God’s Secretaries: - The Making of the King James Bible
Adam Nicolson
Number of quotes: 20
Book ID: 99 Page: 24
Section: 3A3B
Should any of the poor wander into the richer parishes, particularly if they were visibly sick or weak, the churchwardens would have them taken back to the slums with which London was ringed.
Quote ID: 2518
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 99 Page: 35
Section: 2C
In a Catholic or sub-Catholic church, where the visual and the ceremonial dominated the verbal and intellectual, it scarcely mattered if the priest was well qualified; he was simply the conduit for divine meaning.
Quote ID: 2519
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 99 Page: 36
Section: 2E1
One needs reminding, perhaps, of just how passionate was the loathing among Puritans of that symbolic strain in the English Church. Few modern Christians, however severe, would be quite as brave as Richard Parker, the author of A Scholasticall Discourse against Symbolizing with AntiChrist in Ceremonies: especially in the Signe of the Crosse, published in London in 1607, who was keen to point out to the ignorant, at some length, ‘the idolatrie of the Crosse, the Superstition of the Crosse, the Hipocrisie of the Crosse, the impietie of the Crosse, the injustice of the Crosse and the soule murther of the Crosse’. The cross was ‘a part of deuill worship. . . The vsing of the Crosse is but an idle apishe toye, and lighter than the surplice which is also too light.’
Quote ID: 2520
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 99 Page: 37
Section: 2A
The church had always used ritual and ceremony to approach the divine. It was the conduit through which grace could reach the believer. Only big-headed modern ‘novelist’ could assume that, without any guidance from the wisdom of the church fathers, ordinary people could approach God direct, as no one had done since the Apostles. Mystery for Andrews required ceremony and a respect for the inherited past.
Quote ID: 2521
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 99 Page: 39
Section: 3A2
Throughout the summer, the bishops maintained that any questioning of the doctrine and articles of the Church of England was politically subversive, dangerous and to be expunged.
Quote ID: 2522
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 99 Page: 63
Section: 3C
James’s dream of a unified and peaceful realm, guaranteed by his own Solomonic wisdom, was perhaps a fantasy too far.
Quote ID: 2523
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 99 Page: 72
Section: 3A1
A copy of the instructions, now in the University Library in Cambridge, is entitled simply ‘The rules to be observed in translation’. The sixteen separate instructions on two sheets are the record of an extremely efficient administrator at work. They are the scaffolding within which the King James translation was erected.[Used in Chapter 1, “The Beginning of the End”]
Quote ID: 2524
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 99 Page: 75
Section: 2C
The ould ecclesiasticall words to be kept viz. As the Word Churche not to be translated Congregation etc.William Tyndale in his great 1526 ground-breaking translation of the New Testament had translated ecclesia not as ‘church’ but as ‘congregation’ and presbyteros not as ‘priest’ but as ‘senior’ (which he later changed, under pressure from Thomas More, to ‘elder’, as being the more English word). The entire meaning of the Reformation hinges on these differences.
And if ecclesia means not church but congregation, what relevance to God can there be in the elaborate and expensive superstructure of an established church and the grotesque indulgences of its officers?
[Used in Chapter 1, “The Beginning of the End”]
Quote ID: 2525
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 99 Page: 85
Section: 3C
Beyond the guilty and the dangerous, however, James held out the prospect of an all-encompassing embrace to anyone and anything that might fall within the dream of national community. Destroy the extremists, whether Catholic plotters or those Puritans who could not conform to the habits of the Church of England, embrace a broad stretch of middle ground. That is the heart of all Jacobean policy - it is what any well-managed, civilised government would do - and of that middle ground the new Bible was to become both the expression and the symbol, the code and guidebook to a rich, majestic and holy kingdom.
Quote ID: 2526
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 99 Page: 89
Section: 3A1
Andrewes thought he spotted error. ‘The savoreth of a pryvat spyrit,’ he said. Nothing was more damning in his lexicon than that phrase. The privateness of the Puritan spirit was its defining sin.PJ Note: See Quote ID #986.
Quote ID: 2527
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 99 Page: 90
Section: 2A
For churchmen such as Andrewes, it seemed that the true church could only be inclusive, one in which God’s grace would descend on believers not through some brutal predestinarian edict but through the sacraments, through the ceremony of the church.
Quote ID: 2528
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 99 Page: 96/97
Section: 3A1,3A1B
Every minister had to appear before the diocesan registrar (or ‘Register’) to show him the licence by which he was allowed to preach. (The licence was a tool of conformity: it would be granted only if the minister had explicitly signed up to the canons which Richard Bancroft had drawn up for the English Church.) This was the moment at which the bishop’s secretary could make his killing.. . . .
To my verie loving friend, Mr. Baddeley, secretary to ye Rt. Reverend Father in God ye Ld. Bp. Of Coven. & Lichfield, These in London.
. . . .
One secret I will tell you, which I must entreat you to make a secret stil: vjd. A piece you may demaunde of every one of them, either licensed or not, for the exhibition of their license, and keep the profit to your self, however the Register may perhaps challenge it.
. . . .
This is a rare sight of one of the sinews of the Jacobean church in action: private extortion by a high-level and ambitious church official of a little bribe or pourboire from the impoverished, simple rural clergy; a man looking out for his own, passing on a little tip by which advantage can be gained and the beginnings of a fortune made; and an awareness, in the insistence on the tip being kept secret, that it was wrong.
Quote ID: 2529
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 99 Page: 100
Section: 3A2A
A revealing gap opens up here. Andrewes could happily see a good, God-fearing, straight-living, honest and candid man like Henry Barrow condemned to death; and a debauched, self-serving degenerate like Thomson elevated to the highest company. Why? Because Barrow’s separatism was a corrosive that would rot the very bonds of Jacobean order; because that order was both natural and God-given; and because nothing could be more sinful than subversion of that kind. Goodness, in other words, was not a moral but a political quality and nothing in Thomson’s failings could approach the dept of Barrow’s wickedness.
Quote ID: 2530
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 99 Page: 108/109
Section: 3C
James would rather Catholics were banished than executed. ‘I will never allow in my conscience’, he had written to Cecil, ‘that the blood of any man shall be shed for diversity of opinions in religion, but I should be sorry that Catholics should so multiply as they might be able to practise their old principles upon us.’ That was the old political point, as good for Catholics as for extremist Puritans: errors in faith could be tolerated as long as they didn’t threaten the order of the kingdom. The idea of blowing up parliament, needless to say, stepped over the line.
Quote ID: 2531
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 99 Page: 121
Section: 3C
The king who could get so drunk with his brother-in-law was also the king who was anxious for an inclusive church and an inclusive Bible. It was the dream of civilisation and for that dream to work the moderate Puritans clearly had to be included in its making.
Quote ID: 2532
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 99 Page: 124
Section: 3C
When they expelled those eighty or so Puritans from the church between 1604 and 1606. For James it was effective and practical politics: a means of achieving unity and uniformity in the church by excluding a small proportion of extremists
Quote ID: 2533
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 99 Page: 157
Section: 3A2A
Abbot could be brutal as well as verbose. He once had 140 Oxford undergraduates arrested for not taking their hats off when he entered St. Mary’s Church. He had another man arrested at dinner in Christ Church ‘for publicly in the hall making a very offensive declaration in the cause of the late Earl of Essex’. He had religious pictures burned in the Oxford marketplace and a stained-glass window in Balliol, showing a crucifix, before which an undergraduate had been praying and beating his breast, pulled down and destroyed. He would not hesitate, later in his career, to use torture against miscreants, nor to execute Separatists.Pastor John’s note: Archbishop of Canterbury
Quote ID: 2534
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 99 Page: 180/181
Section: 2A4
No Separatist was ever married in church, because there is no hint of a marriage ceremony in scripture and the primitive church had not considered marriage a sacrament before AD 537.
Quote ID: 2535
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 99 Page: 229/230
Section: 3A1,2E1
The relationship of Puritan church and Puritan state in early America soon became, strangely enough, as close as any relationship between the Jacobean Crown and the Church of England. In early Massachusetts, heresy, witchcraft, profanity, blasphemy, idolatry and breaking the Sabbath were all civil offences, to be dealt with by civil courts. The new Americans may have dispensed with bishops, surplices and the Book of Common Prayer, but they had not replaced them with a Utopia of religious freedom. Seventeenth-century America was a country of strictly enforced state religion and as such needed a Bible much more attuned to the necessities of nation-building than anything the Separatists’ Geneva Bible could offer. It is one of the strangest of historical paradoxes that the King James Bible, whose whole purpose had been nation-building in the service of a ceremonial and episcopal state church, should become the guiding text of Puritan America.
Quote ID: 2536
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 99 Page: 238/239
Section: 3A2A
The ferocious intolerance of the pre-liberal world have been left behind - it is inconceivable now that a Henry Barrow would be executed, or a Henry Garnet, or that the Scrooby Separatists would have been forced to leave home and country - and perhaps as a result of that change, perhaps as a symptom, religion, or at least the conventional religion of ordinary people, has been drained of its passion.
Quote ID: 2537
Time Periods: 7
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