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The genesis of the King James Bible.

Jul 7, 2003, Vol. 8, No. 42 • By ALAN JACOBS
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God's Secretaries

The Making of the King James Bible

by Adam Nicolson

HarperCollins, 281 pp., $24.95

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." But Nicolson's book is something much different, and, I think, richer and deeper than those two useful studies. This is popular history at something close to its very best.

"God's Secretaries" counts as "popular" history because it lacks footnotes; 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. Although Nicolson is not a professional scholar, his learning is both impressive and well managed. Especially noteworthy is his discretion in speculating--noteworthy because the story he has to tell is one that cannot be told without some guesswork. As Nicolson notes, at the end of several chapters tracing the lineaments of Jacobean (that is, early seventeenth-century) political and religious culture:

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