Father of the English Bible
Tyndale was the first person to translate the Bible into English directly from Hebrew and Greek, and the first to print it. Told by a learned churchman that England would be better off without God's law than without the Pope's, he replied that if God spared his life he would cause a boy who drives a plough to know more of the Scriptures than that man did.
He fled to the continent, printed his New Testament in 1526, and had copies smuggled into England in bales of cloth. Church authorities bought and burned them; the profits funded further printings. He was betrayed by a man he had befriended, imprisoned near Brussels for sixteen months, then strangled and burned in October 1536. His last recorded words were a prayer that God would open the King of England's eyes.
Three years later, an English Bible resting substantially on his work was placed by royal command in every parish church in England. Scholars estimate that roughly 83% of the King James New Testament is Tyndale's wording. "Let there be light," "the powers that be," "the salt of the earth," "a law unto themselves" — these are his sentences.
The abuses, the doctrinal recovery, the five solas, the printing press, and the honest reckoning with what the Reformation cost as well as what it gained.
How the Bible travelled from Jerusalem to Alexandria to Rome to England, the theological battles fought over it, and the people who died to make it available.