Rating: 
Summary: Well-written Overview of the Jacobean Age
Review: A brisk, engrossing look at the circumstances surrounding the birth of the King James Bible. Readers expecting the inside story on the translation may be disappointed; "God's Secretaries" is more of a general overview of the period, with deft character sketches of the principal translators. This is unavoidable, since most of the documents relating to the day-to-day work of the translators have been lost. What the book lacks in detail, it compensates for with strong storytelling and a fine sense of history. Even though I enjoyed the book, Nicolson did not convince me that the translators added very much to the work of William Tyndale, the martyred 16th-century translator; nor did he convince me that the King James Bible remains the best available translation. At the end of the book, Nicolson quotes a few beautiful verses from Psalm 77 to demonstrate the superiority of the KJV. But other lines from the same psalm are either mistranslated or obscure. Here they are, with comparisons from more recent translations: KJV - my sore ran in the night and ceased not
NEW KING JAMES VERSION - my hand was stretched out in the night without ceasing KJV - thou holdest mine eyes waking
NEW REVISED STANDARD VERSION - you keep my eyelids from closing KJV - I will remember the years of the right hand of the most High
NEW AMERICAN BIBLE - my sorrow is this, the right hand of the Most High has left us The King James Bible was great in its day, but newer translations are more accurate and more intelligible. Nevertheless, "God's Secretaries" shines a vivid light on a passionate, contradictory age.
Rating: 
Summary: Uneven mini-history
Review: About halfway through this book, Nicolson informs us that from the time the translators were given their instructions to the time the translation is completed, next to nothing is known of their work or process. Oops. And I had read half the book, some mildly interesting biographical sketches, some rather unconvincing attempts to portray the zeitgeist of Jacobean times (and how they were embodied in and made possible the KJ Bible) only to find out that what I was most interested in - what the translators did and said and thought during those years - was not part of the book because there is no historical record. The book jumps erratically from biography to often pretentiously worded speculation based on the author's imagination, to a few paragraphs on a bit of manuscript with a few markups that did survive, to bits of general Jacobean history, to cultural/ psychological analysis of why such a book/translation could not happen today. The most ambitious aspect I would say is Nicolson's attempt to paint for us the inner world of the faithful, religious Jacobean. The book is thus much more than just a history of external events, it is more a cultural study. Much is interesting, although the whole is badly organized.
Rating: 
Summary: fascinating story told in clear, gem-like prose
Review: Adam Nicholson has, in the old-fashioned expression, a graceful, fluid "felicity" of style. Reading his gem-like prose is a high pleasure that does not dip from the first page to the last of "God's Secretaries." His topic, suitably enough, is the sonorous, expressively phrased biblical translation we know as the King James version. It is difficult to believe that this translation was the work of a committee, men of disparate views and widely differing temperaments. One of the ironies of the KJV is that it was written to support the Anglican Church in its alliance with the British monarchy, in opposition to the rising Puritan/Calvinist influences in England. Yet the KJ has become the version best known to generations of Americans, in fundamentalist churches throughout the U.S., who are in some respects heirs of the Puritan tradition in the New World.
Nicholson's book is rather loosely organized, with many anecdotal asides about the various translators, especially in describing their connections to each other across doctrinal lines. In one chapter he dwells heavily on the attitude of some clergymen that the plague was God's vengeance, and that devout, pure people need not fear the disease. (Interestingly enough, our modern term "stroke" probably originated from this time----some churchmen believed that an plague-stricken person was felled by God's stroke.) In another chapter, Nicholson describes the sights, sounds, and smells of London and its sprawling suburbs (which were the slums, the counterpart to the"inner city" of today) with such detailed accuracy that the reader will see, hear, and smell what the Londoner of the early 1600s encountered. "God's Secretaries" is a beautifully written, well-researched book that will bring delight to the general reader as well as to the religious scholar. Kudoes to Nicholson, and the five-star rating to his work!
Rating:
Summary: Interesting background but speculative in places.
Review: Adam Nicolson (author of Sea Room which this reviewer is unfamiliar with) combines historical investigation with a novelist's flair to produce a book which attempts to take the reader back to the time of the making of the King James Bible and to provide a deeper understanding of the events, personalities, and historical developments which contributed to this literary and spiritual masterpiece.
The majority of the author's treatment concerns the social, political, and ecclesiastical fabric of Jacobean England within which the translation of the King James Version (KJV) was undertaken. This is perhaps the most valuable contribution of the book which deals relatively less with the issues and technical process of the translation itself. For those translators for which historical records are still available, he undertakes each personality in turn, reviewing their education, political and ecclesiastical position, and their station in 17th century England, as well as their contribution to the translation process itself.
A particularly valuable contribution of the text is the understanding that the KJV translation occupied a position of reconciliation and mediation-eschewing the influences of both Roman Catholicism and Separatist Puritanism. This was due, in large part, to the ecclesiastical middle-ground occupied by the King and to the translator's commitment to operating as a committee, something which seems most unlikely, to the modern mind, to produce an enduring work (p. 69):
"Everything in the modern frame of mind, trained up on centuries of individualism, and on the overriding importance of individual freedoms, rebels against the idea. Joint committees know nothing of genius. They do not produce works of art. It is surely lonely martyrs who struggle for unacknowledged truths. Committees thrive on compromise and compromise produces fudge and muddle. Isn't the beautiful, we now think, to be identified with what is original, the previously unsaid, the unique vision of the individual mind? How can a joint enterprise of this sort produce anything valuable?"
The author helps us to understand how far our present age has come from the historical position within which the translators performed their task-changes which help explain the uniqueness of the KJV and why a work of its kind is unlikely to be produced in our own age.
Although the book is a valuable contribution to the subject of historical translation, and the KJV in particular, this reviewer has several reservations concerning the author's treatment of the subject.
Although the author exhibits great respect and admiration for the KJV as a literary and historical work, it is evident that he himself has never come to terms with the central issue of the text itself: the claims and identity of Jesus Christ. The author writes from the perspective of an uncommitted agnostic, "I am no atheist but I am no churchgoer" (p. 241). This works itself out in several ways. An underlying theme seems to be the thesis that none of the translators could possibly have been motivated by genuine altruism. Like most skeptics, the author majors in digging up and highlighting inconsistencies and impugning motivations behind the lives and work of the divines assigned to the translation. This is a questionable process when so little in the way of hard historical evidence is available-leaving the author in a similar position to that of an historical novelist, reading much between the lines which may not be factual. In the end, one is left wondering how the translation work was ever accomplished since it seems, according to this treatment, as if politics, academic vanity, and ecclesiastical maneuvering were the prime movers behind the work.
The author also evidences a lack of familiarity with the essential message of the Bible. In an otherwise insightful exchange between one of the translators and a jailed Puritan Separatist, their discussion concerning the Holy Spirit, Who only indwells believers, is mistaken for the spirit of man, common to all men (p. 91).
Also typical of an unbeliever, he is highly critical of basic Calvinist teachings-as if they were the creation of Calvin when in fact they simply reflect teachings basic to the Biblical text (p. 229 cf. Romans 9; 13):
"Calvinist Christianity is inherently fissive. Its emphasis on the primacy of a vengeful God constantly throws into doubt the validity of worldly government, and its repeated emphasis on the difference between the elect, who would be saved, and the rest, who would be damned, is no basis on which to found a nation. These radically disruptive ideas are the repeated threnody of the Geneva Bible, . . "
Yet such basic Biblical teaching was the basis for Calvin's Geneva and the Puritan experiment which resulted in one of the greatest nations in our own time (the United States).
Lastly, numerous comments throughout the text betray the author's disregard for the reliability of the Biblical text itself.
Assuming the reader is able to keep these biases of the author in mind, there is much valuable material to be found in the work-especially in relation to understanding the thought patterns and social influences of the 17th century which made the King James Version of the Bible the popular translation and cornerstone of western civilization that history has shown it to be.
We could not agree more with the author when he asserts that an English translation with the combined grandeur, literary beauty, accuracy, and enduring value of the KJV is no longer possible to produce-the historical factors which made it possible no longer exist.
Rating: 
Summary: This is the 21st century...
Review: Adam Nicolson must be aiming to show that he can copy illegible texts with their original spelling and grammer. As a result, what might have been 'quaint' in a chapter title page or two becomes a very laborious exercise. A potentially interesting topic, Nicolson's insistance on making us all scholars of old English resulted in a better solution to insomnia than an interesting tale.
Rating:
Summary: Frail and faulty but still God's secretaries
Review: Adam Nicolson poignantly brings us back to Jacobean England using poetic language disgusing itself as prose. He makes no pretense that this is a scholarly work about the process of translation with all its nuances. I beg to disagree with him when he asserts that the greek text used by the translators lacked the advantage of the newer discovered manuscripts. By doing so he is perpetuating an assumption that will be found lacking in substance. I however enjoyed his weaving of the translators individual lives, their convictions and contradictions with the mission at hand, to make a new translation of the Holy Bible. I fully agree with him that the translators approached the text for what it is...the word of God and proceeded to translate it with great diligence and reverence. The english they used served the original not to replace it. Frail and faulty they may be , still God's secretaries they proved to be.
Rating:
Summary: A highly readable account with many levels of insight
Review: Adam Nicolson's account of the re-translation of the Bible from Latin, Greek and Hebrew texts is a surprisingly riveting tale. The narrative--how more than 50 Translators managed to complete the task on-time and with a surprisingly uniform "voice"--would be an accomplishment in itself. But he adds much more: There's a wonderful social commentary on life at the Jacobean court and the astounding contrasts within King James's personality. Throughout the book, Nicholson weaves in interesting character sketches of the diverse group who came together for this monumental task. He adds concise discussions of the doctrinal issues that were separating the Puritans from the established Church of England, and many protestants will recognize the same issues we see today in discussions of "high church versus low church." For many bible readers, the Christmas story can only be told in the language of the King James. "God's Secretaries" shows how the placement of a single word can change the rhyhthm of a sentence from poetry to prose. Nicholson even dares to show the errors that the Translators made. The King James is beautiful, yes, but imperfect as any Sunday morning lay reader who has tried to make sense of "He who was sin who knew no sin" knows. This book will make a wonderful gift for any Epsicopalian, or someone with an interest in popular history of the British Reformation. Then borrow it to read yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: Overrated
Review: After reading several great reviews, I approached this book with keen interest, only to find myself bored, and struggling to finish the last forty pages. My time could have been saved if the author had simply said he thinks the KJV is better than all modern translations and have done with it, nevermind that in the 21st century the KJV is hard going, its musicality lost in the ancientness of its language. Even Mr. Nicholson's work is hard going with his insistence of reproducing all quotes in their original 17th century spelling. I found the book little more than a series of personality profiles with precious little actually devoted to the KJV and how its translation came about--something I was far more interested in than whether or not one of the Translators married for money. Sorry, but for me this Emperor wears no clothes.
Rating:
Summary: Not God's, but King James' Church Secretaries
Review: An interesting and slanted work, God's Secretaries is an unabashed paean to the King James, or Authorized Version of the Bible. The author is overly enamored with the affected elegance and churchiness of the King James Bible, and shows it to be the work, not of men of God, but men of the Church - clever, wealthy, powerful, politically motivated church literati (Protestant and Puritan) of Jacobean England. The work is born of an enthusiasm for the men and the times that gave birth to that noble and beloved translation, and a celebration of the decidedly un-spiritual and worldly atmosphere it breathed. Vernacular versions are bashed, from Tyndale to the Twentieth Century. There is a good deal of material about the scholars, but disappointingly, very little about the scholarship that went into the translation - no details of the particular recensions used (we know that Erasmus' Textus Receptus was the basis of the King James' New Testament, but we hear little of it or it's history here). The King James Bible, it turns out, was essentially a cut-and-paste job, from the contemporary versions of the day. The author admits as much, but some insights into the use of original-language manuscripts and recensions would have been apropos - very little is said on the subject. The author does not appear to be a serious student of textual transmission, and his occasional forays into exegesis are hard to take seriously. And I personally couldn't subscribe to his nostalgia for an age where religious passion for a churchly authoritarianism results in the death of innocent dissidents, nor could I appreciate the parallel drawn between Jacobean religious intensity and the beliefs of modern day religious terrorists. As for the author's ridicule of all Bible translations guilty of a blunt simplicity, lacking in ornamentation - if this is a crime, it was the crime of the original. The New Testament was written in Koine Greek, the workingman's Greek, what one scholar called the "coffee and doughnuts" Greek - a plain and unpretentious language of the everyday person. To people like William Tyndale, and many others since, the beauty is in the message, not in the eloquence of language used to express the message. By the author's own admission, the King James Bible was written in an affected, formalized literary English that was never spoken, not even at the time it was written, based on an antiquated English of a previous century. Still, the King James Bible is a very good translation for all it's shortcomings, which the author argues persuasively. The story of it's creation is interesting, and there is an attempt to explain the Jacobean literary influence by likening it to an architecture enamored with overt ornamentation and overlay, married to a utilitarian simplicity of egalitarian elegance. The book jumps around quite a bit, wandering off in various and sundry tangents, exploring this tenuous detail, then that. In spite of which, it remains relatively readable and informative. I learned something of the circumstances and milieu that gave birth to this most popular translation. If you think the King James Bible is the be-all do-all of Bible translations, you'll probably enjoy this book. If you lean toward a vernacular, colloquial rendition, be prepared to have your feathers ruffled. And don't expect a scholarly look at the textual geneology of the King James translation from this enjoyable but rambling essay.
Rating:
Summary: Popular history that informs without rigor
Review: Currently, I'm trying to reform my Christianity after a substantial period away from the church and gospel music. I picked up a friend's copy of this book hoping to demystify the circumstances surrounding the King James Bible, the translation of choice for many black americans. This book introduced me to the subject and was worth my time, but I suspect there may be better works on the subject.
The initial historical context was very helpful for me. Understanding that this book was created by a new Scottish king of England to unify his kingdom and further solidify his throne is a major insight for me. The paradox of James with his consuming personality and foreign influences generating this project is powerfully stated. The irony of a man like Lancelot Andrewes, who evaded serving the poor and sick during the plague on London, serving as a chief translator pricks the balloon that these were holy infallible men who had nothing but the unadulterated word of God as their guide. Nicholson makes it clear that this was both a religious and a political project, a sharp contrast to the earlier translation by the martyr Tyndale.
Nicholson admits late in the book that he is not a churchgoer and his interests in the work seem to be more poetic than spiritual. Several specific examples highlight what he feels to be the vastly superior word choices of translators in comparison to both earlier and later translations. He does seem to do a good job of capturing the regalness of the translation.
As someone who has read more thorough historical works, I wanted a more thorough job of fleshing out the history. Several times in the book, Nicholson will find one historical reference that allows him to speculate on the biographical motivations of the translators. At times, Nicholson seemed to oscillate between a series of biographical portraits which may be interesting but divert away from his subject and a meditation on the beauty of the text. He makes a case for how the majesty of the King James Bible parallelled the architectural excess of Jacobean England as well that I was unconvinced by. I wanted more historical details so that I could devise some of my own interpretations to how this book and its authors affect the Bible in practice. Only in the last few pages does he describe what happened to the Bible once it was created.
I feel this book, while helpful, was confused between a historical meditation on the Bible and a choppy biography of the interpreters. I learned a great deal, but I will probably find other books on the subject more helpful. For a popular audience, this readable book may be a good introduction, but I suspect there's better stuff out there.
[3 stars]
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