The Bible is for everyone

We do not wish to abolish teaching and to make every man his own master, but if the curates will not teach the gospel, the layman must have the Scripture, and read it for himself, taking God for his teacher.

- William Tyndale

William Tyndale could speak seven languages and was proficient in ancient Hebrew and Greek. He was a priest whose intellectual gifts and disciplined life could have taken him a long way in the church—had he not had one compulsion: to teach English men and women the good news of justification by faith.

Tyndale's translation was the first English Bible to draw directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, the first English translation to use Jehovah as God's name as preferred by English Protestant Reformers,[3] the first English translation to take advantage of the printing press, and first of the new English Bibles of the Reformation. It was taken to be a direct challenge to the hegemony of both the Roman Catholic Church and the laws of England maintaining the church's position. In 1530, Tyndale also wrote The Practyse of Prelates, opposing Henry VIII's annulment of his own marriage on the grounds that it contravened Scripture

A copy of Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christian Man fell into the hands of Henry VIII, providing the king with the rationale to break the Church in England from the Roman Catholic Church in 1534.[5][6] In 1535, Tyndale was arrested and jailed in the castle of Vilvoorde (Filford) outside Brussels for over a year. In 1536, he was convicted of heresy and executed by strangulation, after which his body was burnt at the stake. His dying prayer was that the King of England's eyes would be opened; this seemed to find its fulfilment just two years later with Henry's authorisation of the Great Bible for the Church of England, which was largely Tyndale's own work - missing sections supplemented with translations by Miles Coverdale. Hence, the Tyndale Bible, as it was known, continued to play a key role in spreading Reformation ideas across the English-speaking world and, eventually, to the British Empire.