The earliest efforts to translate the Bible into English occurred in Anglo-Saxon England. The idea of an English Bible did not, however, immediately find fertile soil.
The Renaissance of the 15th century, which involved the rediscovery of much ancient knowledge, led scholars to question the accuracy of St Jerome’s traditional Latin version. This movement of textual criticism was taken up in the early 16th century by men such as the German monk Martin Luther. Luther believed that an inaccurate translation of the Bible and ill-conceived medieval theology had led key Christian ideas to be misinterpreted.
One of Luther's views was that the Bible should be made available to an increasingly literate society in their everyday language. The idea of such a Bible in English was endorsed enthusiastically by Luther’s contemporaries William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale who set about producing an English version of the text. The value of an English Bible was greeted with rather more scepticism by the English king, Henry VIII, but the second half of the 16th century saw several versions of the Bible appear in English, each tailored to meet the needs of a specific religious community.
