The Bible in English: Its History and Influence by David Daniell
Yale University Press, 2003
(962 pages, $50.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Janice Horton
David Daniell’s massive The Bible in English is a chronicle that would be hard to invent, filled with kings and sailors, sacrifice and providence. It’s a complicated story, rich in detail, sometimes overwhelmingly so. Even so, Daniell, Professor Emeritus of English at University College, London, and honorary fellow of two colleges at Oxford, tells it from the perspective of a language scholar—less focus on the persecutions, more attention to the prose. Even without the photographs—there are 40 pages showing early Bible manuscripts and illustrations—you can tell that Daniell has seen and admired ancient texts.
Most accounts of getting the Scriptures into the English language are highly condensed, with names, dates, and places all packed together. Some writers have whipped up the dramatic parts, wanting us to smell the burning of heretics. While it may do us good to remember that 600 years ago, a man was put to death for having in his possession a fragment of Scripture in his own language, it does us better to place the story of the English Bible in the wider frame of the known world. Daniell copiously supplies the needed background: from the Anglo-Saxon invasions and Britain’s civil war to the careers of Handel and Edward VI, and much more.
Before 1500, most of Europe had the Bible or at least portions of it in vernacular translations—Italian, French, Spanish, Czech, German, and so on. English was considered a poor language, spoken by few and irrelevant on the Continent. It was considered too crude a language for the Holy Scriptures. It had all those one-syllable words in their un-flowery subject-verb-object order. Still, there were English handwritten translations (Wycliffe), even if English vernacular translations were usually mown down whenever they sprang up.
Our Debt to Tyndale
Some English translators would not be stopped, however, even on pain of death. Preeminent among these was William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536). Daniell gives no short shrift to Tyndale’s wretched life in exile, his betrayal and months in prison, where he lacked sufficient clothing as well as light to work by, or the hideous death he faced. Yet above the noise of politics and wars, Daniell wants us to hear the beauty and versatility of the English language. So his telling of Tyndale’s story revolves less around the latter’s martyrdom than his skill as a translator.
Daniell knows his subject well. As the founder of the Tyndale Society, he updated the spelling in the Old and New Testaments that Tyndale produced, so that they are now used as references. Tyndale, master of several languages, wrote plainly but not coarsely, so that, yes, the ploughboy would understand; he would also absorb the biblical language and make it his own. Tyndale gave England a new prose. Daniell, also a Shakespearean scholar, says,
In Britain, something switched the power-lines of written thought and expression from Latin . . . into clear English, understandable throughout the land. I argue here that the switch was thrown by the dominance of the English Bible, and of Tyndale’s forms in particular. (pp. 248–249)
Although Tyndale didn’t live to complete an entire translation of the Bible—friends carried on the work—it bears his unmistakable imprint. At least 80 percent of the language in the King James Version is shown, on analysis, to be Tyndale’s. The balance and rhythm of the words when read aloud is what makes the KJV so precious and is one reason it has outlasted other translations. (It was also stripped of the marginal notes that other versions were replete with).
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