Reviews for God's Secretaries
Review - God's Secretaries
This book wasn’t at all what I expected, but I enjoyed it anyway. It’s about King James of England and the men he picked to translate the King James Version. Nicolson does a good job of explaining the cultural, political and theological environment that influenced them to write the way they did.
Nicolson isn’t an evangelical Christian. He says, “I am no atheist, but I am no churchgoer.” But he obviously has a lot of respect for the KJV as literature.
King James grew up in Scotland where the church had gained ascendancy over the crown. When he took over the throne of England, he determined that that wasn’t going to happen again. He made sure that the translators didn’t use the Bible to support either the Presbyterian position which claimed a strong central church apart from the state or the Puritans who held for the autonomy of the local church in all things. He wanted a text that supported himself as head of the state religion. As Nicolson puts it, “Nevertheless, Solomon-like to the end, he [James] was anxious that the established church itself should be cleansed of impurities. It is the classic Jamesian position: self-congratulatory, vain, and perhaps, in the end, surprisingly, and against the odds, rather wise.”
There were two English Bibles in common use at the beginning of James’ reign. He didn’t like the Geneva Bible because it was filled with margin notes that supported Presbyterians. The “official” Bible, the Bishop’s Bible was just plain bad. For example, the verse translated in the KJV as “Cast thy bread upon the waters,” in the Bishop’s Bible read, “Lay thy bread upon wet faces.” James saw his Bible as the peace-maker between the various factions of the church. He would have agreed with George W. when he said, “I’m a uniter, not a divider.” Nicolson says, “The words of this translation, then, could embrace both gorgeousness and ambiguity, did not have to settle into a single doctrinal mode but could embrace different meanings, either within the text itself or in the margins. This is the heart of the new Bible … an organism that absorbed and integrated difference, that included ambiguity and by doing so established peace.”
But for all its weaknesses, and this I agree with, it still reads much better than any of the modern translations. Modern Bibles are often “a descent to dreariness, to a level of banality … The modern world [has] lost a sense of encompassing richness which stretches unbroken from the divine to the sculptural … from a sense of the beauty of the created world to the extraordinary capabilities of language to embody it … 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 modern consciousness, language in other words which submits to its audience, rather than instructing, informing, moving, challenging and even entertaining them, is no longer a language which can carry the freight the Bible requires.”
Amen.
Nicolson isn’t an evangelical Christian. He says, “I am no atheist, but I am no churchgoer.” But he obviously has a lot of respect for the KJV as literature.
King James grew up in Scotland where the church had gained ascendancy over the crown. When he took over the throne of England, he determined that that wasn’t going to happen again. He made sure that the translators didn’t use the Bible to support either the Presbyterian position which claimed a strong central church apart from the state or the Puritans who held for the autonomy of the local church in all things. He wanted a text that supported himself as head of the state religion. As Nicolson puts it, “Nevertheless, Solomon-like to the end, he [James] was anxious that the established church itself should be cleansed of impurities. It is the classic Jamesian position: self-congratulatory, vain, and perhaps, in the end, surprisingly, and against the odds, rather wise.”
There were two English Bibles in common use at the beginning of James’ reign. He didn’t like the Geneva Bible because it was filled with margin notes that supported Presbyterians. The “official” Bible, the Bishop’s Bible was just plain bad. For example, the verse translated in the KJV as “Cast thy bread upon the waters,” in the Bishop’s Bible read, “Lay thy bread upon wet faces.” James saw his Bible as the peace-maker between the various factions of the church. He would have agreed with George W. when he said, “I’m a uniter, not a divider.” Nicolson says, “The words of this translation, then, could embrace both gorgeousness and ambiguity, did not have to settle into a single doctrinal mode but could embrace different meanings, either within the text itself or in the margins. This is the heart of the new Bible … an organism that absorbed and integrated difference, that included ambiguity and by doing so established peace.”
But for all its weaknesses, and this I agree with, it still reads much better than any of the modern translations. Modern Bibles are often “a descent to dreariness, to a level of banality … The modern world [has] lost a sense of encompassing richness which stretches unbroken from the divine to the sculptural … from a sense of the beauty of the created world to the extraordinary capabilities of language to embody it … 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 modern consciousness, language in other words which submits to its audience, rather than instructing, informing, moving, challenging and even entertaining them, is no longer a language which can carry the freight the Bible requires.”
Amen.
Reviewed by Roger on 2004-03-19 21:39:48