Ruth Magnusson Davis is a retired lawyer and a student of early modern English, the Reformation, and, especially, the 1537 Matthew Bible. In 2009 Ruth founded the New Matthew Bible Project, dedicated to gently updating the Matthew Bible for today. The New Testament of the NMB was published as The October Testament in 2016. In 2018, Ruth published The Story of the Matthew Bible, the first book ever to give the full story of this forgotten Bible and the three men who made.
In part 1 of this article, we saw a brief history of the Matthew Bible, first published in 1537. It was the work of three Englishmen living in Antwerp: William Tyndale, who translated the New Testament and the first half of the Old from the Hebrew and Greek; Myles Coverdale, who translated the other Scriptures…
When the sixteenth century dawned in England, there were laws prohibiting the translation of the Bible into English. It was illegal to even own or to read English Scriptures.((In 1401, under King Henry IV, parliament passed a statute called De haeretico comburendo, or On the burning of heretics, targeting Wycliffe’s followers, the Lollards. Then in 1408…
