George Joye’s New Testament

Abstract

Although George Joye’s early work on the translations of the Psalms into English make him a pioneer in his own right, it is not for this reason that Joye is chiefly remembered by sixteenth-century scholars. Butterworth and Chester, Joye’s biographers suggest that Joye’s 1534 New Testament is an insignificant adjunct to his corpus.¹ Though William Clebsch’s pioneering work, England’s Earliest Protestants does much to recover the reputations of marginal Bible revisers, he too considers Joye’s New Testament to be hardly worth notice.² As a Bible translator and reviser, however, Joye did not himself consider his revision of Tyndale’s New Testament to be less than necessary and long overdue. As for the famous argument which ensued, this alone is sufficient witness to the fact that Tyndale certainly did not think that there was insufficient difference between his and Joye’s work to warrant Joye’s calling it his own version; arguably, this was the basis of Tyndale’s vehement epistolary battle with Joye. In any case, the fact that Joye revised Tyndale’s New Testament has not won him any supporters among present day advocates for the translations of William Tyndale. It is worth re-examining exactly what George Joye did to Tyndale’s translation to warrant his being blotted out of the Bible history books.