“God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible”, by Adam Nicolson

 

336 pages, HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN-13: 978-0060838737

If you read Adam Nicolson’s God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible expecting a comprehensive history of the writing of…the King James Bible, you will be disappointed. And that’s perhaps the best thing I can say about this book. For some of the worst things I can say, well, first there’s the quotes: all of them – and I do mean ALL – are from original 17^th Century sources and are, thus, quoted in original 17^th Century spelling; furthermore, if the person in question being quoted is a 17^th Century Scotsman well then by God (heh) he will be quoted as a 17^th Century Scotsman. This all but makes whole swaths of the book virtually unreadable. Nicolson also never misses an opportunity to take the scenic route on his way to making a point. A common pattern throughout God’s Secretaries consists of Nicolson attempting to say “Person ‘X’ and Person ‘Y’ collaborated on such-and-such”; but the way in which Nicolson does it is to break up the narrative with page after page of biography of both Person ‘X’ and Person ‘Y’, which is fine if you want to learn about everyday Jacobean life but not if you want to learn about the writing of the friggin’ King James Bible!

Overall, the whole book reads rather like a term paper that’s being padded to make the professor’s minimum word count. Perhaps this is because Nicolson was in a tight spot, as very few written records about the writing of the King James Bible in fact have survived, owing to the secret nature of the process and a fire that wiped out many records from the reign of King James. And so what you get are a series of vignettes about the Jacobean era – some of which are even related to the King James Bible! – along with tangents about anything remotely Jacobean that has anything to do with the Bible, just to run the page count up to something appropriate for a full length book instead of the pamphlet this could’ve been. So we get thirty pages or so on the Pilgrims going to America, another twenty in the middle that are just a restatement of the twenty pages near the beginning, around fifteen or so of pictures of the translators, ten-to-fifteen on Shakespeare (including a section on how King Lear is the “opposite” of the King James Bible. Huh?). Oh, and I hope you like the word “Jacobean” because it gets used about, oh, a million times, several times a page in some cases – along with “richness” and “marvelous”, too.

Perhaps this all could have been forgiven if the presentation was clearer: I mean, God’s Secretaries isn’t organized chronologically, or by whom translated what, or by topic, or any other rational system one could devise. This disorganization leads to the restatement of information several times over the course of the book, which adds to the impression that Nicolson was just running the page count up or, at the very least, published a draft of the book that hadn’t been run by a proper editor. So God’s Secretaries is one big disappointment, being not so much a history of the writing of the King James Bible – its ostensible subject – but rather a treatise on Jacobean (that word again) architecture, long excerpts in archaic dialogue from books and letters of the time, basic history lessons on King James and the like. What a waste.