William Tyndale: A Biography

Several popular histories of the King James Bible are available to interested readers, including works that concentrate on the book's political influence Wide as the Waters) and its theological import (In the Beginning). Perhaps the most readable survey of the language of the King James Version, however, comes in the form of a biography of its primary translator. William Tyndale: A Biography by David Daniell (a University of London scholar and chairman of the William Tyndale Society) reveals all that is known of Tyndale's life, but its primary interest is in Tyndale's rhetorical style. Daniell asserts, convincingly, that Tyndale "made a language for England," in the same way that Martin Luther is acknowledged having united Germany's dialects in his German translation of the New Testament. The biography recites many widely known facts (Tyndale wrote nine-tenths of the King James Version's New Testament (the gospel Christmas stories--"there were shepherds abiding in the fields"--are Tyndale's), and half of its Old Testament ("Let there be light" is another of Tyndale's phrases). More importantly, Daniell's biography describes the development of Tyndale's skills as a linguist (he commanded eight languages, including Hebrew, at a time when Hebrew was virtually unknown in England) and parses Tyndale's adaptation of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin syntax into English. In the first sentence of his introduction to this book, Daniell states that "William Tyndale gave us our English Bible." The verb in that sentence is the key to this biography: it is a work of gratitude. --Michael Joseph Gross