John Rogers (c.1500–1555)

John Rogers
Bible translator and commentator, Protestant martyr
Born	c. 1505 Deritend, Birmingham, England
Died	4 February 1555(1555-02-04) Smithfield, London, England

John Rogers (c. 1505 – 4 February 1555) was an English clergyman, Bible translator and commentator. He was the first English Protestant martyr under Mary I of England.

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 he graduated B.A. in 1526. Between 1532 and 1534 he was rector of Holy Trinity the Less in the City of London.

In 1534, Rogers went to Antwerp 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 married Antwerp native Adriana de Weyden (b. 1522, anglicised to Adrana Pratt in 1552) in 1537. After Tyndale's death, Rogers 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.