Erasmus called for the scriptures to be made universally available in all languages he could hardly have imagined that his close friend and defender, Sir Thomas More, would become embroiled in a fierce battle to suppress the first ever translation of the New Testament into English from the Greek text, the New Testament of William Tyndale. It is the debate concerning issues of authority in relation to the translation and interpretation of scripture. With the mass production made possible by printing threatening to overwhelm his agents, Tunstall commissioned his friend and fellow humanist Thomas More to take up his pen against Tyndale's New Testament and other writings seen as propagating Luther's ideas, including Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man and to do so in English, so as to reveal to the simple and uneducated the crafty malice of the heretics'. There is much about the life of William Tyndale that remains shadowy and eludes his biographers.