Book of Books

...How did the selected men deliver...

...Especially noteworthy is his discretion in speculating—noteworthy because the story he has to tell is one that cannot be told without some guesswork...

...Nicolson calls our attention to Andrewes's tendency to coldness and moral indifference, as when Andrewes considers an outbreak of the plague in London a punishment for the people's sins, yet leaves town to wait out the pestilence in the safe and peaceful countryside...

...God's Secretaries counts as "popular" history because it lacks footnotes...

...BY ALAN JACOBS When I first saw Adam Nicolson's new book about the King James Bible, I feared that it would be no more than a belated competitor to two volumes that appeared a year or so ago: Alister McGrath's In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture and Benson Bobrick's Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired...

...Otherwise we can never understand something that Nicolson is at great pains to make us understand: "It is because people like Lancelot Andrewes flourished in the first decade of the seventeenth centu-ry—and do not now—that the greatest translation of the Bible could be made then, and cannot now...

...Although Nicolson Alan Jacobs teaches English at Wheaton College in Illinois...

...similarly, Bobrick is more concerned to trace the theological, political, and linguistic developments of the century prior to James's commission of six Companies of Translators, and the subsequent cultural influence of that Bible, than to trace the production of the book itself...

...This is popular history at something close to its very best...

...His most recent book is A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love...

...is not a professional scholar, his learning is both impressive and well managed...

...Examples of this kind could easily be multiplied...

...and once the Translators had been chosen, almost the entire process drops from view...

...that is, Nicolson focuses on creating a compelling narrative rather than emphasizing (as professors usually do) the sources supporting the narrative and specifying the inferences the author has drawn from them...

...As Nicolson notes, at the end of several chapters tracing the lineaments of Jacobean (that is, early seventeenth-century) political and religious culture: it was an intense, competitive and vital world...

...But the question remains: how did this Bible emerge from it...

...Once the king had decided it should happen...

...Without speculating unnecessarily, he draws on letters, diaries, governmental reports, and every other kind of document available to reveal the minds and hearts of the Translators...

...But it is precisely the job of historians like Adam Nicolson to help us see that such people once existed...

...or when he tells a long-imprisoned Puritan, Henry Barrow, that he shouldn't complain about imprisonment: "The solitarie and contemplative life I hold the most blessed life...

...The age's lifeblood was the bridging of contradictory qualities...

...Layfield seems to have been particularly interested in the richness and profusion of the flora of the New World, and racked his brains to find a way to describe the taste of pineapples: "I cannot liken it in the palate to any (me thinks) better then to very ripe Strawberries and Creame...

...Typical of Nicolson's scrupulousness is his skillful exploration of the theological and political context for each of the fifteen Rules that Archbishop Bancroft, working from King James's own instructions, disseminated to the Translators...

...No wonder then that, despite McGrath's title, only two of his twelve chapters focus on the King James Bible itself...

...once [Archbishop of Canterbury Richard] Bancroft had disseminated the Rules...

...Take, for instance, Lancelot Andrewes, perhaps the most famous preacher of his time, the leading light among the Translators, and (three centuries later) a hero of T.S...

...Nicolson describes the culture of affection in Jacobean Eng-land—in which friendships with no element of sexuality would nevertheless find passionate expression in words and embraces, something visitors from the more restrained Continent (how times have changed...

...Nicolson, however, is not deterred by the poverty of documentation: His book is a wonderful example of what the determined researcher can find and use where the less diligent or imaginative see only deficiency...

...It is likewise typical of his skill as a writer that he makes this exploration fascinating...

...Andrewes, in short, was an immensely complicated man, in a way that we can scarcely comprehend...

...A particularly lovely example is Nicolson's account of John Layfield, a Translator who in the 1590s had been chaplain to the Earl of Cumberland on a voyage to Puerto Rico and had written an account of the voyage "as bright-coloured an adventure as anything by Robert Louis Stevenson...

...Perhaps Nicolson's greatest gift is his ability to portray the vibrant characters of the men responsible for the unfolding of this story...

...But Nicolson also emphasizes Andrewes's genuine piety, his overwhelming sense of his own sinfulness: "Everybody reported on his serenity, the sense of grace that hovered around him...

...often commented on— and considers how that passionate intensity found its way into the translation of the Song of Solomon...

...Andrewes embodies it and so does the King James Bible...

...People like Lancelot Andrewes no longer exist," Nicolson writes...

...He does so largely through his description of the personalities that give energy and tension even to the mere elaboration of rules for translation...

...After the initial flurry of documents [stemming from a 1604 conference at which the idea of a new translation first arose], there is a dearth of evidence almost until the final printed volume appeared in 1611...

...But alone every day he acknowledged little but his wickedness and his weakness...

...How appropriate, then, suggests Nicolson, that Layfield would be one of the men responsible for translating the first chapters of Genesis, whose Eden must have called to Layfield's mind his voyage to a strange land where "the trees doe continually main-taine themselves in greene-good liking" and the rivers provide "a continuall refresshing of very sweete and tastie water...

...It is the life I would chuse...

...Eliot's...

...But Nicol-son's book is something much different, and, I think, richer and deeper than those two useful studies...

...More than just resourceful, Nicolson is scrupulously fair, even to those Jacobean figures for whom the twenty-first century reader is likely to have the least sympathy...