God's Secretaries by Adam Nicolson

(New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 336

Notes


Contents


Preface

  • "The making of the King James Bible remains something of a mystery...They [the translators] have a ghost presence in our lives, invisible but constantly heard." (xi)

Chapter 1: A poore man now arrived at the Land of Promise

Summary: Coming from Scotland, James found himself in the immense riches of the English throne, and dreamed of unity and peace.

  • Elizabeth was dying, meaning that James was to take the throne. "More than anything else he wanted and believed in the possibilities of an encompassing peace." (3)
  • James' mom was Catholic, and he was baptized Catholic (4), but he was raised by a "string of terrifying Presbyterian governors" (7), making him "an old young man" (8).
  • He was "immensely intellectual, speaking Greek before breakfast, Latin before Scots, composing stiff Renaissance poetry, translating the Psalms, capable on sight of turning any passage of the Bible from Latin to French and then from French to English." (7)
  • Productivity: "He could afford to spend time in hunting, because when he attended to business he could do more in an hour than others could do in a day." (8)
  • "Social differences between men were not an unfortunate result of economics or power politics, nor a distortion of how things ought to be but a sign that society was well ordered. Life, happily, was arranged on a slope as steeply pitched as a church spire. What looks to us now like the most unctuous kind of self-abasement was symbolic of civilisation. A man making a request to his superior happily knelt before him, as a straightforward sign of submission. Plaintiffs knelt in court, children to their fathers, MPs and bishops when addressing the king." (16, cf. "becomingly" [convenienter] in Rerum Novarum)

Chapter 2: The multitudes of people covered the beautie of the fields

Summary: The KJV grew out of the English divide between naked Puritanism on the one had and the Andrewes style with its respect for tradition and mystery on the other.

  • Covid: "Disease exposes the assumptions of a society." (22)
  • Lancelot Andrewes was in many ways the hero of the KJV. "The Man was a library, the repository of sixteen centuries of Christian culture, he could speak fifteen modern languages and six ancient, but the heart and bulk of his existence was his sense of himself as a worm...People like Lancelot Andrewes no longer exist. But the presence in one man of what seem to be such divergent qualities is precisely the key to the age. It is precisely because people like Lancelot Andrewes flourished in the first decade of the seventeenth century—and do not now—that the greatest translation of the Bible could be made then, and cannot now. The age's lifeblood was the bridging of contradictory qualities. Andrewes embodies it and so does the King James Bible." (33)
  • The Puritan reformists saw James' reign as the chance for a new start and got 1000 signatures on the "Milllenary Petition" for a conference to complete the reformation in England.
  • Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer embodied the "English compromise between PRotestant language and Catholic ceremonies" (35)
  • Two worldviews of Jacobean England:
    • The Puritan worldview: "Only the naked intellectual engagement with the complexities of a rational God would do. All else was confusion and obfuscation. The word was the route to understanding. Everything else was mud in the water." (37)
    • Tradition & mystery: "The church had always used ritual and ceremony to approach the divine...Mystery required ceremony and a respect for the inherited past."
    • → Bowing to the name of Jesus was the hinge of this debate (37, cf. Phil-02)
  • Church and State in England: "Uniquely in England, an increasingly powerful state had made itself synonymous with a—more or less—Protestant Church. This state Protestantism was the great and accidental discovery of the English Reformation. It bridged the divisions which in the rest of Europe had given rise to decades of civil war." (38)

Chapter 3: He sate among graue, learned and reuerend men

Summary: The request for a new translation comes from the Hampton Court Conference, where James demonstrated his episcopal and monarchist attitude against the Puritans.

  • "The currency of those world was talk between people who had known each other all their lives, and the intimacy of those relationships was crucial to the nature of the conference and its outcome, and to the qualities of the Bible that would eventually emerge from it." (46)
  • "Dressed up as a meeting of opposites, this conference was in fact the bringing together of a near-consensus...The only outsider, ironically enough, was the king." (47-48)
  • "The beauty of the Church of England, with its full panoply of bishops and archbishops, was its explicit acceptance of the king as its head." (57)
  • James disliked the Geneva note on Ex-01 which displayed his royalist attitude: "For James, their behaviour had been the essence of sedition. Their disobedience was wicked and their deception made it worse. It was clearly the midwives' duty to obey the royal instruction, to conform to the authority of the powers that be and to murder the babies." (59)
  • The KJV was to be a "fiercely episcopal and monarchist Bible" (60)

Chapter 4: Faire and softly goeth far

Summary: The translation companies and instructions to Translators.

  • Joint authorship was the virtue of the age, and the new translation would be a joint project at James' direction (68-69)
  • "If you think of the King James Bible as the greatest creation of seventeenth-century England, a culture drenched in the word rather than the image, it is easy to see it as England's equivalent of the great baroque cathedral it never built, an enormous and magnificent verbal artifice, its huge structures embracing all 4 million Englishmen, its orderliness and richness a king of national shrine built only of words...The only mind that could have produced the King James Bible was the mind of England itself." (70)
  • Richard Bancroft issued the letter of instructions to the Translators, the central document in the story, the king's own rules, including:
    1. The Bishop's Bible as the base text (which contributed ~8% of the KJV phrases)
    2. Use vernacular names
    3. Keep the old ecclesiastical words (church, priest, etc.)
    4. Use the meaning of a word according to the ancient fathers or he analogy of faith
    5. Not alter division of chapters
    6. No marginal notes
    7. Cross references
    8. Translators work individually, then compare in the company
    9. Each book sent to other companies when complete
    10. Companies can provide reasons for not agreeing with another's translation
    11. "Any learned man in the land" may be consulted for difficulties of translation

Chapter 5: I am for the medium in all things

Summary: Selection of the Translators.

  • Jacobean policy was a "broad stretch of middle ground", and the Translators were chosen with "breadth and inclusiveness" (85-86)

Chapter 6: The danger never dreamt of, that is the danger

Summary: The Gunpowder Plot and its implications for relations with Catholics.

  • telling the truth: A Treatise on Equivocation by Garnet gives the circumstances in which the Jesuits considered it lawful not to tell the whole truth (113)

Chapter 7: O lett me bosome thee, lett me preserve thee next to my heart

Summary: Puritans upheld the word of God as primary, giving a distinctive character to the King James Bible.

  • No Separatists or Presbyterians were included among the Translators, but moderate Puritans were. (121)
    • "The critical division between extreme and moderate was on the question of royal authority: moderate Puritans accepted the authority of the church, and of the king as its head, even if they cavilled over points of doctrine; radical Puritans denied the authority of that state and would in the end rather separate themselves from the royal church than accept doctrines which they loathed." (124)
  • "A Puritan ate and drank the word of God...The difficulty came in deciding the lawfulness of religious behavior and belief that were not mentioned in the Bible." (123)
  • "The essence of the King James Bible lies precisely in the coming together of these mentalities, the enriched substance of Andrewes's supremely well-stocked mind lit by the fierce white light of Puritanism." (125)

Chapter 8: We have twice and trice so much scope for oure earthlie peregrination...

Summary: Jacobean sensibilities prized firmness and brilliance.

  • "It may be difficult to think of an age in which multiple and apparently contradictory qualities are rubbed so closely together." (144)

Chapter 9: When do we luxuriate and grow riotous in the gallantnesse of this world

Summary: Lambeth MS. 98 and KJV language...

  • King James: "Were I not a King, I would be a University-man. And I could wish, if ever it be my lot to be carried captive, to be shut up in this prison, to be bound with these chains, and to spend my life with these fellow captives which stand here chained." (151)
  • The New English Bible is a "descent to dreariness": "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 in-structing, 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 Hatfield, 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." (153-154)

Chapter 10: True Religion is in no way a gargalisme only

Summary: The majesty of the King James Bible comes from the translators acting not as authors but as secretaries, faithfully passing on what is given to them in the original.

  • "The struggle at the heart of the European Reformation had been the conflicting claims of word and of ceremony, of the verbal and the visual, of a naked and direct relationship to God through scripture against a mediated, elaborated and socialised approach through an ancient church, guided by tradition...The words of scripture, and an intellectual consideration of them, were the essence of Separatist Christianity and in many ways of Protestant Christianity itself...In a sense that almost no one now understands, the words of the Bible were the ultimate and encompassing truth itself. That depth of belief in the sufficiency of language is also one of the shaping forces of teh King James Bible." (180-182)
  • "Secretaryship is one of the great shaping forces behind the King James Bible. There is no authorship involved here...Biblical translation could only be utterly faithful. Without faithfulness, it became meaningless." (184)
    • Contrast this to translation of secular texts where one absorbs the meaning of the text and then reproduces something like it in his own language. This is roughly what Luther did with his translation to "speak German to them" (184-185)
  • Liturgical revival and 'words are not enough', as embodied by Lancelot Andrewes: "Jacobean churchmen started to enrich the way services were held" (185) leading to an "enriching and ceremonialising of the English Church, an embracing of the idea that majesty, godliness, enrichment and ceremony could all be part of one new vision" (186-187)
  • "One of the King James Bible's most consistent driving forces is the idea of majesty. Its method and its voice are far more regal than demotic. Its archaic formulations, it consistent attention to a grand and heavily musical rhythm are the vehicles by which the majesty is infused into the body of the text. Its qualities are those of grace, stateliness, scale, power. There is no desire to please here; only a belief in the enourmous and overwhelming divine authority, of which royal authority, 'the power that be' as they translated the words of St. Paul, was an adjunct and extension." (189)
    • →Is this from the translation, or from being literal and therefor faithful to the original? (cf. Robert Alter)

Chapter 11: The grace of the fashion of it

Summary: The King James sounds the way it does because it is meant to be read aloud and listened to.

  • "This is the kingdom of the spoken. Tee ear is the governing organ of this prose; if it sounds right, it is right. The spoken word is the heard word, and what governs acceptability of a particular verse is not only accuracy but euphony." (209)
  • "Latin and Greek were the medium for Renaissance scholarship, for precision of thought. English was simply the target." (210)
  • "That linguistic hierarchy is also one of the sources of the King James style. This English is there to serve the original not to replace it. It speaks in its master's voice and is not the English you would have heard on the street, then or ever. It took up its life in a new and distinct dimension of linguistic space, somewhere between English and Greek (or, for the Old Testament, between English and Hebrew). These scholars were not pulling the language of the scriptures into the English they knew and used at home. The words of the King James Bible are just as much English pushed towards the condition of a foreign language as a foreign language translated into English. It was, in other words, more important to make English godly than to make the words of God into the sort of prose that any Englishmen would have written, and that secretarial relationship to the original languages of the scriptures shaped the translation." (210-211)

Chapter 12: Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut vp his tender mercies?

Summary: The King James Bible as the "formative mental structure for all English-speaking people".

  • The KJV is in a line of English translations: "This text has been assembled like a mosaic floor, every tessera gauged and weighed, held up, examined, placed, replaced, rejected, reabsorbed, a winnowing of exactness from a century of scholarship." (221)
  • "Tyndale required and produced a simple and plain man's translation to be slapped in the face of the medieval church and its power-protective elite. He was, in that way, a straight Lutheran, looking for immediacy and clarity in scripture which could shake off teh thick and heavy layers of medieval scholasticism and centuries of accumulated ecclesiastical dust...What they did could not have been done without Tyndale, but their task reached beyond his." (222-223)
  • Printing errors: "The curious fact is that no one such thing as 'The King James Bible'—agreed, consistent and whole—has ever existed." (226)
  • The Geneva Bible continued to be preferred, and indeed came over on the Mayflower. "Only after the Restoration in 1660 did the King James Bible, hallowed now as something that had its origins before the great rupture of the Civil War, redolent of monarchy and antiquity, come to take its place as the Bible itself, the national text and the symbol of England as God's country." (229)
  • "It is one of the strangest of historical paradoxes that the King James Bible, whose whole purpose had been nation-building in the service of a ceremonial and episcopal state church, should become the guiding text of Puritan America." (230)
  • Comparing the New English Bible: "Again and again, the seventeenth-century phrases seem richer, deeper, truer, more alive, more capable of carrying complex and multiple meanings, than anything the twentieth century could manage." (236)
  • "The King James Bible persisted, the touchstone, the national book, the formative mental structure for all English-speaking people...a common text against which life itself could be read." (236)
  • "The old, for the English, is holy and beautiful, largely beacuse the language of the King James Bible has conveyed that to them." (237)

Topic: King James Version

Source

New Words

  • Elide: To omit or slur over (xiv)
  • Agglutination: forming a mass or group from separate elements (24)
  • Irenicon: A proposition or device for securing peace, especially in the church (69)

Created: 2023-07-24-Mon
Updated: 2025-08-11-Mon