Book Review: God's Secretaries by Adam Nicholson
- From: "louann_m@xxxxxxxxx" <louann_m@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 4 Feb 2006 16:50:36 -0800
This book is history of how the King James Version of the Bible came to
be translated in 1604-1611. I contend that that makes it on topic for
talk.origins, since many sects that insist on reading the Bible
literally down to the last comma also insist that the KJV is the best
(or only acceptable) translation.
Nicholson quite correctly starts by giving the historical background to
the KJV, which was begun only a year after James I became King of
England and, not coincidentally, head of its state-run church.
Nicholson's retelling is lively and readable, with good use of detail
to bring the period to life and no historical mistakes that I could
spot. He gives James more credit for personal involvement in the
project than most scholars apparently do, and I think makes a good
case.
Only a few pieces of documentation about the making of the KJV survive;
Nicholson covers them in detail. He also gives biographical
information, where it exists, about individual translators among the
total of fifty or so. Several times in the later parts of the book he
compares well-known verses as translated in the KJV to their
translations in the Tyndale Bible, the Geneva Bible, and other English
translations that the KJV committee had access to. Nicholson talks more
about the literary beauty of the passages than their inerrancy, but he
contends that the beauty of the language is not a distraction but a
support to the book's more spiritual qualities.
One or two Amazon.com reviewers managed to get really upset with
Nicholson's "secular" take on the KJV. Apparently this is because he
points out that the book didn't appear full-grown in a corona of
holiness. It was the work of a committee, almost exclusively made up of
Anglican clergymen who were therefore government employees, and was
intended to have the political effect of uniting two countries and
several sects as well as the spiritual effect of saving souls. I don't
see how any possible history of the translation could have avoided that
particular objection. Religion and politics were inseparably merged in
16th and 17th century Europe; wars started and ended, monarchs were
deposed or executed, whole countries were turned upside down over
differences between what today are peacefully co-existing Christian
denominations.
(Maybe that's the problem, actually. The whole history of European
civilization for about three centuries around this period -- the
Reformation, the Counter-reformation, the Inquisition, the Thirty
Years' War -- was deeply familiar to the US Founding Fathers. It can be
read as one long case study which explains why they concluded that a
separation of church and state was a Really, Really Good Idea. For
modern believers who kind of wish that separation wasn't so separate --
with their own beliefs in the favored position, of course -- that whole
period can't be comfortable to read about in detail.)
I would be interested to see a thoughtful Biblical literalist's take on
Nicholson's book to see how we differ; as t.o. collectively knows, my
own attachment to the text is cultural rather than belief-based these
days. By 'thoughtful' I naturally mean someone who has read the entire
book. (Which I fully expect thoughtful people didn't need to be told in
the first place.)
Louann Miller
.
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