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Title: God's Secretaries : The Making of the King James Bible by Adam Nicolson ISBN: 0-06-095975-4 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 02 March, 2004 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.63 (38 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Well-written Overview of the Jacobean Age
Comment: A brisk, engrossing look at the circumstances surrounding the birth of the King James Bible. Readers expecting the inside story on the translation may be disappointed; "God's Secretaries" is more of a general overview of the period, with deft character sketches of the principal translators. This is unavoidable, since most of the documents relating to the day-to-day work of the translators have been lost. What the book lacks in detail, it compensates for with strong storytelling and a fine sense of history.
Even though I enjoyed the book, Nicolson did not convince me that the translators added very much to the work of William Tyndale, the martyred 16th-century translator; nor did he convince me that the King James Bible remains the best available translation. At the end of the book, Nicolson quotes a few beautiful verses from Psalm 77 to demonstrate the superiority of the KJV. But other lines from the same psalm are either mistranslated or obscure. Here they are, with comparisons from more recent translations:
KJV - my sore ran in the night and ceased not
NEW KING JAMES VERSION - my hand was stretched out in the night without ceasing
KJV - thou holdest mine eyes waking
NEW REVISED STANDARD VERSION - you keep my eyelids from closing
KJV - I will remember the years of the right hand of the most High
NEW AMERICAN BIBLE - my sorrow is this, the right hand of the Most High has left us
The King James Bible was great in its day, but newer translations are more accurate and more intelligible. Nevertheless, "God's Secretaries" shines a vivid light on a passionate, contradictory age.
Rating: 3
Summary: Not God's, but King James' Church Secretaries
Comment: An interesting and slanted work, God's Secretaries is an unabashed paean to the King James, or Authorized Version of the Bible. The author is overly enamored with the affected elegance and churchiness of the King James Bible, and shows it to be the work, not of men of God, but men of the Church - clever, wealthy, powerful, politically motivated church literati (Protestant and Puritan) of Jacobean England.
The work is born of an enthusiasm for the men and the times that gave birth to that noble and beloved translation, and a celebration of the decidedly un-spiritual and worldly atmosphere it breathed. Vernacular versions are bashed, from Tyndale to the Twentieth Century.
There is a good deal of material about the scholars, but disappointingly, very little about the scholarship that went into the translation - no details of the particular recensions used (we know that Erasmus' Textus Receptus was the basis of the King James' New Testament, but we hear little of it or it's history here). The King James Bible, it turns out, was essentially a cut-and-paste job, from the contemporary versions of the day. The author admits as much, but some insights into the use of original-language manuscripts and recensions would have been apropos - very little is said on the subject.
The author does not appear to be a serious student of textual transmission, and his occasional forays into exegesis are hard to take seriously. And I personally couldn't subscribe to his nostalgia for an age where religious passion for a churchly authoritarianism results in the death of innocent dissidents, nor could I appreciate the parallel drawn between Jacobean religious intensity and the beliefs of modern day religious terrorists.
As for the author's ridicule of all Bible translations guilty of a blunt simplicity, lacking in ornamentation - if this is a crime, it was the crime of the original. The New Testament was written in Koine Greek, the workingman's Greek, what one scholar called the "coffee and doughnuts" Greek - a plain and unpretentious language of the everyday person.
To people like William Tyndale, and many others since, the beauty is in the message, not in the eloquence of language used to express the message. By the author's own admission, the King James Bible was written in an affected, formalized literary English that was never spoken, not even at the time it was written, based on an antiquated English of a previous century.
Still, the King James Bible is a very good translation for all it's shortcomings, which the author argues persuasively. The story of it's creation is interesting, and there is an attempt to explain the Jacobean literary influence by likening it to an architecture enamored with overt ornamentation and overlay, married to a utilitarian simplicity of egalitarian elegance.
The book jumps around quite a bit, wandering off in various and sundry tangents, exploring this tenuous detail, then that. In spite of which, it remains relatively readable and informative. I learned something of the circumstances and milieu that gave birth to this most popular translation.
If you think the King James Bible is the be-all do-all of Bible translations, you'll probably enjoy this book. If you lean toward a vernacular, colloquial rendition, be prepared to have your feathers ruffled. And don't expect a scholarly look at the textual geneology of the King James translation from this enjoyable but rambling essay.
Rating: 4
Summary: Bible translation as the product of a time
Comment: I finally heard a term used to describe books such as this and the Michelangelo book I mentioned a few weeks ago -- a micro-history. This books use a particular historical figure or event to illuminate the period. This book was mentioned in some publication, I can't remember which, and I added it to my growing collection of books to get from the library.
The reign of King James I was tumultuous and filled with political and religious fighting. James sought to use a new translation of the Bible to help bridge the growing gap between the traditional Chruch of England and the growing number of Puritan's who sought a simpler, purer and less Roman Catholic religion. Instead, the disclusion of many, more radical Puritan leaders seems to have only pushed the country close to the Civil War that would occur a few decades later.
Thime time period is important for American's, as the persecution of Purtains in England led directly to their arrival in America. Already, at the very beginning of its history, America was filled with radicals not content with the status quo in England. Given a choice of surrender to the traditional dogma, imprisonment or exile, they chose to leave their home and create a new life based on their own beliefs. Even in America, though, the thought of religious freedom was a moot point. Just like James and his bishops in England, they demanded strict adherence to their religious beliefs.
God's Secretaries is an illuminating story of an often-ignored period of history and the creation of one of the most well-known translations of the Bible in the world today. In time, even the Puritans began to use the translation as their own official text, despite their exclusion during its development.
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Title: In the Beginning : The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language,and a Culture by Alister McGrath ISBN: 0385722168 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 19 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester ISBN: 0198607024 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Wide As the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired by Benson Bobrick ISBN: 0142000590 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Beyond Belief : The Secret Gospel of Thomas by Elaine Pagels ISBN: 0375501568 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 06 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Bible in English: Its History and Influence by David Daniell ISBN: 0300099304 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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