Rating: 
Summary: A Monumental Project Reveals an Age
Review: It was to be the Bible for everyone. James, the sixth in Scotland and the first in England, viewed it as an opportunity to unify his kingdom.To create this translation - a project many consider to be the greatest work of English prose - he assembled about 50 scholars to do the work. Despite their individual failings - drink, ambition, self-promotion, obsequiousness, greed and pedantry-they labored together for seven years to give the first Stuart king his translation. It is a text, which for all of its failings, is without equal. Its language drips with potency and sensitivity. The English language had just reached its age of maturity. This translation reflected the times - boisterous, subtle, majestic, nuisanced and musical. King James' Bible reflects the Jacobean England. This book relates not only the translation's tale, but also the England of Shakespeare, Bacon, the plague and the Gunpowder plot. It is insightful read into the greatest monument of those times.
Rating:
Summary: Jointedness
Review: James Stuart was ugly, red-headed, restless. He was an unlikely hero. He believed in the possibilities of an encompassing peace.
The plague afflicted London at the time of James's accession to the throne. The best way to avoid catching the plague was to leave the city. The royal supremacy over Church and State was the foundation of James' position. In Church matters James was faced with contending parties of Presbyterians, Puritans, and others.
Rather than use the Bishops' Bible or the Geneva Bible, another version was constructed. The King James Bible became part of the new royal ideology. The translation work was a tightly organized and managed programme. The organization created for the task resembled a commercial company.
Richard Bancroft issued the royal orders to the translators. The author speaks of jointedness, a quality existing in the culture and particularly characteristic of the manner in which the work of translation was undertaken. The translation committee was separated into six subcommittees. Rules provided for continuity and noncontentiousness. The organization, the setting of tasks of translation, contained a sort of system of checks and balances.
The Jacobean atmosphere was one of openness, tolerance, discussion. Lancelot Andrewes was a leader of the enterprise. He was clever, learned, and had a network of connections. He was Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. The others in the major leadership roles were Hadrian a Saravia, a Protestant Fleming, and John Overall, Dean of St. Paul's. Saravia was a linguist and Overall a classicist. Both wee members of the anti-Puritan party in the Church.
In the first years of James's rule, eighty or so Puritans were expelled from the Church. Puritans working on the new translation were by definition moderates. The richness of the King James Bible was caused by the coming together of diverse religious mentalities.
In the Jacobean era there was a love of variegation, of the multiplicity of things. The author uses a glorious description of Hatfield House, the estate of Robert Cecil, to make his point. The size of the windows at Hatfield House was immense, letting in the light. In the new translation the objective was to bring to readers the light of understanding.
The final printed volume of the Bible appeared in 1611. Word-counting is not a route to understand a translation. The King James Bible, as the Tyndale, reflects its historical circumstances. The Jacobean translation process was social. The result had a heard rhythm. T.S. Eliot cited auditory imagination.
The printshop of Robert Baker produced some anarchy with the copy so that no version of the 1611 Bible is the same. The translation was not successful when issued. Some complained that the English used was sixty or so years out of date, but the fact of the matter was that the language used was a kind of English that had never been spoken. Initially the Geneva Bible was preferred.
The King James Bible became popular after 1660 and the Restoration. Subsequent translations have lacked the rich, deep, true, and alive qualities of the seventeenth century phrases. Appendices include a piece on sixteenth century Bible translations, a comprehensive list with identifying information of the individual translators, bibliography, chronology, and index. The circumstances surrounding the translation venture and the personalities involved are described vividly and winningly.
Rating:
Summary: Ordinary People
Review: Most secularists believe that life is just a series of random events, though some are bold enough to believe in a "higher power" who once set it all in motion. In contrast, Christians believe the world unfolds according to the divine plan of a personal God. Throughout God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, such a plan is evident. In a beautifully written book, Adam Nicolson explores the efforts of a group of fallible human beings--clergymen, power-brokers, drunkards and even a few rogues--who produced a divine work of art that was to become a standard for generations. A committee of 54 men translated the King James Bible, a book that has inspired the world and influenced the work of countless great writers and thinkers, including William Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, William Faulkner, Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy. In God's Secretaries, Nicolson draws the reader into a world of political, religious, social and cultural change. Crowned in 1603, the impoverished King James VI of Scotland had ascended to the throne of England as King James I, inheriting great wealth and a country divided by religious and political turmoil. Nicolson writes, "The period was held in the grip of an immense struggle: between the demands for freedom of the individual conscience and the need for order and an imposed inheritance; between monarchy and democracy; between extremism and tolerance." The reign of King James marked the beginning of a united England and Scotland. Long before James's ascension, after King Henry VIII had broken from the Roman Catholic church in 1534, the Church of England was created with the king as its head. By the time James became king, England was a crucible of Catholic loyalists, royalists, Puritans and Presbyterians, all of whom were in disagreement over how God's word should be translated. Several translations were in existence, but King James wanted one Bible for everyone. Drawing on existing translations, including the Reformation-era Geneva Bible, the king's men labored for seven years to create the King James Bible. Not surprisingly, King James wasn't overly concerned with proper biblical interpretation; he wanted to maintain the order of his kingdom and preserve the "divine right of kings." While James was open to examination of the theological basis of the Church of England itself, he wouldn't tolerate the questioning of his own authority. Nicolson does an excellent job illuminating a world now ancient to modern eyes as he takes the reader into the conflicted society of Jacobean England. A great admirer of the literature of the Bible, Nicolson's own prose is magnificent. Rarely does one come across an engrossing book that elevates the ordinary, banal language often heard and spoken today. Nicolson further draws out the beauty and musicality of the language as he compares select passages from other translations to the King James Bible to show the linguistic superiority of the latter. Readers will also learn interesting facts. For instance, the English in the King James Bible was already archaic in 1611, and the Puritans--opponents of the Church of England and future pilgrims to the New World--did not bring the King James Bible with them. Thus, the KJV didn't become popular in America until after the Civil War. God's Secretaries is definitely not a Bible study, so Christian readers shouldn't expect an exposition of Biblical truth. Regardless, this book is an enjoyable excursion into an age that produced the greatest work of English prose. For those readers who believe the Bible is the infallible word of God, Nicolson's book offers an intriguing snapshot of a brief time in history guided by the very hand of God. © 2003 La Shawn Barber
Originally published on Townhall.com.
Rating: 
Summary: Pretentious and Disappointing
Review: Nicolson is a genius at making a fascinating subject boring. While there is interesting information here about the Jacobean Age, the text is disorganized and discursive. Not much real information is provided about the Bible itself or the process of its translation. There is nothing about this subject here provided that has not been more effectively presented elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: Sermons, sedition and social stability
Review: Nicolson's study of the background and people involved in producing the King James Bible is akin to doing an old jigsaw puzzle where the colours are washed out. You're pretty certain of how it will look when completed. After all, most people have been exposed to the book's purported topic. You have expectations of what you will encounter. Each chapter offers a new piece leading to the assumed final result. Yet each piece is something of a surprise - an unknown character or an obscure event. As the image builds, Nicolson assures you of its relevance. Yet, when the task has been finished, the rendering is almost wholly unexpected.
For once, the renaming of a British publication - the original was "Power and Glory" - was appropriate. Nicolson opens with the accession of King James I of England, but the VI of Scotland. This unusual transformation of a monarch brought about a new wave of stresses to a nation that had endured a succession of religious upheavals over the previous century. From Henry VIII's break with Rome, through an unmitigated Protestantism and sudden reversion to Roman Catholicism, to Elizabeth's long, waffling reign, the British welcomed a king they felt promised religious stability. They hadn't counted on James' unhappy years under Scots Presbyterian mentors. Nicolson's depiction of James is of a man almost obsessed with exercising power over religious matters. If not the subtle initiator, James certainly pounced on the idea of creating a "new" English Bible.
It was an era of Bible writing. The Douai had been recently produced by English Catholics in exile, while the very Presbyterians James loathed had imported Calvin's Geneva text enthusiastically. Anglicans had struggled with earlier English-language versions, from Tyndale through the half-century old Bishop's Bible. Having been smothered by the heavily annotated Geneva version, James was keen to have a "pure" text. Nicolson convenes, almost one at a time, the Translator committee to produce it. Calling them "a disparate lot" is but mildly descriptive. There were stern theologians, frowning at any challenge to episcopal prerogatives. Others were known to weep while delivering sermons. The Presbyterian presence, no matter how unwelcome in James' view, still had to be tolerated. The Geneva, as Nicolson notes repeatedly, is what came to the Western Hemisphere on the Mayflower.
However pedantic this book might have been in another's hands, Nicolson's characterisations elevate it to gripping reading. Lancelot Andrewes, the weeping pastor, takes centre stage as the chief Translator - James insisted on the capitalisation. Andrewes, along with most of the team, was driven by the notion of a monarch closely aligned with the church. No more backsliding to Rome! The Puritans, although not yet granted that appellation, wanted even stronger guarantees - bishops were the banana peels leading to papistry. Get them out! The tenor, ably captured by Nicolson, is a strong church under a strong king. Yet among the Translators was one entertaining the most seditious thought of all. Henry Savile, whose family would later found the London haberdashery locus, had travelled and read probably more widely than any of his colleagues. Describing him as "the most glamorous of the Translators", Nicolson also reveals that Savile harboured the idea of a nation without kings! Savile's experience kept him from the confines of holy orders, but his language capability was undeniable.
As the work begins, Nicolson is forced to reveal that almost nothing of the Translators' notes or exchanges has survived. Although they had access to a large compendium of works by Church Fathers and other commentators, no list of what they consulted is available. There are some personal journal entries in various locations - mostly uncovered by American researchers beavering away in dusty vaults. These, however, are but a tantalising sample. No record of submissions, disputations, arguments or reasons for resolutions are provided. Instead, we are given Nicolson's paean to the formal language of Jacobean England. His disparagement of more recent versions isn't even camouflaged scorn. He longs to return to the subject of his study, but what would be sacrificed to accomplish this end?
Although this is supposed to be a study of Jacobean times, there are a few gaps. The communication between Britain and the Continent, only touched on with Savile, had more impact than Nicolson grants. Explorers were widening the view of the world, which led many to wonder what the deity had been up to in those remote places. Within the British Isles, Savile was but a symptom. The rapid change of faiths led to serious questioning of long-standing dogmas. If religion could change so often and so dramatically, how could the deity tolerate it.
Nicolson ignores the growing tendency to question and the resulting emergence of "the village atheist" in Britain. As the most literate people, which Nicolson notes was increasing in this period, it was only logical that questions would increase. Nor does he see fit to note that the very effort the Translators made laid the foundation for an even greater upheaval in the Puritan Revolution and Cromwell. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
Rating: 
Summary: Great information, poor execution
Review: or "Mr. Nicholson is in desperate need of a good editor." This should have been an interesting read, Mr. Nicholson has done a great deal of research and knows the subjects very well. He just has no idea as to how to present it. Quite simply, what organization there is in this book is poor. It isn't chronological, it isn't person by person, it isn't theme by theme, it isn't faction by faction, it isn't event by event, it's mostly just confused. And because of the confusion it's often redundant. You will ask yourself "didn't I read this a few pages ago and a page or two before that, too?" you did. You will ask "what does this have to do with anything?" it doesn't. You will ask the author "why are you only getting around to asking this central question on page 190 of a 240 page book? And are you ever going to answer it?" who knows, and no he doesn't. There is a lot of really interesting information here. I even liked the quoted passages with 17th century spelling. I just wish it had been better presented to his audience.
Rating: 
Summary: KJV overrated
Review: Pretty much everything that was good about the KJV actually came directly from Tyndale's translation. Tyndale was the real genius. In fact a well known biblical scholar has said that where the KJV and the Tyndale translation are different it is usually because Tyndale had a better understanding of the original language than the KJV translators had. Personally I've never much cared for the archaic translations. Come to that, most of the genius of Tyndale actually comes from the underlying biblical writers themselves and is readily seen in many modern translations. Too many readers of the KJV actually don't understand what they are reading. For example the "strain at a gnat" verse, which is often labeled a misprint in the KJV, is misinterpreted by most otherwise well informed KJV readers that I've met. (Hint: strain means "filter").
Rating: 
Summary: How the bestselling Bible in history came to be
Review: REVIEWED BY LARRY WITHAM...
We often locate ourselves in history by memories of a dramatic day, from President John Kennedy's assassination in 1963 to the Challenger explosion in 1986. What were you doing, we will ask, the day the World Trade Towers fell?
In "God's Secretaries," the story of the King James Bible's translation, Adam Nicolson gives us another benchmark. What were we doing between 1603 and 1625, the reign of James I? Quite a lot. During that time, the bestselling Bible in history was minted, Puritan dissenters left for America, and literary genius spilled from the pen of William Shakespeare.
It was also the English era of "companies," or joint enterprises, that included the Virginia Company that arrived here in 1607. For our story, the important "company" was a group of about 50 men on six different committees who between 1604 and 1611 produced a new Bible for the king.
Mr. Nicolson argues that only the Jacobean age (Latin for James) could produced such a work - the age's landmark was not a painting or piece of architecture, but a book. Because of this unique chemistry of royalty and worthy scholars, "the greatest translation of the Bible could be made then, and cannot now."
The greatness, the author says, arose from the musicality of the verse. It used Elizabethan prose and when the final meeting of translators gathered, they read through it for final corrections on the principle that "if it sounds right, it is right."
Reared in Scotland, James was baptized a Catholic and brought up by Presbyterian governors. He was intellectually inquisitive, wanted "the medium in all things," had held a "dream of coherence" of society under his own kingship. "The Bible was to become part of the new royal ideology," Mr. Nicholson writes, part of a "large-scale redefinition of England."
The Reformation-produced Geneva Bible had been the favorite of English dissenters, who recoiled at the Church of England's bishops, crosses and ceremonies and its staid Bishop's Bible. When 1,000 Puritans appealed to James for a new translation, he used that momentum for his won purposes - he wanted a simple royal Bible to be read from every pulpit in the realm.
The cultural times lent to honoring hierarchy and pageantry, which would end up a quality of the King James. "Plaintiffs knelt in court, children to their fathers, MPs and bishops when addressing the king," Mr. Nicholson said. While the Geneva Bible used the word "tyrant" for ruler, the Jacobean text proudly used "king."
"For the strict reformers, only the naked intellectual engagement with the complexities of a rational God would do," Mr. Nicholson writes. For Jacobean royalty, the carnal beauty, passion and pageantry of the world also were prized.
When James set up his company of translators, separatists and Presbyterians were excluded, yet the text ended up a synthesis of verbal simplicity and earthy richness. The most famous of the translators was the Cambridge don and dean of Westminster Abbey, Lancelot Andrewes. A brilliant and pious man, he was far from saintly. He fled his flock during the plague and abetted the torture of a Puritan heretic. But he spoke 15 modern languages and six ancient. He was one of the great preachers of that epoch.
Other dramas enthralled the era. The plague of 1603 killed 30,000 Londoners, and two years later some estranged Catholics were caught in a "gun powder plot" to blow up Parliament. A real plot now is questionable, but amid the public hysteria the crown executed the innocent leader of the English Jesuits.
Meanwhile, the royal agents in 1608 had finally banished "a separatist cell in Scrooby in Nottinghamshire," namely the Puritans who left for Holland and then Plymouth colony to found the United States.
Through his splendid narrative, Mr Nicholson raises the ironies of such a glorious enterprise as he believes this work of sacred Scripture turned out to be. A skilled theological disputant, King James was also an active bisexual, which the author discretely hints at with comments about the married king being "vulnerable to the allure of beautiful, elegant, rather Frenchified men" and boys.
The Jacobean period was one of relative peace that preceded the bloody English Civil Wars, which tried to level royalty, but were defeated by the ultimate Restoration of the crown again. The wars had no little source in the corruption, moral and financial, of James' court. "The court was corrupt and everyone knew it," Mr. Nicholson notes.
Then there is the question of the prose itself, which Mr. Nicholson shows in many comparisons of Bible translation to be rhythmically superior, and not just sentimentally preferred. Indeed, the King James phraseology was so influential in the United States that it was almost believed that God spoke in Elizabethan cadences - and the fact that the lascivious King James was enemy to the Puritans is happily forgotten.
While the Bible's language is beautiful on tombstones, and it compelled great oratory down to Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, this must also be said: The living-room Bible study of the 21st century can barely get through the King James without a commentary.
Mr. Nicholson closes his lively narrative by acknowledging that partisans of William Tyndale (the British Lutheran executed in 1536 for translating the Bible from Latin to English) call the King James Version a 94-percent plagiarism. Tyndale did indeed fashion most of the great biblical phrases. But he "was working alone," Mr. Nicholson said, and thus his prose lacked the "musicality" of the final King James masterpiece.
This book is a delight to read, and leaves us with wonder at the strange times of Jacobean England and the wonderful literature it wrought.
Rating:
Summary: How to rule a country in the XVII century
Review: The "Making of the King James Bible" is a pretty good book, but written in an exquisite and outdated English, interspesed with many phrases written in archaic English and in Latin, portraying with a lot of detail, the life of the nobility, the pugnacious clergy and subjects of the United Kingdom in the beginning of the XVII century. King James was a Scottish who, by the accidents of death ascended the throne, and inagurated a new era of religious belief and persecution, principally heralded by the edition of the bible who carries his name, and was to substitute all its many famous predecessors. Amid rampant misery and plague, of London and its outskirsts, the death toll reaching sometimes 4.000 thousand persons a day, King James, a very astute and cultured man, who loved to enjoy to the fullest all the attributes of his royal position, mantained and extended his immense powers using all the handy tools at his disposal, treason, murders, lies and spies included. A man of bad temper, whenever he lost it, someone faced sudden death in the scaffolds of popularity, evading all due judicial proccess of the time. His mind was refined and he spoke more than 10 languages (Greek and Latin included), and he personally assembled the groups in charge of the translation, designing the rules to be strictly followed, the scheme of work rotation, personally supervising much of the workload. As he was governed by a paranoid mind, full of hatred he stocked since his parentless childhood, many of the participants of the biblish task-force, found death as payment.
Rating:
Summary: A tribute to a translation and the Jacobean Era
Review: The book described how James Stuart came to power, his personality and foibles. The book then described the Jacobean era. It was a complex era of opposing forces and King James was a man who tried to unite his kingdom. King James appointed several teams of translators to translate the Bible. The translation itself was to be an irenicon. The book described the personalities of several of the translators. Some were holy and some were assuredly not holy. The author then tried to show how the translation affected our culture to this day. The writing is well done and the story is fascinating. My only small criticism is that the author made some rather weak conclusions to show how the different influences contributed to the book. The book shows the author's love for wording and cadences of the King James version. At times, the author's effusiveness is irritating, but the book is always entertaining and informative. The author's love for the language of the King James version is contagious.
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