John Rogers

Life and Ministry

John Rogers was born around 1500 at Deritend near Birmingham, took his BA at Cambridge in 1526, and went out as chaplain to the English Merchant Adventurers in Antwerp in 1534. There he fell in with William Tyndale in the last year of Tyndale's freedom and was won to the Reformation by Tyndale's own teaching. After Tyndale's arrest in 1535, Rogers carried on the translation work — taking up Tyndale's unfinished Old Testament from Joshua through Chronicles, completing it with Miles Coverdale's earlier work, adding prologues and marginal notes, and publishing the whole in 1537 under the pseudonym Thomas Matthew. The Matthew Bible was the first complete English Bible authorized by royal license, the textual ancestor of every English Bible from the Great Bible (1539) through the King James (1611), and the chief vehicle by which Tyndale's English passed unbroken into Anglican usage.

Circumstances of Death

When Edward VI died in 1553 and the Catholic Mary I came to the throne, Rogers was a senior preacher at Saint Paul's Cross in London and a prebendary of Saint Paul's. He preached against the Marian restoration the Sunday after the queen's entry, was placed under house arrest within a week, and was committed to Newgate prison in January 1554 with John Hooper, John Bradford, and Laurence Saunders. He was interrogated through the winter of 1554–55 by Stephen Gardiner, the Lord Chancellor, refused to recant on transubstantiation and the Roman primacy, and was condemned to death on January 29, 1555. On the morning of February 4 he was led from Newgate to Smithfield. His wife and ten children — the youngest at the breast — met him on the way; he greeted them. At the stake he was offered a final pardon, refused it, and asked only to speak with his wife before he died, which was denied him. He was burned. Eyewitness accounts in Foxe report that he washed his hands in the flames as if in cold water and stood until the smoke took him.

Legacy

Rogers was the first English Protestant burned under Mary, the first of nearly three hundred Marian martyrs whose deaths Foxe gathered and printed in 1563 as the Actes and Monuments — the Book of Martyrs that shaped English Protestant identity for three centuries. The Matthew Bible he edited under cover of a pseudonym is the textual spine of every later English Bible: roughly eighty percent of the King James New Testament is Tyndale-Rogers verbatim. His refusal to recant set the tone for the Marian martyrs who followed him to Smithfield, and his death — composed, deliberate, in plain sight of the largest crowd Smithfield could hold — fixed in English Protestant memory the picture of a Christian going to the fire as a man going to his ordinary work.