John Rogers was born in Deritend, an…

1537 CE

John Rogers was born in Deritend, an area of Birmingham then within the parish of Aston.

His father was also called John Rogers and was a lorimer—a maker of bits and spurs—whose family came from Aston; his mother was Margaret Wyatt, the daughter of a tanner with family in Erdington and Sutton Coldfield Rogers was educated at the Guild School of St John the Baptist in Deritend, and at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge University, where in 1526 he graduated B.A.

He was rector of Holy Trinity the Less in the City of London between 1532 and 1534.

Rogers went to Antwerp in 1534 as chaplain to the English merchants of the Company of the Merchant Adventurers.

Here he met William Tyndale, under whose influence he abandoned the Roman Catholic faith, and in 1537 married Antwerp native Adriana de Weyden (b. 1522, anglicized in 1552 to Adrana Pratt).

After Tyndale's death, Rogers had pushed on with his predecessor's English version of the Old Testament, which he used as far as 2 Chronicles, employing Myles Coverdale's translation (1535) for the remainder and for the Apocrypha.

Although it is claimed that Rogers was the first person to ever print a complete English Bible that was translated directly from the original Greek and Hebrew, there was also a reliance upon a Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible by Sebastian Münster and published in 1534/5.

Tyndale's New Testament had been published in 1526.

The complete Bible is put out in 1537 under the pseudonym of Thomas Matthew; it is printed in Paris and Antwerp by Adriana's uncle, Sir Jacobus van Meteren.

Richard Grafton publishes the sheets and gets leave to sell the edition (fifteen hundred copies copies) in England.

At the insistence of Archbishop Cranmer, the "King's most gracious license" is granted to this translation.

Previously in the same year, the 1537 reprint of the Myles Coverdale's translation had been granted such a license.

The pseudonym "Matthew" is associated with Rogers, but it seems more probable that Matthew stands for Tyndale's own name, which, back then, was dangerous to employ.

Rogers had little to do with the translation; his own share in that work was probably confined to translating the prayer of Manasses (inserted here for the first time in a printed English Bible), the general task of editing the materials at his disposal, and preparing the marginal notes collected from various sources.

These are often cited as the first original English language commentary on the Bible.

Rogers also contributed the Song of Manasses in the Apocrypha, which he found in a French Bible printed in 1535.

His work was largely used by those who prepared the Great Bible (1539–40), and from this came the Bishops' Bible (1568) and the King James Version.