I was raised in the KJV-only tradition, and can remember my dad in the late 1960s looking askance at teenagers and young adults in our congregation burying their noses in Good News for Modern Man. I made a number of attempts to read the KJV in my youth, and might have made it all the way through once. As beautiful as the language is, I couldn't really make heads or tails of it.

It was many, many years later that my husband finally lured me into tasting the forbidden fruit of the NIV. And, hallelujah! The heavens opened and the angels sang! Finally, instead of laboring over what was to my mind a florid, overwrought text, it was all laid out clearly and simply before me. A pure pleasure to read, although, yes, my suspicious little mind insisted on laying out the KJV and NIV side by side on my first read-through. Now my most often-used Bible is an NASB wide-margin edition heavily annotated from my studies with FF Bruce, Alfred Edersheim, and Eusebius.

I tell you all this because I thought I had left the KJV far behind me, but after reading this book I'm tempted to give it another go.

God's Secretaries contains very little information on the actual work of creating the KJV, as so few in-process records have survived. What it does instead is to paint a picture of the environment in which the KJV was conceived and executed. England has passed through the violent paroxysms of the Reformation, old Queen Elizabeth has finally died, James of Presbyterian Scotland has taken the throne, and the Puritans have begun splitting off from the Church of England. Nicolson gives insight into the tenor of the times and the personalities and motivations of many of the men brought together to create this new, definitive English translation. Also, he does a very good job of explaining the lasting success of the KJV and selling it as far superior to any modern translation:

The Jacobean translation process was richly and densely social. Endless conversation and consultation flowed across the final judging committee, testing the translation not by sight but by ear. This Bible was appointed to be read in churches... and so its meaning had to be carried on a heard rhythm, it had to appeal to what T. S. Eliot later called 'the auditory imagination,' that 'feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word.'