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Rating: 
Summary: A Religious Revolutionary
Review: After reading the recent God's Secretaries by A. Nicolson (q.v.) where it is pointed out that the King James version of the Bible was already using the archaic language of the sixteenth century, I picked up this new life of Tyndale to find the clarification--as the author here points out, "A complete analysis of the Authorised Version, known to generaion as the 'AV' or 'the King James', was made in 1998. It shows that Tyndales' words account for 84 per cent of the New Testament, and for 75.8 per cent of the Old Testament books that he translated'. So, it is the beautifully 'clear as mountain brook water' English of Tyndale that echoes in our minds when we wonder at the language of the AV.
This is a crisp and exciting short life of the remarkable but too little known Tyndale and his nemesis the now saintly Thomas More, who pursued him with a vengeful fury, resulting in his being burned at the stake. The beginnings of modern democracy lie in the Reformation Bible translations of Luther, then Tyndale, and others. Bringing the text of the Bible to the people was a genuinely revolutionary gesture Church and State tried mightily to prevent. Anyone who read the Bible for the first time in that era in his own language would notice the absence of mention of much that constituted medieval authority, from the Popes themselves, to the issues of celibacy, or transubstantiation.
Let's hope Tyndale will retrieve his place in history past the one paragraph at most that we are used to. Well done.
Rating:
Summary: A WRITER FOR ALL SEASONS
Review: GOD'S BESTSELLER recounts the remarkable life of William Tyndale, one of the founding fathers of English Protestantism and perhaps the second most influential writer in the English language. Brian Moynahan gives the reader more than a simple biography. He enumerates church abuses that triggered the Reformation, gives brief sketches of the "bible men" who preceded Tyndale (Wycliffe and Luther), and, for good measure, demolishes the popular image of Sir Thomas More, Tyndale's nemesis. Moynahan can be generous with ancillary details because little is known of Tyndale's life after he fled Britain in 1524.Wycliffe produced the first complete bible in English, but he and his assistants translated from the Latin Vulgate text, then in use throughout the Christian world, into an English that was nearer Chaucer than Shakespeare. Tyndale, who studied at Oxford and Cambridge, translated the New Testament and much of the Old Testament from earlier Greek and Hebrew texts. Eighty years later his simple, colorful language found its way , almost intact, into the King James Bible. It was Tyndale, Moynahan says, who first wrote "Those great rolling phrases that boom through the English-speaking mind..." The Lord's Prayer we recite is Tyndale, the Beatitudes are Tyndale, as are "eat, drink and be merry...", "Death where is thy sting." and a hundred more. A 1998 study found that 84% of the King James New Testament is identical to Tyndale and more than 75% of the Old Testament. Moynahan says, "Where the King James strays away from him, Tyndale is often both more vivid and more plain." Example: the King's scholars changed Tyndale's "...for as ye judge so shall ye be judged." into "For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged..." One of the many amazing things about Tyndale's accomplishment is that he did his translations while on the lam. He was a fugitive from the heretic hunters for the last twelve years of his life, living in Hamburg, Worms, and Antwerp. Copies of Tyndale's New Testament were smuggled back into Britain, where they aroused the wrath of Sir Thomas More. More was, according to Moynahan, the most aggressive persecutor of heretics among Henry VIII's high churchmen. He wrote lengthy and vituperative denunciations of Tyndale and sent spies into Europe to track him. Even after More, himself, had been consigned to the Tower, Moynahan says it was his agents and allies who captured Tyndale and saw to it he was executed. So we have the "saintly" Man for All Seasons to thank, not only for giving Shakespeare his biased version of Richard III, but also for sending one of the greatest writers in the English language to the stake.
Rating:
Summary: A WRITER FOR ALL SEASONS
Review: GOD'S BESTSELLER recounts the remarkable life of William Tyndale, one of the founding fathers of English Protestantism and perhaps the second most influential writer in the English language. Brian Moynahan gives the reader more than a simple biography. He enumerates church abuses that triggered the Reformation, gives brief sketches of the "bible men" who preceded Tyndale (Wycliffe and Luther), and, for good measure, demolishes the popular image of Sir Thomas More, Tyndale's nemesis. Moynahan can be generous with ancillary details because little is known of Tyndale's life after he fled Britain in 1524. Wycliffe produced the first complete bible in English, but he and his assistants translated from the Latin Vulgate text, then in use throughout the Christian world, into an English that was nearer Chaucer than Shakespeare. Tyndale, who studied at Oxford and Cambridge, translated the New Testament and much of the Old Testament from earlier Greek and Hebrew texts. Eighty years later his simple, colorful language found its way , almost intact, into the King James Bible. It was Tyndale, Moynahan says, who first wrote "Those great rolling phrases that boom through the English-speaking mind..." The Lord's Prayer we recite is Tyndale, the Beatitudes are Tyndale, as are "eat, drink and be merry...", "Death where is thy sting." and a hundred more. A 1998 study found that 84% of the King James New Testament is identical to Tyndale and more than 75% of the Old Testament. Moynahan says, "Where the King James strays away from him, Tyndale is often both more vivid and more plain." Example: the King's scholars changed Tyndale's "...for as ye judge so shall ye be judged." into "For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged..." One of the many amazing things about Tyndale's accomplishment is that he did his translations while on the lam. He was a fugitive from the heretic hunters for the last twelve years of his life, living in Hamburg, Worms, and Antwerp. Copies of Tyndale's New Testament were smuggled back into Britain, where they aroused the wrath of Sir Thomas More. More was, according to Moynahan, the most aggressive persecutor of heretics among Henry VIII's high churchmen. He wrote lengthy and vituperative denunciations of Tyndale and sent spies into Europe to track him. Even after More, himself, had been consigned to the Tower, Moynahan says it was his agents and allies who captured Tyndale and saw to it he was executed. So we have the "saintly" Man for All Seasons to thank, not only for giving Shakespeare his biased version of Richard III, but also for sending one of the greatest writers in the English language to the stake.
Rating:
Summary: A Page-Turner!
Review: This is a gripping, immensely readable tale of intrigue and ironies, set in one of the most fascinating periods in Western history. As depicted by Moynahan's carefully unsensationalistic prose, Thomas More comes off as a foreshadower of Cromwell, worthy of the obsessed villains in Dumas and Hugo, while Tyndale and his underground reformers are endearingly quirky, courageous, and astonishing in their martyrdom. Catholics and Protestants alike indulge in virulent righteousness, while intrigues involving the influence of one of Henry VIII's wives further spices the sauce. Moynahan is equally expressive in his appreciation of Tyndale's textual contributions as well, enthusiastically exploring their semantic subtleties. As I read it, I fancied consulting the author about turning his book into a screenplay, but have settled simply for teaching the text to my adult college students this coming Spring.
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