God’s Secretaries

[robin_d_laws]

Adam Nicolson’s God’s Secretaries: The Making Of the King James Bible (2003, HarperCollins) is a compelling work of popular history. I’d rate it as a great companion piece to Northrop Frye’s The Great Code, which follows the influence of the King James Bible as a literary work. It traces the political and cultural forces that led to the project, from the accession of the profligate, scholarly James, to conflicts between Puritans and Church Of England traditionalists, and through the aftershocks of the 1605 Gunpowder plot. The book lacks the monomania of intent to be boiled down to a single thesis. My main takeaway was that the King James owes its astounding longevity and literary influence to the translators’ emphasis on meter. This aesthetic choice arose naturally from their desire to project a sense of majesty reflecting their belief in a church headed by a king.

I’m far from an expert in the field and therefore found fresh delight in the following factoids, which are undoubtedly old hat to those more fully steeped in the material:

• The original Greek text of the New Testament frequently misquotes, mistranslates, and otherwise mangles its quotations of the Old Testament.
• The common phrase “bald as a coot”? Biblical!
• After seven years of painstaking, line-by-line effort by a vast committee of scholar-clerics, the book was turned over to its officially licensed printer who (in a turn of events that will resonate grimly with anyone involved with RPG publishing) then thoroughly screwed it up.
• The King James version was a dead-on-arrival flop on its debut in 1611. Only after the Restoration, when Britons sought to reestablish a continuity to a past that never quite was, did it catch on as the authoritative version.
• Its acceptance in America followed a similarly ironic path. The edition preferred by the first Puritans was the Geneva Bible, a fire-breathing, rebellious version of the text. When their descendants became the establishment, a pro-government Bible was needed, and the King James moved in to fill the gap.