William Tyndale left England to pursue his work outside the repressive spy-state set up by Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey. He would never return. He met Erasmus and later Luther, the two key men in the movement towards what became Protestantism. He settled in Cologne and began single-handedly to translate the New Testament not from Latin but from the original Greek and Hebrew. It was this, no doubt, coupled with Tyndale’s genius for language, which made his translations so telling and memorable.
