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The life and legacy of a great translator.

Let not your hearts be troubled.

-Tyndale

Do not be worried or upset.

-Today's English Version

William Tyndale: A Biography, by David Daniell (Yale, 429 pp.; $30, hardcover). Reviewed by Mark Galli, managing editor of Christian History magazine.

When James I committed his administration to a new translation of the Bible, he gathered England's brightest and best-50 of the leading linguists of the age. These scholars put their collective learning together and assembled a translation now known as the Authorized Version (as it is called in Great Britain) or the King James Version (KJV). Their phrasing and cadence and their apt choice of words have been celebrated for centuries; the impact of their work is incalculable.

For the most part, however, they plagiarized. I am not saying they didn't pore over their grammars and scrutinize the ancient manuscripts word by tedious word, straining to determine the exact meaning and the best way to put it. But when push came to shove-how exactly should we translate this phrase?-90 percent of the time, they decided William Tyndale, 75 years before, had gotten it right in the first place.

Herein lies the overlooked genius of William Tyndale. In this biography, the first full-scale life of Tyndale to appear in 60 years, David Daniell wants to set the record straight.

TRANSLATION AS REFORMATION

Daniell, professor emeritus at the University of London, appreciates the glories of the English language.

He has given his life to studying Shakespeare and other literary lights of that age. Daniell knows a wordsmith when he sees one, and he sees another in William Tyndale. His is a literary biography: he is less interested in Tyndale the courageous martyr than in Tyndale the literary genius.

Still, we do get the story: Tyndale's education at Oxford and Cambridge; his discovery of Erasmus's Greek New Testament; his passion to publish a translation that could be readily grasped by an English farm hand; his flight to Europe; his persecution; his betrayal and execution.

Along the way, Daniell debunks some recent debunking of the English Reformation. Revisionists (such as Eamon Duffy in his The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580) have shown that the English were not as aggravated with the Catholic church as Reformation polemicists would have us believe. Still, Daniell replies, there was plenty that needed reforming.

The Bible, he reminds us, had become encrusted with glosses and legends; biblical illiteracy prevailed. As late as 1551-after English translations had been available for 20 years-a reforming bishop surveyed his bishopric. His priests remained woefully ignorant: nine did not know how many commandments there were, and 33 did not know where they appeared in the Bible (Matthew was the favorite guess). Thirty-four did not know who wrote the Lord's Prayer. Ten were unable to recite it.

Tyndale saw the need and filled it. In a day when print runs averaged between 1,000 and 1,500, Tyndale's first (1526) New Testament was printed in an edition of 3,000. Tyndale, Daniell argues, "must have been sure of his market," and that "market" was eager for an English Bible and for church reform. Tyndale gave the rest of his short life to refining that translation, adding to it large sections of the Old Testament. In all this, argues Daniell, Tyndale not only promoted ecclesiastical reform, he transformed the English language.

TYNDALE'S CRAFT

It has been said that there is "no vestige of literariness in Tyndale's writings," that "in all his works there is no trace of writing for effect." Balderdash, says Daniell.

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June 19 1995, Vol. 39, No. 7