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David Danieli, William Tyndale: A Biography. Yale UP, 1994, ? + 429 pp., ISBN 0-300-06132-3, £ 19.95.
David Darnell's William Tyndale: A Biography has something of the energy and drive of a Tyndalian polemic.1 It opens with a claim that serves also as a fair statement of its principal theme:
William Tyndale gave us our English Bible. The sages assembled by King James to prepare the Authorized Version of 161 1, so often praised for unlikely corporate inspiration, took over Tyndale's work. Nine-tenths of the Authorized Version's New Testament is Tyndale's. The same is true of the first half of the Old Testament, which is as far as he was able to get before he was executed outside Brussels in 1536.
To this claim, hitherto effectively unregistered, the balance of the book returns a burnished Q.E.D.
Danieli could hardly be more thoroughly versed in his role. Through a solitary search-and-rescue effort, he has edited, in modern spelling for a modern readership, Tyndale's translations of the New Testament (second, 1534 edition); of Old Testament writings from Genesis through 2 Chronicles; of Jonah, and (in the New Testament volume) of Old Testament epistles for liturgical use.
Competent himself in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, Danieli is an exceptionally fit biographer of that miraculum trilingue, Tyndale the translator. Recognizing that "The Bible" equates with the King James Bible for many readers, Danieli produces an astonishing array of original Tyndalisms that the King James committee indeed took over verbatim, as well as expressions that, in classic committee process, they damaged with "improvements," producing, according to Danieli, "the sort of sentence that gets the Bible a bad name" (356). In some ways the most impressive items in Daniell's collection are the stillvivid idioms in our secular speech that we use without knowing they are biblical, let alone Tyndalian. There is much ample and unpretentious analysis of how Tyndale arrived at the translation of a given expression. A modest instance amid plenty is inspired by the translation of 2 Samuel 22:17 (which Tyndale did not live to repeat in Psalm 18:16):
'He sent from on high and fetched me, and plucked me out of mighty waters.' Tyndale's 'plucked' for the Hebrew yamsheni is good (it is the Hebrew word used in Exodus...