who was the first person to translate the bible into english
Bible translations into English Although John Wycliffe is often credited with the first translation of the Bible into English, there were, in fact, many translations of large parts of the Bible centuries before Wycliffe's work. The English Bible was first translated from the Latin Vulgate into Old English by a few select monks and scholars. Such translations were generally in the form of prose or as interlinear glosses (literal translations above the Latin words). Very few complete translations existed during that time. Rather, most of the books of the Bible existed separately and were read as individual texts. Thus, the sense of the Bible as history that often exists today did not exist at that time. Instead, an allegorical rendering of the Bible was more common and translations of the Bible often included the writerâ€™s own commentary on passages in addition to the literal translation.
Tyndale Bible The term Tyndale's Bible is not strictly correct, because Tyndale never published a complete Bible. That task was completed by Miles Coverdale who supplemented Tyndale's translations with his own to produce the first complete printed bible in English in 1535. Prior to his execution Tyndale had only finished translating the entire New Testament and roughly half of the Old Testament.[1] Of the latter, the Pentateuch, Jonah and a revised version of the book of Genesis were published during his lifetime. His other Old Testament works were first used in the creation of the Matthew Bible and also heavily influenced every major English translation of the Bible that followed.[2]