Founded before A.D. 1000, Westminster Abbey is the traditional site of coronations and burials for monarchs of the British Commonwealth. Lancelot Andrewes, director of the First Westminster Company of translators, was the dean of Westminster.
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A few translators were atypical because they were not associated with a university. Richard Brett was one such translator. Though he attended Oxford and mastered such languages as Syriac, Coptic, and Ethiopic, he spent most of his life as a rector, husband, and father in the small English village of Quainton—except for the few years he worked on the King James translation.
The parish church in Quainton, England, where Richard Brett served for over 40 years as the rector.
Photo by Kenneth Mays
In this room at Merton College, Oxford, translators led by Thomas Ravis worked on the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation.
Photo by Kenneth Mays
William Tyndale desired to put the Bible in the hands of the common people. Speaking to the clergy of his day, he said, "If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough, shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost!"2 Tyndale achieved his goal, but in 1536 he was strangled, then burned at the stake as a heretic.
Nevertheless, much of Tyndale's translation survived in the King James Bible, and his hope that the common people could study the Bible in English came to pass, as seen in the life of Joseph Smith, a young farm boy.
William Tyndale (on the right) is featured in this window in the Emmanuel College chapel, Cambridge.
Photo by Kenneth Mays