Jonathan Yardley ‘God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible’ by Adam Nicolson By Jonathan Yardley Sunday, May 11, 2003; Page BW02
GOD’S SECRETARIES By Adam Nicolson HarperCollins. 281 pp. $24.95
The King James Bible, Adam Nicolson writes, “can lay claim to be the greatest work in prose ever written in English.” True enough, so far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. The King James Bible is the greatest work ever written in English, period. That alone is quite enough to inspire awe, but there is more. The King James Bible is not the work of a single inspired genius — a Shakespeare, a Milton, a Dickens — but of a committee. Too many cooks made it the most splendid broth imaginable. Translated from the Hebrew and Greek in the early 17th century by order of the newly crowned James I, it is a work of such majesty, passion and literary power that even the greatest of Shakespeare’s tragedies must bow before it.
The story of how it came into being has been told many times — told, that is, to such extent as it can be told. Commissioned by James early in 1604, apparently in response to a petition from ministers of the Church of England for “one only translation of ye byble to be authenticall and read in ye churche,” it was the work of about four dozen men and took seven years to complete. So few documents have survived this labor — apart, of course, from the translation itself — that piecing together the tale is at least as much a matter of intelligent guesswork as of hard research.
This is what Adam Nicolson has done, and he has done it extraordinarily well. A grandson of Vita Sackville-West and the author of several well-received books, he has written God’s Secretaries for the lay reader rather than the scholar, but this lay reader suspects that it would win the approval of all but the most biased and/or self-interested scholars. In fewer than 250 pages of generously spaced text, it places the King James Version in historical context, brings vividly to life many of those who worked on it (most notably the king himself and Lancelot Andrewes, the churchman who presided over the translation), gives a plausible account of how the task was accomplished, and conveys in Nicolson’s own passionate prose the full grandeur of the translation.
There were in 1604 three important English translations of the Bible: William Tyndale’s immensely influential New Testament, done in 1525-26, the Geneva Bible, done in the late 1550s “by a small team of English Calvinists” with a strongly Puritanical bent, and the Elizabethan Bible, done in 1568 by Her Majesty’s order, “a Bible of the hierarchy, not of the people.” The last two of these were in stark contrast to each other, a contrast that reflected the controversies of the time “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 toleration.”
To what extent the king’s order for a new translation of the Bible was a conscious effort to find a middle way is just about impossible to determine, but Nicolson argues that the end result was precisely that. James is one of those singular characters whom historians have treated in many, often highly contradictory, ways. Nicolson acknowledges that the monarch could be violent, impulsive, bloodthirsty and “foul-mouthed,” but he chooses to emphasize “what might be called exaggeratedly social behavior, a longing for acceptance and a desire for a life and a society in which all conflicting demands were reconciled and where all factions felt at home.” The “long rumbling agony of the English Reformation” was in its final hours as this seasoned veteran of Scotland’s bitter internecine wars assumed the throne, and among his most ardent desires was to bring Protestants and Catholics to mutual understanding and acceptance:
“James held out the prospect of an all-encompassing embrace to anyone and anything that might fall within the dream of national community. Destroy the extremists, whether Catholic plotters or those Puritans who could not conform to the habits of the Church of England, embrace a broad stretch of middle ground. That is the heart of all Jacobean policy — it is what any well-managed, civilized government would do — and of that middle ground the new Bible was to become both the expression and the symbol, the code and guidebook to a rich, majestic and holy kingdom.”
With the zealous support of Richard Bancroft, newly installed as archbishop of Canterbury, the project got under way in the summer of 1604 even though it “was short of cash.” There “could be no waiting for money before the other elements — above all the organization, the control and checking systems — were put in place.” Bancroft “recognised from the start that the translation had to be a joint enterprise.” This was true to the spirit of the age, which treasured “jointness” over individuality, precisely the opposite from what “the modern frame of mind, trained up on . . . the overriding importance of individual freedoms,” values most highly.
“Joint committees know nothing of genius,” we believe today, and the committees we form sustain us in that conviction. Yet the committee authorized by Bancroft and assembled by Andrewes produced, indisputably, a work of genius. Leaning heavily on earlier translations, Tyndale’s most especially, they took the best of the old and embellished it — with multiple readings and re-readings in various committees and sub-committees — with the best of the new, producing in the end an astonishing document possessing “immediacy, dignity, a sense of deep, musical rhythm, an intuitive and poetic understanding of the connection between the present and the past, a tangible empathy, a precision . . . a careful elaboration of arrangement and structure.”
It is no exaggeration to say, as Nicolson does, that over the centuries the King James Bible came “to seem like the language spoken by God.” Its influence upon writers and orators was incalculable: “Lincoln’s Gettysburg address . . . would have been impossible without the King James Bible.” So too would have been the incomparable oratory — far and away the greatest, in English, of the 20th century — of Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr. Yet today, the King James is a relic of the past, relegated to the back of the shelf by the Revised Standard Version, which appeared in this country in 1952, and the New English Bible, which appeared in England in 1970. The two are different in many respects, but exactly the same in the one that counts most. They have replaced the majestic language of the King James with flat, banal language. In one example cited by Nicolson, what reads in the King James as “Now Elizabeth’s full time came that she should be delivered, and she brought forth a son” becomes, in the New English, “Now the time came for Elizabeth’s child to be born, and she gave birth to a son,” a “descent to dreariness” of which he writes:
“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 language of the King James Bible is the language of . . . patriarchy, of an instructed order, of richness as a form of beauty, of authority as a form of good; the New English Bible is motivated by the opposite, an anxiety not to bore or intimidate. It is driven, in other words, by the desire to please and, in that way, is a form of language which has died.”
The New English Bible, as T.S. Eliot wrote when it appeared, “astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic.” The King James Bible, by contrast, astonishes in its combination of the majestic, the singular and the exalting. That it has been replaced in most English-speaking Christian congregations by “modern” translations of surpassing mediocrity is one of the outrages of the age, and one that says all too much about the age itself. .
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