God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (P.S.) [Paperback]

Adam Nicolson (Author)

Book Description

Series: P.S. | Publication Date: August 2, 2005

A network of complex currents flowed across Jacobean England. This was the England of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Bacon; the era of the Gunpowder Plot and the worst outbreak of the plague. Jacobean England was both more godly and less godly than the country had ever been, and the entire culture was drawn taut between these polarities. This was the world that created the King James Bible. It is the greatest work of English prose ever written, and it is no coincidence that the translation was made at the moment "Englishness," specifically the English language itself, had come into its first passionate maturity. The English of Jacobean England has a more encompassing idea of its own scope than any form of the language before or since. It drips with potency and sensitivity. The age, with all its conflicts, explains the book.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The King James Bible remains the most influential Bible translation of all time. Its elegant style and the exalted cadences of its poetry and prose echo forcefully in Shakespeare, Milton, T.S. Eliot and Reynolds Price. As travel writer Nicolson points out, however, the path to the completion of the translation wasn't smooth. When James took the throne in England in early 1603, he inherited a country embroiled in theological controversy. Relishing a good theological debate, the king appointed himself as a mediator between the Anglicans and the reformist Puritans, siding in the end with the Anglican Church as the party that posed the least political threat to his authority. As a result of these debates, James agreed to commission a new translation of the Bible as an olive branch to the Puritans. Between 1604 and 1611, various committees engaged in making a new translation that attended more to the original Greek and Hebrew than had earlier versions. Nicolson deftly chronicles the personalities involved, and breezily narrates the political and religious struggles of the early 17th century. Yet, the circumstances surrounding this translation are already well known from two earlier books-Benson Bobrick's Wide as the Waters and Alister McGrath's In the Beginning-and this treatment adds little that is new. Although Nicolson succeeds at providing insight into the diverse personalities involved in making the King James Bible, Bobrick's remains the most elegant and comprehensive treatment of the process.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* The quip about the Bible being the greatest book ever written by a committee is just a quip, but the English Bible that King James I commissioned in 1604 really was committee work. Each of six committees, or companies, as they were called, was charged with translating a different portion of the original Hebrew and Greek texts. The Translators (their official title, and as such, capitalized) were far-from-saintly Anglican clergymen and scholars, selected to exclude radical Puritan sentiments from the finished translation (James had had enough of Puritan divisiveness while on the throne of Scotland). Their handiwork was to be the preferred pulpit Bible, so it had to be accessible in vocabulary and tonally. In that respect, the Translators succeeded so brilliantly that their style remains the quintessence of sacred prose to this day. Religious utility wasn't, however, the primary original purpose of the King James Version. Rather, the KJV was an element of James' grand dream of forging a harmoniously united realm out of the faction-ridden one he inherited from Elizabeth I. In that respect, the book was a failure, for not until after the Puritan American colonies embraced it (ironically, given its anti-Puritan conception) did England accept it. Nicolson tells the KJV's story so well that his book may prove to be the KJV's indispensable companion for years to come. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (August 2, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060838736
• ISBN-13: 978-0060838737
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (86 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #21,340 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #21 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > History
  • #80 in Books > History > Europe > England
  • #91 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Church History

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

138 of 160 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Committee that Made a Classic, May 11, 2003

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (Hardcover)

There are a good many churches in America who insist that the use of any Bible other than the King James Version is anathema. The joke goes that one of the members of such a sect declared, "If it was good enough for Saint Paul, it is good enough for me." The truth is that the KJV is good enough for any English speaker, more majestic than any other version, and that it is a foundation of the English-speaking world more than even Shakespeare is. How this astonishing book came to be composed is Adam Nicolson's story in _God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible_ (HarperCollins). It is a successful account of how diverse personalities, European history, and religious fashions produced a timeless classic.

There were English Bibles before 1611. The KJV grew out of a conference at Hampton Court where the new king took up grievances of the Puritans; the Bible was a byproduct of the conference. James was heartened by the idea of a new translation. He distrusted the widely used Geneva Bible because it had marginal notes about how people ought to view kings, notes he viewed as seditious. Less self-servingly, he thought an authoritative translation might bring religious peace to his conflicted land. The translation was his personal project. There are plenty of jokes about how committees invariably complicate rather than solve problems, but Nicolson shows that in Jacobean England, individuality was distrusted and "Jointness was the acknowledged virtue of the age." The KJV was a product of 54 translators, broken into teams and organized in a fashion that would befuddle a modern CEO, and they followed general or specific rules laid down by King James. The notes and directives generated by the translators have been largely lost, but Nicolson is able to tell us about a few of the translators themselves, a mixed bunch. A combination of puritans, prudes, drunkards, scholars, libertines, hotheads, and other eccentrics were perhaps just the crew to be involved in translating a work of such breadth. Among the most interesting parts of Nicholson's book are comparative translations. He gives a history of Luke 1:57, for instance, to show how it was rendered as "Now Elizabeths full time came that she should bee delivered, and she brought forth a son." Nicholson points out the richness of "full" meaning plump, perfect, or overbrimming. He also gives us another committee translation, performed over three centuries after the KJV, the New English Bible: "Now the time came for Elizabeth's child to be born, and she gave birth to a son." There is nothing at all remarkable in these flat words; they might have come from a social worker's report. Nicolson says of these translators, "Wanting timelessness, they achieved the language of the memo."

Recently we have been treated to gender-free translations of the Bible, or the Ebonics Bible, as attempts to make the book relevant or up to date. There are also "modern" translations into American English that are as dull as they are easy to read. Such translations will quickly themselves be out of date curiosities, but the KJV will never be antiquated. _God's Secretaries_ is a fine tribute to the imperishable majesty of its words, and to the particular Jacobean circumstances that brought it about.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Middle-brow history of a working committee, May 28, 2007

By 

L. E. Cantrell (Vancouver, British Columbia Canada) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (P.S.) (Paperback)

As always, visiting and reading the words of the previous 63 reviews has proved to be enlightening and useful. Because of certain comments and objections offered in the past, it seems to me that I should begin with statements of what this book is NOT:

--This book is not an advocate of any particular religious issue, sect or cause.

--This book is not a Bible study or, indeed, any sort of religious study guide. Those seeking an exposition of religious truth should turn away right now. This is not for you.

--This book is not an academic text, being largely free of any formal thesis and paying no particular homage to whatever Theory happens to be on the academic boil these days. Academic drudges burrowing for material with which to footnote their footnotes will be wasting their time here in a manner even more dramatically pointless than usual.

--This book is not a self-consciously designed "easy read" written in words and phrases suitable for the comprehension of fourth graders. This author occasionally dares to quote people who lived four hundred years ago in their own words, styles and spellings. Consider this passage: "I am persuaded his Royall mynde reioyceth more with good hope, wch he hathe for happy successe of that worke [the new Bible], then of his peace concluded with Spayne." [Page 65-66 of the hardcover edition] If that taxes your reading skills to the breaking point, seek enlightenment elsewhere.

This book does provide an overview--or perhaps more accurately, a sketch of religion and politics in 17th century England. In many ways, the two words were alternate terms for the same phenomenon, much as they are in Baghdad today. (A single generation after this translation of the Bible was made, the intertwining of religion and politics would become almost as deadly as it is in Baghdad today.)

The book offers thumbnail biographies--and in a few cases, somewhat more than that--of the fifty or so grave and learned scholars tasked with preparing the translation. In so far as the records survive, it outlines their organization and their contributions--for even in those long-ago days there were bosses and drudges.

Finally, the book deals with the majestic 17th century translation of the Bible as a literary entity. Here, at last, Adam Nicolson becomes an advocate. While acknowledging that scholarship and learning have made advances in the three centuries since the translation was made, he argues forcefully that no English translation made before or since has matched the King James Version in effectiveness, directness, power and sublimity.

Nicolson is such an advocate of the grand style of the KJV that it affects his own writing style. He does not emulate the actual style of the Bible--a thing, he makes clear, that was deliberately chosen and already noticeably archaic in the early 17th century, but he is much more orotund than is common in our piping times. He models his prose more on Gibbon or Macaulay than, say, Hemingway.

Consider the author's handling of a meeting at Hampton Court that involved the newly crowned King James, some gorgeously bedecked senior bishops of the Church of England and four black-clad Puritan ministers. All were assembled to bring sweet harmony to the land under a King who liked to think of himself as a peacemaker--and who sometimes was. That, of course, turned out to be a flat failure, but one of the Puritans, John Reynolds, almost casually remarked that the ministers he represented would like to have "one only translation of ye Bible to be authenticall and read in ye churche." Richard Bancroft, the Bishop of London (who a few years earlier had taken up a pike among his own armed guards to repulse the Earl of Essex's ragtag rebellion and who would soon become Archbishop of Canterbury) sneered at that, saying "If every man's humour might be followed, there would be no end of translating."

To everyone's surprise, the King commanded that a translation be made. In Adam Nicolson's long-breathed, parentheses-strewn, semi-colon-laden words, it was a "translation that was to be uniform (in other words with no contentious Geneva-style interpretations set alongside or within the text); with the learned authority of Oxford and Cambridge (which, at least in their upper echelons, were profoundly conservative institutions ...); to be revised by the bishops (the very influence that Reynolds did not want); then given, for goodness' sake, to the Privy Council, in effect a central censorship committee with which the government would see that its stamp was on the text, no deviation or subversion allowed; and finally to James himself, whose hostility to any whiff of radicalism ... had been clear enough. And this ferociously episcopal and monarchist Bible was to be the only translation to be read in church: `no other'." [Page 60.]

It must be pointed out, however, that Nicolson's prose does not always march to the solemn beat of the kettledrums ("for goodness' sake"), but sometimes dances to a merrier piper: "For these Puritans, and in a way we can scarcely understand now, the words of the scriptures were thought to provide a direct, almost intravenous access to the divine." [Page 135]

This is a good, middleweight book that, so far as I can tell, does not push unduly beyond the bounds of the scanty evidence. It can be justly criticized for being as much a series of raconteurial anecdotes as a logically-structured book. Its underlying preference for style over content is, at the very least, open for debate.

Four stars--but well worth reading in any case.

A MINOR OBSERVATION:

Adam Nicolson is obviously an Englishman, but my American edition from HarperCollins consistently uses the typically North American term, "King James Version," rather than the English "Authorised Version." I therefore suspect that other Americanisms may also have been edited into the English text.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Challenging Foray into Jacobean Society, September 27, 2003

By 

WILLIAM H FULLER (SPEARFISH, SD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (Hardcover)

These observations come from a reader who is a scholar of neither the Bible nor British history and for whom Nicolson's book was the first venture into literature pertaining to the creation of the King James Bible. In multiple ways, then, these are all first impressions. They also represent the reactions of a reader who was steeped in the conservative Protestant ethic prevalent in the Bible Belt of the United States, a broad area of the country where the King James Bible is taken as the literal Word of God and is not to be submitted for interpretation, much less translation. Yes, there are many there who fervently believe that every word in the King James Bible is represented precisely as the Christian deity placed it in the minds of the holy ones who set it on paper and that the King James Bible is the only "true" Bible that has ever existed. Even when one does not subscribe to such a literalist and historically ignorant approach to the contents of the Bible, growing up in such an environment leaves lasting impressions. With this as background, I found Nicolson's work informative and enlightening.

Understand that Nicolson's book is not "Bible study": It does not deal with issues of spirituality; it does not attempt to explicate biblical passages; and it does not care whether or not heaven and hell exist or whether or not God is dead or alive-or has ever existed. It does deal with the social, cultural, economic, and governmental milieu that existed at the time King James VI of Scotland and I of England directed that a new translation be made of the Greek and Hebrew texts comprising the Bible. It explains why yet another Bible was to be created-in addition to the multiple versions that already existed. It explains why, despite the efforts of six companies of Translators, the world has never enjoyed a totally authentic copy of the King James Bible (think "printers' errors," including such egregious mistakes as replacing the name "Jesus" with the name "Judas").

As do some other reviewers represented here, I feel that Nicolson has perhaps tried to make too strong a case for the power of the language used in the Bible. In this instance and others, he is dealing with highly subjective topics, and I do not always find his arguments persuasive. He is also hampered by the fact that we are now four centuries removed from the events he describes, and much evidence has been lost to the passage of time. Consequently, there is little concrete cause-and-effect in the book and much surmise and supposition. Are Nicolson's conclusions accurate? Alas, the most we can say at this point in history is "perhaps."

The casual reader also needs to be forewarned that Nicolson's use of language is, at its best, erudite and, at its worst, obfuscated. Have a dictionary handy before plunging into Nicolson's text and be prepared to add to your existing vocabulary because this book can be a learning experience in more ways than one!

Is this the best book available on Jacobean society in the early 17th century in England? I have no idea for, as I stated in the beginning, this was my first venture into that particular subject. Is it sometimes challenging reading? Yes. Does its reliance upon conclusions based on subjective interpretations produce frustration in readers hoping for concrete evidence? Again, yes. Do these weaknesses condemn the book? Definitely not, at least not for a reader newly come to this subject, for there is much here to be learned about the far-reaching theological conflicts between the austere Puritans and the Catholic-influenced Anglicans, about the other versions of the Bible extant when the King James Bible was being written, and about the King himself. And did you know that the King James Bible was NOT the one that the Puritans brought with them to the New World? Nicolson's book will cause many Americans-at least those of us who are products of the Bible Belt-to correct quite a few erroneous assumptions. It is indeed a learning experience and worth the effort to study it.