Tyndale’s Testament
The New Testament in English, translated from the Greek (Worms, 1526)
William Tyndale, strangled and burned at Vilvoorde, 1536
Small enough to hide in a sleeve, and printed in the same town where a monk had refused to recant five years before.
- Catch rate
- Not found in the wild
- Base research
- 820
- Stat total
- 1000
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Hunted, burned by the bishop of London, and still here — most of the King James New Testament is this man’s wording, sentence for sentence.
The best Greek of the three great translators, and a plain English ear that has never been bettered. It argues by being readable.
Attacked hard and mostly over vocabulary — congregation for church, senior for priest, love for charity — and the vocabulary was right.
Between three and six thousand copies, small octavo so they hid in a sleeve, down the Rhine in bales of cloth into English ports.
Cited for this book
The 1525 Cologne printing was raided mid-run; he fled upriver and Peter Schoeffer finished the job at Worms in 1526 — the same town where Luther had refused to recant five years earlier. Tunstall, bishop of London, burnt the copies in St Paul’s churchyard. Tyndale was betrayed near Antwerp, held sixteen months, strangled and burned at Vilvoorde in 1536. Three years later the king he had defied ordered an English Bible into every parish church, and most of it was his.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A Boy That Driveth the Plough | Bible | Argument | 88 | 95% | 10 |
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 44 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |
| 46 | Smuggled in Bales of Cloth | History | Argument | 80 | 100% | 15 |
| 48 | Into Their Own Tongue | Exegesis | Argument | 84 | 100% | 10 |
| 51 | The Whole Life of Believers | Soteriology | Argument | 76 | 100% | 15 |
Read it: A Boy That Driveth the Plough
The passages the Scriptorium holds on screen, word for word from a public-domain translation. Written in English.
“If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow, shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.”
William Tyndale, as reported in John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1563). Foxe is the sole witness and an interested one — see research/SECONDARY-SOURCES.md §3. Public domain; no snapshot on hand.
“The first edition of Tyndale’s New Testament had to be smuggled into England and was publicly burnt by order of Tunstall, bishop of London, in St. Paul’s church-yard near the spot from which Bibles are now sent to all parts of the globe.”
Schaff, History of the Christian Church VII (1888), on the Bible in the vernacular, public domain.
“…the latter furnished the text from which, with the aid of Jerome’s Vulgate, the translations of Luther and Tyndale were made.”
Of Erasmus’ Greek Testament, in Schaff, History of the Christian Church VII, on the Bible in the vernacular (1888), public domain.
The 1525 Cologne printing was raided mid-run; he fled upriver and Peter Schoeffer finished the job at Worms in 1526 — the same town where Luther had refused to recant five years earlier.
Tyndale was betrayed near Antwerp, held sixteen months, strangled and burned at Vilvoorde in 1536. Three years later the king he had defied ordered an English Bible into every parish church, and most of it was his.