Tyndale's New Testament: Translated from the Greek by William Tyndale in 1534; in a Modern-Spelling Edition and with an Introduction by David Daniell.

This modern-spelling edition of William Tyndale's 1534 New Testament first appeared in 1989 as a handsome, large-format, cloth-bound volume with a deep blue ribbon to mark the page - in short, as a Bible. Now Yale University Press has reissued Tyndale's New Testament as a compact, well-bound paperback. This "Ploughboy Edition" is now less a Bible than a testament to the lasting influence of a momentary man's language. According to Foxe, in a story the editor David Daniell repeats, a critic once scoffed at Tyndale's plans for an English Bible. The "Ploughboy" designation is no doubt meant to recall Tyndale's famous riposte: "I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost" (viii). At six-by-eight inches and an inch thick (with modern spelling and a Bembo font), Tyndale's New Testament is not a perfect facsimile of the four-by-six inch blackletter sheets that were smuggled into England in deceitful barrels and bales of cloth. But it is delightfully close.

Tyndale was the first to translate the whole New Testament into English from the original Greek, working from the text established by Erasmus. Daniell's edition emphasizes the wholeness of Tyndale's work as well as its originality. Thus the edition includes the translation itself, together with the apparatus of cross-references, explanatory notes, and markings for public reading. Tyndale also showed the public aspect of his work by printing a table of New Testament lections for each Sunday and by translating forty Old Testament lections prescribed during Advent and Lent and on certain saints' days. Many of these Old Testament lections come from the Prophets, which Tyndale did not live to translate in full, and, as Daniell points out, they tantalize us with their "evidences of what we have lost by his early death" (xix). Daniell also includes Tyndale's eighteen prologues to the Pauline and general epistles, where Tyndale is often translating Luther, and both 1534 prefaces, where he more fully discloses himself. Daniell's introduction defends Tyndale as a linguist, stylist, and religious thinker. He vigorously counters charges that Tyndale's grasp of Greek was insecure, his marginal notes inflammatory, his English either borrowed from earlier Lollard manuscript translations or superseded by the Authorized Version.

Reading the book straight through, as Daniell invites, defamiliarizes the New Testament. Because the Authorized Version depended so heavily on Tyndale's work (though without acknowledgment), the voice is deeply familiar, as in Matthew 2 when "wise men" bring gifts of "gold, frankincense, and myrrh" (22-23), or in Hebrews 12, "Our God is a consuming fire" (359). Often, though, the voice is audibly strange, as in 1 John 2, when "the lust of the flesh," and "the lust of the eyes," are joined by "the pride of goods" (339), not life. Even small differences contribute to the cumulative effect. For example, in the Authorized Version the noun [Greek text omitted], with over 150 occurrences in the New Testament, is rendered more than half the time, with faint disapproval, as "multitude," "crowd company," or "press." (King James hated crowds.) By contrast, Tyndale almost always renders [Greek text omitted] as simply "the people," as in Matthew 13: "Then sent Jesus the people [AV: "multitudes"] away, and came to house" (38). Thus there are about 75 fewer crowds in Tyndale than in the Authorized Version. With small matters like this, as with Tyndale's better known use of "congregation" instead of "Church," the biggest challenge in reading Tyndale's New Testament is to remember that its wording was not inevitable. Because Tyndale moved comfortably in many languages, Daniell suggests that he might well have become an inkhorn polyglot like Shakespeare's Holofernes. We can be grateful that Tyndale chose a different dialect for his ploughboys.

JAMES ANDREW CLARK Auburn University