Adam Nicolson, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

2003, HarperCollins, 281 pgs.

Summary: A non-academic history of the King James Version of the Bible which attempts to describe the religious, cultural, and philosophical ambiance behind the translation. The personalities of the main translators and historical actors are also described with an almost bipolar sympathy or causticness.

Exemplar Quotes:

The deep décolletage of Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset, is a mark not of her own degeneracy but of a Jacobean court fashion in an age which valued lusciousness (description of a photo 172-173).

Shakespeare’s great tragedies and the King James Bible are each other’s mirror-twin. Both emerge from the ambitions and terrors of the Jacobean world. They are, from their radically diverging cores, the great what-ifs of the age. King Lear pursues the implications of a singular and disastrous decision to divide a kingdom; the King James Bible embraces the full breadth of absorbed and inherited wisdom in order to unite one; Lear contemplates, more fearlessly than any text had ever done or has ever done, the falling away of meaning; the King James Bible enshrines what is understands as the guarantee of all meaning; the rhetoric of King Lear breaks and shivers into multi-faceted shards of songs, madness, grandeur, argument, pathos; the King James Bible masks its immensely various sources under one certain, all-over musical sonority; everything in Lear falls apart, everything in the King James Bible pulls together; one is a nightmare of dissolution, the other a dream of wholeness (239-240).

Benefits/Detriments:

Mr. Nicolson tells us, “I am no atheist but I am no churchgoer. . .” (241). We also discover that he’s an aesthetic. His appreciation of Christianity and the King James Bible circles around his tastes and sensibilities. He has little interest in the meaning of the text or the faith’s ability to draw anyone to God. There is some interest in shared existential experiences through time. He is intelligent and shows great skill at providing interesting descriptions through historical research.

The book includes vulgar-contemporary poems about one of the translator’s wives and alludes to King James’ bisexuality and court debauchery with terms like “gauche sexuality” and the like.

There is very little of devotional value here for Christians and some academic merit. It does lay to rest the possibility of the King James Bible falling from heaven as the normative translation for English speakers.

Acceptable for adults, but not recommended to anyone except as a part of a much wider reading on the development of the King James translation.