The Vulgate was the only Latin translation in use by the Roman Catholic Church but had accumulated a multitude of small variations between hand-copied manuscript despite several regional efforts over the millennium to make a definitive text.

[4][5] Tyndale made his purpose known to Erasmus' collaborator Bishop of London Cuthbert Tunstall who declined to finance the project.

Tyndale translated additional Old Testament books including Joshua, Judges, First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings and First and Second Chronicles, but they were not published and have not survived in their original forms.

Catholics, prominently layman Thomas More,[19] the Lord Chancellor of Henry VIII, claimed that he had purposely mistranslated the ancient texts in order to promote anti-clericalism and heretical views.

The Catholic theologian Jacobus Latomus and he spent almost a year and a half attempting to convince each other in a series of private books.

Tyndale now being voluntarily outside the protection of the Church, the Habsburg civil authorities then took him and sentenced him to be strangled to death and the body burned.

[23] Tyndale was not condemned because of translating or publishing Scriptures, which was not a crime in Brabant, but for the promulgation of Lutheran views that the Catholic states considered seditious or threatening to peace.

[25] When Tyndale translated the Greek word ἐκκλησία (ekklēsía) as congregation, he was thereby undermining the entire structure of the Catholic Church.

Their belief that the church was not a visible systematized institution but a body defined by believers, however organized, who held a specifically Protestant understanding of the Gospel and salvation was now to be found directly in Tyndale's translation of Scripture.

Tyndale's translation of the Greek word πρεσβύτερος (presbúteros) to mean elder instead of priest also challenged the doctrines of the Catholic Church.

The role of the priest in the Catholic Church was to offer the sacrifice of Christ's body and blood in the ritual of the Mass, to bless, to conduct other religious ceremonies, to read and explain the scripture to the people, and to administer the other sacraments.

Tyndale's translation of scripture backed up the views of reformers like Luther who had taken issue with the Catholic practice of sacramental penance.

According to Tyndale's New Testament translation and other Protestant reformers, a believer could repent with a sincere heart, and God would forgive without an intent of submission to some formal restitution.

As well as individual words, Tyndale also is reported as having coined many familiar phrases, however, many of the claimed expressions turn out to have antecedents in the Middle English Bible translations or the German.

Tyndale, citing Erasmus (who was referring to the Latin not English), contended that the Greek New Testament did not support the traditional readings.

[45] It has been asserted this translation choice "was a direct threat to the Church's ancient – but, so Tyndale here made clear, non-scriptural – claim to be the body of Christ on earth.

To change these words was to strip the Church hierarchy of its pretensions to be Christ's terrestrial representative, and to award this honor to individual worshipers who made up each congregation.

Tyndale in the Prologue to his 1525 translation wrote that he never intentionally altered or misrepresented any of the Bible but that he had sought to "interpret the sense of the scripture and the meaning of the spirit.

[46] The Tyndale Society adduces much further evidence to show that his translations were made directly from the original Hebrew and Greek sources he had at his disposal.

Joan Bridgman comments on the Contemporary Review that, "He [Tyndale] is the mainly unrecognized translator of the most influential book in the world.

Although the Authorised King James Version is ostensibly the production of a learned committee of churchmen, it is mostly cribbed from Tyndale with some reworking of his translation.

[50] However, historians such as Richard Marsden have cautioned that much scriptural language is simple and "offers little scope for variation by translators,"[16]: 145  and note that Tyndale himself was not working from scratch with a tabula rasa.

[51][52] The Tyndale Bible also played a key role in spreading Reformation ideas to England which had been reluctant to embrace the movement.

William Maldon's account of learning to read to directly access the Tyndale Bible testified to the sometimes violent opposition to the translation's use.