyndale and the English Bible
Tyndale printed the first English New Testament from the original Greek in 1526. He was strangled and burned at the stake in 1536 — but roughly 80% of his text survives in the King James Version.
William Tyndale, an Oxford-trained priest and accomplished linguist, set out to translate the Bible into English directly from the Hebrew and Greek — something English law forbade without a bishop's licence, which he could not obtain. He left England in 1524 and never returned.
Working in Cologne, Worms and Antwerp, he printed the first complete English New Testament from Greek in 1526. Copies were smuggled into England in bales of cloth; the bishops of London bought and burned as many as they could find. Tyndale went on to translate large parts of the Old Testament from Hebrew before being betrayed by an English Catholic, Henry Phillips, in Antwerp in 1535.
He was strangled and burned at the stake near Brussels on October 6, 1536. His reported last words: "Lord, open the King of England's eyes." Three years later Henry VIII authorised the Great Bible — heavily dependent on Tyndale's work. Modern scholars estimate that roughly 80% of the King James Version's New Testament is Tyndale's wording.