God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible is an audio book that is part of the Plus Catalog which is included in my subscription to Audible (Amazon’s Audiobook Service). The book was 8 hours and 39 mins long. The reading of Clive Chafer was good, although a bit stale from time to time. In several locations the book revealed quite a bit of drama in content that could not equally be heard through the reading.
But beyond the reading, “God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible” is a treasure trove of the contextual climate within which the King James Bible was compiled. It is filled with rich descriptions of the excesses and exertions, of not only the society during the time of King James I ascension to the throne of England, (with all its political struggles and financial desperations) but of the cast of characters that surround the translation. One of the most engaging instance of this character insight is found in the exchange between Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, who oversaw the translation of the King James Version of the Bible, and Henry Barrowe, an English Separatist Puritan, who would be hanged for his Christian convictions concerning the state church.
The cast of characters which surround the translation of the King James Bible, at least in my mind before listening to this audio book, were a monolithic nameless committee of grave and peerless divines. But now, in at least the few we know something about, are filled with diverse complexities and motivations, not only among themselves, but within themselves.
This book is by no means the KJV Onlyist’s validation of the translator’s God-guided pen which emblazon upon humanity an English version of the words of God to cleave to for endless successive generations. Nor is it a National Enquirer tell-all airing all the dirty laundry of a translation committee and a King whose nefarious efforts produced a highly suspect and questionable translation that is to be relegated to the dusty part of the library marked obsolete. NO! Not at all!
On the contrary, the author seems to go out of his way to trumpet the superiority of the Authorized Version both for its time in the 17th century and to contemporary readers. But his superiority claim is specifically under subjective terms rather than objective (objective terms being the tenacious argument of KJVO advocates), readily admitting the mistakes, bumbling’s, and baffling actions that indelibly mark the history of the King James Bible’s production. I was enriched by the history of the Jacobean Era and have a better understanding of the times, as well as a new revere for the King James Bible.

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