George Joye

He was born at Salpho Bury, Renhold, Bedford, Bedfordshire, England, around 1495. He studied at Christ's College, Cambridge where he graduated as Bachelor of Arts (1513 or 1514).[1] In 1515 he was ordained priest.[2] In 1517 he obtained the degree of Master of Arts, was elected Fellow of Peterhouse and became "inceptor in arte."[3] In 1525 Joye graduated as Bachelor of Divinity. During his years in Cambridge, he came into contact with several people who later became prominent figures of the Protestant Reformation. Under their influence Joye also embraced Luther's ideas.[4] In 1526, when the premises of the university were searched and Joye's copy of Chrysostom's exegetical sermons on the Book of Genesis in Johannes Oecolampadius' translation was discovered, Stephen Gardiner's intercession saved Joye from the authorities, but the following year (1527) he had less luck. When John Ashwell, Augustinian Prior of Newnham Priory, denounced him as a heretic to John Longland, bishop of Lincoln, chancellor of Oxford and confessor to King Henry VIII, Joye was summoned before Cardinal Wolsey at Westminster together with Thomas Bilney and Thomas Arthur.[5] Joye waited for several days in Wolsey's antechamber to be received by the Cardinal, and witnessed the interrogation of Bilney and Arthur, which made him realize that it was safer for him to flee to the Continent.

It is sometimes thought that he went first to Strasbourg,[6] but in 1529 at the latest he must have moved to Antwerp, where many other English Protestants took refuge (e.g. William Tyndale, Thomas Hitton, Robert Barnes, William Roye, and Myles Coverdale). Like Coverdale, Joye was probably also employed in the printing business as proofreader, translator, and author of religious books.

His first, now lost publication was a Primer, the first Protestant devotional book ever published in English.[7] Based on contemporary accounts, it probably contained the translation of the seven penitential psalms, "Mattens and Euensong" with the Commendations (Psalm 119).[8] The book was criticized by Thomas More for omitting the Litany of the Saints, the hymns and anthems to the Blessed Virgin, and the Dirge.[9]

After the publication of his Primer, containing perhaps as many as thirty psalms, Joye set out to translate the rest of the Book of Psalms, which appeared in 1530. Joye used Martin Bucer's recent Latin translation of the Hebrew text, which was published under the pseudonym Aretius Felinus. In the same year Joye produced a revised version of his earlier primer with the title Ortolus animae. The garden of the soule.

In 1531, Joye's translation of the Book of Isaiah appeared, which seems to have been intended as a twin volume to Tyndale's translation of the Book of Jonah.[10] In 1531 Joye also published a defence countering the charges of heresy put against him by Ashwell in 1527.

By 1532 he married.[11] Butterworth and Chester suggest that Joye published the translations of the Book of Proverbs and of Ecclesiastes in 1533 in Antwerp, of which only later London reprints have survived.[12] It is now also believed that Joye is the author of an anonymously published treatise entitled The Souper of the Lorde, which was earlier attributed to Tyndale.[13] In this Joye described his position on the Eucharist, based on that of Zwingli.

Joye's translation of the Book of Jeremiah, of Lamentations, and a new translation of the Psalter followed (this time from the Latin Psalter of Zwingli, whose Latin commentaries and translations had also served as source texts for Joye's translations of the other books of the Old Testament). All these translations were the first of these books ever printed in English.

In 1534 Joye undertook the proofreading of Tyndale's New Testament edition that had been reprinted three times without any English-speaking corrector by the Flemish printing firm of the family Van Ruremund. Joye, however, not only corrected the typographical errors, but he also changed the term "resurreccion" as found in Tyndale's text by expressions such as "the lyfe after this" in some twenty occurrences of the word.[14] Joye believed, as he later explained, that the original term in the Bible in those places did not refer to the bodily resurrection but to the intermediate state of the soul.[15] At the same time, Joye retained Tyndale's original formulation at the some 150 other occurrences of the word, where he agreed with Tyndale that the term did refer to the bodily resurrection.[16] Tyndale reacted by bringing out his own revised version of his New Testament in November 1534, in which he inserted a second foreword attacking Joye and his editorial work. Tyndale accused Joye of promoting the heresy of the denial of the bodily resurrection and causing divisions among Protestants. After an inconclusive attempt to reconcile the parties, Joye published an apology to refute Tyndale's accusations in February 1535.

In April 1535, Tyndale was betrayed by Henry Phillips, who also wanted to have Joye and Robert Barnes arrested, but Joye escaped and returned to England through Calais. Apart from the publication (1535) of an English translation of a Latin pamphlet, published a year earlier in Antwerp, there is nothing known about his years in England. Around the same time when Coverdale sought refuge again on the Continent, Joye, too, fled to Antwerp. During his second exile, he published apologetic works on various subjects, among which is a defense of the clergy's right to marry, against Stephen Gardiner.[17] In several of his works, he emphasizes that Christ's true Church has always been persecuted. Joye, as many of his contemporaries, was convinced that they lived in apocalyptic times and that the Return of Christ was not far away. After Henry's death (1547), Joye returned to England. In May 1548, he published a translation of a book by Andreas Osiander about conjectures of the end of the world, in which he projected the end of the world between 1585 and 1625. In 1549, Joye debated the question of the preferred punishment of adulterers with John Foxe. In September 1549, Joye was given the Rectory of Blunham, Bedfordshire by Sir Henry Grey of Flitton, and in 1550 he was appointed Rector of Ashwell, Hertfordshire. George Joye died in 1553.