"God's Secretaries" by Adam Nicolson

King James I ascended the English throne in 1603, following the death of Elizabeth I. The religious issues that had started with Henry VIII and the English Reformation had never really stopped – a swing to the radical Protestant under Henry’s son, Edward; a swing back to the Catholic under Queen Mary; and swing back toward the center under Elizabeth. But the issues were far from settled.

The background of James himself exemplified these conflicts. He was the son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots; he was raised by ardent Presbyterians in Scotland where, for self-protection, he learned to lie and dissemble. And then he becomes king of England (and Scotland) and the head of the Church of England. One of the first things he did as king was to convene a conference at Hampton Court Palace of the various Protestant religious groups and factions, seeking some kind of common ground as long as that common ground accepted him as head of the church.

It was a time of excitement about regime change, expectations of things getting better, and anticipation of the good things the reign of James would bring. It couldn’t last, but of all the things James did, one had by far the greatest and most long-lasting impact – the assembling of six companies of theologians to create a new version of the Bible. It became what we know as the King James Version; it’s impact on religion and the English language can’t be overestimated.

In God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, British writer Adam Nicolson tells the full story of how that version of the Bible came to be. Originally published in in 2003, reissued in 2009, republished yet again in 2011 for the 400^th anniversary of the KJV, and republished in 2016, God’s Secretaries provides the history and context of the times, and how the KJV emerged from it. It was not a sure thing.

Religious conflicts were ongoing. If anything disabused James of his notion of him leading a new era, it was the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which a small group of Catholic extremists planned to blow up Parliament, the King and Queen, and government officials.

The conflicts weren’t only between Protestants and the remaining Catholics in England. They could be just as intense between Anglican officials and groups called “Puritans,” people who had a more radical Protestant view. They could be persecuted as much as the Catholics at times; one group, known as the Pilgrims, would eventually leave England for Holland, and a few years later sail in the Mayflower for America. But some of the KJV translators, and particularly the group based in Cambridge University, had definite Puritan sympathies.

Few documents from the translation program actually survive. A few discoveries in the 1950s (by American scholars, no less) of documents mostly in Oxford have shed light on translators themselves and how they went about the process of translation.

The translators had no qualms about borrowing from five previous translations approved for the work. One of those translations was by William Tyndale (1494-1536), and the KJV translators borrowed liberally from it (so did William Shakespeare).

Adam Nicolson

Nicolson is the author of a number of popular history and nature books. His history works include Seamanship: A Voyage Along the Wild Coats of the British Isles (2004);

 Men of Honour: Trafalgar: and The Making of an English Hero (2005); Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and Nelson’s Battle of Trafalgar (2006); Quarrel with the King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War (2008); Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History (2008); Gentry: Six Hundred Years of a Peculiarly English Class (2011); and The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters (2014), among others. His nature books include accounts of walks in France, Britain, the United States, and Scotland and The Smell of the Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Purch Hill (2011).

“The language of the King James Bible,” Nicolson writes, “is the language …of patriarchy, of an instructed order, of richness as a form of beauty, of authority as a form of good.” He notes that this kind of language has largely died.

God’s Secretaries is a wonderful story of the KJV, one that places the translation in its time and context, and one that judges the main actors in its creation and its translators in their own era and not ours.

Related: “Tyndale” by David Teems.

Top illustration: the title page of the first edition of the King James Bible in 1611.

Happy Birthday, KJV

Baby Boomers can usually remember where they were and what they were doing on Nov. 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated (this Boomer was in his 7^th grade history class). For the Gen X generation, it was the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986. For all of us, it was Sept. 11, 2001.

There’s another date from my childhood that I remember well, one month to the day after President Kennedy was killed. I was standing in Faith Lutheran Church in a suburb of New Orleans. There were 12 of us standing in front of the entire congregation – the new students in the catechism class – and we were there to receive a leather Bible from the church. Each of these blue cover Bibles was inscribed with our names, the name of the congregation and the date.

We had already been meeting since September. The catechism class was comprised of seventh and eighth graders. My class was a small one; a year-and-a-half later, when we were confirmed and made our first communion, the original 12 had dwindled to four. Moves, job transfers had taken a toll on our class. And in the group of four, I would be the only boy. The three girls were thrilled because, they predicted, I would be singled out to answer all the hard questions the pastor would ask us in front of the congregation. I thought they would be wrong. I should have known better; females predict the future better than males.

On that Dec. 22, 1963, the Bibles we were given was the King James Version (with maps). In the intervening 47 years, that Bible is still in remarkably good shape. The volume we were given was published by the American Bible Society.

This year marks the 400^th anniversary of that translation of the Bible. In 1611, the group of scholars (18 from the Church of England and four Puritans) saw their work of seven years come to fruition. Its influence on the Protestant faith has been enormous – it reigned supreme for the next three centuries and even today is still one the bestselling books on any list.

It’s intriguing that the King James version was a contemporary of the other great English influence on language, culture and thought – William Shakespeare. Shakespeare and the KJV together have shaped the language we speak today and the history we share. Its words and phrases can be found in everything from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the Liberty Bell to the inscription on the gates of Harvard (whether the faculty and students there realize it or not), writes Leland Ryken, a professor of English at Wheaton College and author of The Legacy of the King James Bible, in an article Saturday in the Wall Street Journal.

When you consider that English is the language of global business and commerce, the impact of the KJV and Shakespeare go far beyond the countries where English is the native language.

Since 1611,there have been other translations, of course – the New American Standard, the Revised, the New KJV, the New International Version (the NIV is the one I use most often), even a politically correct NIV. But nothing surpasses the beauty of the KJV.

If you’re skeptical, simply read aloud the 23^rd Psalm in the KJV version, and then do the same with any of the more contemporary versions. There is simply no comparison. Reading the KJV today is almost like reading poetry.

Its influence has been huge, but it’s also been particular, especially in the life of a 12-year-old who stood with his fellow catechumens in a church in 1963.