This book begins with an argument over a single word. In the 1530s George Joye and William Tyndale found themselves at odds over the word resurrection as used by Tyndale in his translation of the New Testament into English. Their subsequent dispute, as this excellent and intriguing book makes clear, has considerable significance for our understanding of the foundations of Protestantism, the problems of biblical translation, the theology of the afterlife, and the construction of historical reputation.

In 1534 Joye was employed as a proofreader by Tyndale’s Antwerp publisher and made some changes to his text of the New Testament for a new edition, including using the phrase “life after this” in some (but not all) of the places where Tyndale had used the word resurrection. Joye was drawing a distinction between the state of the soul immediately after death and the condition of the resurrected believer after the Last Judgement, when body and soul would be reunited. Tyndale, however, was outraged and included a preface in the next edition, revised this time by himself, which attacked Joye for undermining belief in the resurrection. Joye’s indignant response to this in turn accused Tyndale of upholding, like the Anabaptists, the controversial doctrine of “soul sleep.” Shortly afterward, Tyndale was arrested and executed, and his reputation as one of the founding fathers of English Protestantism has ensured that Joye has been, for the most part, either neglected or condemned ever since.

This book is first and foremost a very detailed exploration of this argument between Tyndale and Joye, and a vigorous attempt to rehabilitate Joye’s reputation. It is also a great deal more than that. Ranging much more widely than most monographs and arguing with more independence and panache than a great many, it incorporates a comprehensive survey of theological formulations about the afterlife in the medieval Church and during the Reformation. Juhász uncovers a fascinating variety of opinions on postmortem existence and in so doing makes it clear that, despite Tyndale’s stature as a Bible translator, his views on the afterlife were decidedly odd. In short, Joye had a point.

Juhász’s impatience with the almost hagiographical treatment extended to Tyndale is at times intemperate, but with some justification. The respect bordering on reverence that has been directed at Tyndale’s translation of the Bible has warped the historical perception of Joye and their dispute, and it is interesting to watch Juhász pull this apart piece by piece. He vehemently defends Joye, and also reinstates him as a significant translator in his own right who was responsible for the English translation of much of the Old Testament before Tyndale, and who translated the Psalter into English and published the first Protestant prayer book in English.

All this makes this book an interesting contribution to the history of memory. Meanwhile, the passion with which Joye is defended is balanced by a great deal of delicate textual analysis, while the theological backdrop is painted in with a deft hand. There are also many engaging details and digressions, from the coincidence of Joye’s publication with the founding of Lima, to a discussion of how much sixteenth-century proofreaders could expect to get paid. Yet perhaps its greatest achievement is to show precisely how difficult it was to translate the Bible into English in the 1520s and 1530s. The historical stature of the vernacular Bible has often been allowed to overshadow the intricacy and variability of the translation process. This book makes clear just how awkward that process was. The central irony is that Tyndale’s dispute with Joye arguably arose because Joye, in his attempt to produce a Bible text both doctrinally pure and easily accessible, was faithfully following Tyndale’s example. Joye refused to be daunted by the normative quality of the word resurrection, just as Tyndale himself had been assertive enough to render congregation in place of church, or elder instead of priest. The ferocity of their argument and the complexity of the linguistic and theological issues involved demonstrate just how contested and problematic the task of biblical translation was in this era.