THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH
By David Daniell
Yale UP. 900 pages. £29.95
ISBN 0 300 09930 4
The Bible in English is a natural sequel to Prof. David Daniell's excellent critical biography of William Tyndale and his modern spelling edition of Tyndale's New Testament which many will already know.
Here we have a comprehensive survey of English translations of the Bible from Anglo-Saxon times up to the present day. The widely admired English Standard Version arrived just too late to be included in his survey, but we may readily expect that the author would have welcomed this most recent addition to the sequence of revisions that, starting with Tyndale and Coverdale, continued through the King James, on to the Revised Version, the RSV, and ultimately to the ESV. For Dr. Daniell's ongoing thesis is that Tyndale remains the master, setting the standard that others must imitate if they are to fulfil the demands of accuracy with respect not only to the Greek vocabulary but also to its grammatical structures.
