William Tyndale, the renowned English Reformer and Bible translator published his famous work The Obedience of a Christian Man.
The Obedience of a Christen man, and how Christen rulers ought to govern, wherein also (if thou mark diligently) thou shalt find eyes to perceive the crafty convience of all iugglers. is a 1528 book by the English Protestant author William Tyndale. The spelling of this title is now commonly modernized and abbreviated to The Obedience of a Christian Man. It was first published by Merten de Keyser in Antwerp, and is best known for advocating that the king of a country was the head of that country's church, rather than the pope, and to be the first instance, in the English language at any rate, of advocating the divine right of kings, a concept mistakenly attributed to the Catholic Church.It is believed that the book greatly influenced Henry VIII's decision in declaring the Act of Supremacy, by which he became Supreme Head of the Church of England, in 1534. Tyndale's opposition to Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon earned him the king's enmity, but when Tyndale was arrested by the Roman Catholic authorities in Antwerp in 1535, Henry's chief minister Thomas Cromwell attempted unsuccessfully to intervene on his behalf. Tyndale was executed for heresy the following year.
William Tyndale (; sometimes spelled Tynsdale, Tindall, Tindill, Tyndall; c. 1494 – c. 6 October 1536) was an English biblical scholar and linguist who became a leading figure in the Protestant Reformation in the years leading up to his execution. He is well known as a translator of the Bible into English, and was influenced by the works of prominent Protestant Reformers such as Martin Luther.Tyndale's translation of the Bible was used for subsequent English translations, including the Great Bible and the Bishops' Bible, authorized by the Church of England. In 1611, after seven years of work, the 47 scholars who produced the King James Version drew extensively from Tyndale's original work and other translations that descended from his. One estimate suggests that the New Testament in the King James Version is 83% Tyndale's words and the Old Testament 76%. The work of Tyndale continued to play a key role in spreading Reformation ideas across the English-speaking world and eventually across the British Empire. In 2002, Tyndale was placed 26th in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.A copy of Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), which some claim or interpret to argue that the king of a country should be the head of that country's church rather than the Pope, came to the hands of King Henry VIII, providing a rationalization for breaking the Church in England from the Catholic Church in 1534. In 1530, Tyndale wrote The Practice of Prelates, opposing Henry's annulment of his own marriage on the grounds that it contravened Scripture. Fleeing England, Tyndale sought refuge in the Flemish territory of the Catholic Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.
In 1535, Tyndale was arrested, and jailed in the castle of Vilvoorde (Fulford) 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 fulfillment just one year later with Henry's authorization of the Matthew Bible, which was largely Tyndale's work, with missing sections translated by John Rogers and Myles Coverdale.