I have often been asked who my favorite Christian writers are. Off the top of my head, without looking through my library, I would say that my favorite living writers are Craig Keener, Ben Witherington, Stanley Porter, and Douglas Moo. My favorite dead writers are F.F. Bruce, John Walvoord, Charles Ryrie, Arthur W. Pink, Leon Morris, and John Murray. Just off the top of my head, my favorite secular writers are Murray Rothbard and H. L. Mencken (both deceased) and Andrew Napolitano and James Bovard (both living, and both of whom I am privileged to know).
It goes without saying that I don’t necessarily agree with everything that these men believe or have written.
David Daniell (1929-2016) was the founder of the Tyndale Society and its chairman from 1995 until 2005. He wrote the definitive biography of William Tyndale (c.1494-1536), the father of the English Bible. It was published by Yale University Press in 1994. The reason that I mention Daniell today at The Preacher’s Library is because, although he died in 2016, I didn’t find out about his death until today. He was a British scholar of not only Tyndale, but the English language. You can read his obituary here. Exact but modern-spelling editions of Tyndale’s 1534 NT and the portions of the OT that Tyndale translated were edited by Daniell and published by Yale University Press in 1989 (NT) and 1992 (OT). It is interesting to read and note phrases, sentences, and verses in Tyndale that read exactly like the King James Bible.
Another important work by Daniell was his 900-page history of the English Bible titled The Bible in English (Yale, 2003). He references the second edition of my book Archaic Words and the Authorized Version in a lengthy endnote 5 from chapter 25 on page 823. Regarding my book, the first edition was published in 1996, the second in 1999, and the third in 2011. If you are not familiar with the book, it provides an explicit and comprehensive examination of every word in the Authorized Version that has been deemed archaic, obsolete, antiquated, or otherwise outmoded. You can read the full description of the book here.
