Philip Melanchthon

1. 1516Erasmus prints the Greek New TestamentThe Dutch scholar Erasmus published the New Testament in its original Greek, with his own fresh Latin beside it, at Basel. For the first time a parish priest could check the church's Latin Bible against the words the apostles wrote. Luther and Tyndale both worked from it.
2. 1521–1522The Wartburg: a New Testament in GermanFriends staged a kidnapping and hid Luther in the Wartburg castle, where he grew a beard, called himself Knight George, and translated the New Testament from Erasmus's Greek in about eleven weeks. It was printed in September 1522 and sold out almost at once. He wrote that he wanted the mother in the house and the common man in the market to hear it in their own speech.
3. 1525–1526Tyndale's English New TestamentRefused permission to translate in England, William Tyndale printed abroad. The Cologne run was raided mid-printing in 1525; he escaped upriver with the sheets and finished the job at Worms, and copies reached England in 1526 hidden in bales of cloth and sacks of flour. By the account Edward Hall's chronicle and then Foxe preserved, bishops bought up the stock to burn it, and the money the bishops paid financed the next edition.
4. Oct 1529Marburg: the reformers fail to agreePhilip of Hesse brought Luther and Zwingli together to unite the movement. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles and broke on the fifteenth, what happens in the Lord's Supper. Luther chalked "This is my body" on the table and would not be moved; Zwingli reportedly offered his hand in fellowship and Luther declined it. The Protestant world stayed divided.
5. 1534Luther's complete German BibleWith a team of Hebrew and Greek scholars, Luther finished the whole Bible in German, printed at Wittenberg by Hans Lufft. He hunted words in butcher shops and marketplaces to get the sound right. His Bible carried the Saxon chancery German he wrote in into every corner of the language, one of the strongest single forces in the making of standard written German, though not its sole origin.
6. March 1536Calvin's *Institutes*, first editionA twenty-six-year-old French exile published a small six-chapter handbook at Basel explaining the faith to a hostile king. He kept enlarging it for the next twenty-three years; the 1559 edition runs to four books and eighty chapters. That same year he was pressed into staying in Geneva against his own wishes.
7. 1555–1556The Oxford firesUnder Queen Mary I, roughly 280 Protestants were burned in under four years. Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley died together at Oxford on October 16, 1555; Foxe records Latimer telling Ridley they would that day light such a candle in England as would never be put out. Thomas Cranmer, who had signed recantations under pressure, took them back at the stake on March 21, 1556, and held his right hand in the fire first.
8. 1560The Geneva BibleEnglish exiles who had fled Mary produced a pocket-sized Bible in readable Roman type, with every verse numbered and study notes in the margins. It was the Bible of Shakespeare, of the Puritans, and of the Mayflower passengers, and it outsold the King James Version for decades after 1611.

The Reformation: the whole era→