Adam Nicolson has had the ill-luck—or the temerity—to write in the wake of two excellent books on his subject, both of which appeared in 2001: Benson Bobrick’s The Making of the English Bible and Alister McGrath’s In the Beginning. Little of what he tells us about the production process of the King James (“Authorized”) Version of the Bible (1611) cannot be found, in more detail and better expressed, in those precursors. Too much of God’s Secretaries is after-dinner history, written in a “style” which often gives pain. The compilers of the AV are described as “a generous slice of Jacobean England,” serving a monarch whose vision of universal peace was “a fantasy too far” and who wished to “embrace a broad stretch of middle ground”—a truly eirenic ambition. One of the commission’s leading members, Lancelot Andrewes, is credited with the ability to “slalom around the complexities of theological dispute.” Nicolson’s own expertise in this area (theology, not slaloming) may be judged by his reference to “the flat, overall illumination of Protestant ideology.” Nor is his grasp of Jacobean court culture much stronger; he characterizes it as “drenched in the word rather than the image,” forgetting the intensely spectacular nature of masques and other entertainments. How far from the truth, too (alas!), is his statement that the AV is a book with which “the English-speaking world has been familiar ever since” its publication. On the contrary: at least in Britain, few people under fifty are likely ever to have heard it read in churches, or to have read it themselves. Undergraduates might once have encountered it in a course on seventeenth-century prose; if any such courses survive, they probably exclude the AV, despite the fact that it was a key source for English literature for over three centuries, on the grounds that it is now too “inaccessible” to the students—and their teachers.

Faced with Nicolson’s over-simplifications, banalities, crudities, and distortions, one might be tempted to lay the volume aside and pass on. But there is another, more impressive voice in his book. It comes out here, apropos the disastrousness of the New English Bible (1962), which T. S. Eliot rightly condemned for “its combination of the vulgar, the trivial, and the pedantic.” Nicolson writes:  

This is about more than mere sonority or the beeswaxed heritage-appeal of antique vocabulary and grammar. The flattening of language is a flattening of meaning. Language which is not taut with a sense of its own significance, which is apologetic in its desire to be acceptable to a modern consciousness, language in other words which submits to its audience, rather than instructing, informing, moving, challenging and even entertaining them, is no longer a language which can carry the freight the Bible requires. It has, in short, lost all authority… . [The NEB] is a form of language which has died.

That is both true and pungently expressed. When Nicolson undertakes detailed verbal comparisons between the AV and its predecessors or successors, he leaves aside anecdotal padding and focuses a far sharper lens.

The tight social network from which the translators came is noteworthy. We have the names of fifty of them, of whom twenty-three had backgrounds at Cambridge and eighteen at Oxford—a predictable bias, given Cambridge’s prominent role in the gestation of Protestantism, although anyone suspected of Puritan sympathies was excluded from the translation team. Many had known each other at school and university; those who rose to power provided places for their less fortunate fellows. Archbishop Bancroft of Canterbury issued them with a set of instructions which reflect the King’s requirements for the translation: the Bishops’ Bible of 1568 was to be followed as much as possible, with traditional technical terms kept and not translated so as to favor Separatists (e.g. “church” not “congregation”). There were to be no marginal glosses, as in the Geneva Bible which James detested because of its popularity among Puritans, but only cross-references, and in cases of multiple meaning “that to be kept which hath been most commonly used by most of the ancient Fathers.” Each individual’s work was subject to rigorous cross-checking, to eliminate all risk of undue idiosyncrasy. From this derives what Nicolson describes as the AV’s conformity “both to Protestant and to pre-Protestant ideas about the nature of Christianity.” It is in some sense still a Catholic bible; for all its successors, the Reformation has happened, the past is over and gone.

Few other contemporary documents dealing with the translation have survived; the Privy Council records between 1600 and 1613, which might have been informative, were destroyed in a fire. One set of minutes of the discussions has been fortuitously preserved. Its author was John Bois, who had worked on the Apocrypha. He took notes—in Latin ironically—at the final revision stage. The procedure was instructive: the proposed English version was read aloud, committee members following the text in polyglot Bibles, interrupting the reader only to raise objections. “The ear,” Nicolson observes, “is the governing organ of this prose; if it sounds right, it is right.” It was intended to be read aloud in churches, and its cadences were shaped accordingly. In Hebrews 13.18, for instance, Jesus is described as “the same yesterday, and today, and for ever.” In committee, Andrew Downes, Professor of Greek at Cambridge, proposed that this be altered to “yesterday, and today the same, and for ever” on the grounds that “the statement will be more majestic.” Perhaps, but it would not come so easily off the tongue, and his suggestion was rejected. If majesty is indeed the quality which most people feel the AV possesses above all, this is partly due to its combination, at its best, of simplicity and sonority.

Yet this was also a consciously archaic English, adopting much from earlier versions, especially that of Tyndale (tactfully unacknowledged in view of his radicalism), and written with an eye to the original languages: “it is not the English you would have heard on the street, then or ever,” Nicolson says. (Nor, incidentally, is Shakespeare’s; reading his plays alongside those of his contemporaries, I often wonder how much a theater audience would really have understood. Only Jonson is harder—and Jonson’s plays were notorious box-office failures.) The Revised Version (1885) introduced words such as “peradventure” or “aforetime” in a bid to make the AV more “authentically” Jacobean, in the manner of architectural “improvement.” The main reason why the NEB is such a mess is not that it was compiled by a committee, for that had worked perfectly well in 1611, but the delusion of its directors that a “timeless” English could be achieved. “Looking for reality,” Nicolson well says, the NEB team “lost all feeling for the extraordinary and overpowering strangeness of the Bible.” What could be less ordinary than the more blood-curdling stories of the Pentateuch, Jesus’s miracles, or the Book of Revelation? But there is more to the point than that. The only “timeless” language there has ever been is Esperanto. Language belongs perforce to a time and place, a socio-cultural context, a framework of assumptions about the world. Nicolson can cast a sudden shaft of light on such connexions. St. John has Peter, after his denial of Jesus, admitted to a place by the fireside among the high priest’s servants: “and Peter stood with them, and warmed himself.” Did the translators reflect on the shifting coteries of the Court, asks Nicolson, on the fate of Essex for instance, and balance shivering integrity against cosy compromise in their imaginations? Or did John Layfield, who had been to Puerto Rico and written a dazzled account of its wonders, remember what he had called the “green-good liking” of the trees of Dominica as he translated the description of the Garden of Eden?

The hankering of some modern Christians—generally the middle-aged and old—after the AV, and its companion jewel the Book of Common Prayer (1662), while understandable, is also in the strict sense of the word, pathetic. That world cannot come again; perhaps, as Nicolson implies, it was never really there anyway. If we are to have a Bible at all we must, one supposes, have a Bible for our world. The problem is that many of us no longer know what our world consists of or how to name it. It is the world of Babel rather than Pentecost, and for such a bewilderment of tongues there can be no translation.

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