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.