GOD'S SECRETARIES

From the Washington Post: A Review by Jonathon Yardley
GOD'S SECRETARIES
The Making of the King James Bible
By Adam Nicolson
HarperCollins. 281 pp. $24.95

The King James Bible, Adam Nicolson writes, "can lay claim to be the greatest work in prose ever written in English." True enough, so far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. The King James Bible is the greatest work ever written in English, period. That alone is quite enough to inspire awe, but there is more. The King James Bible is not the work of a single inspired genius -- a Shakespeare, a Milton, a Dickens -- but of a committee. Too many cooks made it the most splendid broth imaginable. Translated from the Hebrew and Greek in the early 17th century by order of the newly crowned James I, it is a work of such majesty, passion and literary power that even the greatest of Shakespeare's tragedies must bow before it.

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