For much of the past five centuries, George Joye (c. 1495–1553) has been a name of ill repute. Although he composed the first evangelical primer in English and made the first English translations of several books of the Old Testament, his reputation has been overshadowed by a controversy that erupted between him and William Tyndale over his revision of the fourth edition of Tyndale's English New Testament in 1534. Besides amending certain typographical errors, Joye substituted the phrase ‘the lyfe after this’ for some instances of the word ‘resurreccion’ in Tyndale's translation. In response, Tyndale wrote a vitriolic foreword to the next edition of his New Testament, implying that these alterations amounted to a denial of the physical resurrection. Though Joye attempted to clear his name, first in a short epilogue attached to a succeeding edition of his revision of the New Testament and then in a stand-alone pamphlet, the criticism levelled against him has ossified into an unchecked scholarly orthodoxy, which has ridiculed his intellectual capacity and defamed his character. By meticulously reconstructing and evaluating the historical and theological contexts of this debate, Gergely Juhász's groundbreaking work rescues Joye from the ignominy to which this ‘conservative consensus’ has consigned him. In his first chapter, Juhász offers a thorough and doggedly judicious account of the evidence of this debate and how this consensus came to dominate scholarly depictions of Joye's life and writings (pp. 1–69). In his second and third chapters, he provides an overview of the various understandings of post-mortem existence from biblical sources to the debates of the early Reformation (pp. 71–286). In so doing, he brings to light an often-overlooked fault line of eschatological debate between reformers like Luther, Frith and Tyndale who believed in soul sleep after death and those such as Melanchthon, Bullinger, Bucer and Joye who maintained that there was an intermediate state between death and the final resurrection. Having established this context, Juhász astutely demonstrates in his fourth chapter that Joye's twenty-two substitutions (eighteen of which relate directly to the Sadducean denial of the immortality of the soul in Mark xii.18–27 and Acts xxiii–xxiv) were the result of scholarly exegetical reflection and a coherent translational strategy, rather than the unlearned idiosyncrasy that they are often accused of being (pp. 287–426). By debunking the false claims and assumptions that have long obscured this debate, Juhász rehabilitates Joye, recasting him as a man of both learning and integrity, worthy of further reassessment (pp. 427–31). Though this study contains several strange inconsistences – for example, that Christoffel van Ruremund died in both the Tower and Westminster (pp. 1, 32, 293) and that Joye wrote against John Foxe in either 1541 or 1549 (pp. 416, 26) – these minor foibles do not detract from the overall significance of this work. It skilfully overhauls the scholarly understanding of Joye and makes an important contribution to the history of the early English Reformation.
No CrossRef data available.