While not as nuanced as Nicolson’s God’s Secretaries, Bobrick casts a wider net over the Englishmen who deigned to translate the Latin Bible—Wycliffe, Tyndale, et al. He includes more materials from contemporary writers and shows how each successive generation added a new layer onto the Bible, ending with the King James Version. Complete with appendices containing a side-by-side comparison of the translations, this was a very well-put-together volume. ( )

Benson Bobrick's Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired is a brisk and gripping work of history, religion, and literary criticism. Translation of the King James Bible took centuries to complete, and Bobrick provides colorful descriptions of the distinctive contributions of various translators who took part in the project, particularly John Wyclif in the 15th century and William Tyndale in the 16th century. (Tyndale, he points out, is the second most widely quoted writer, after Shakespeare, in the English language ["eat, drink, and be merry," is Tyndale's phrase; so is "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak"].) Wide as the Waters interprets each translator's work according to its contemporary political context in England. The book's most dramatic passages are found in its account of Henry VIII's showdown with Rome, which resulted in (among other things) Tyndale's execution. Although Bobrick may overstate the singularity of the Bible's influence on the English Revolution (he asserts that the concepts of liberty and free will that guided revolutionaries who overthrew Charles I were primarily derived from the King James Bible), his argument is, at the very least, an effective and engaging reminder of literature's liberating power.

Independent scholar Bobrick's (Angel in the Whirlwind; etc.) erudite yet accessible history chronicles the turbulent period from the first English translation of the Bible, sponsored by John Wycliffe in 1382, to the King James Version in 1611. Rendering the Scriptures in the vernacular was an act fraught with peril, he reminds readers. Simply possessing a Wycliffe Bible was enough to get a layperson tried for heresy. William Tyndale, whose early-16th-century renderings of the New Testament and Pentateuch greatly influenced the King James translators, saw his work confiscated and destroyed by English ecclesiastical authorities; he was burned at the stake in 1536. Though Henry VIII's break from Rome prompted more English versions in the late 16th century, conservatives still feared that giving the common people access to the Scriptures would lead to civic as well as religious unrest; eventually, the Civil War of 1642-1649 suggested they were right. Succeeding Elizabeth in 1603, James I aimed to consolidate his position as head of church and state with a new Bible that would take the best from all previous English versions and maintain the Anglo-Catholic terms (such as "church" rather than the more Puritan "congregation") favored by the Bishop's Bible of 1568. Bobrick offers cogent minibiographies of the remarkable team of scholars James assembled, and his lucid exegeses show how seemingly small changes (from "the earth was void and empty" into "the earth was without form and void") transformed the text, rendering it majestic yet easily understandable. Bobrick's analysis of how dissemination of the Bible helped spark the Civil War is oversimplified, but historians have long agreed that putting the Scriptures in the hands of the people was indeed a revolutionary act. It's a pleasure to have this stirring story so well told for the general reader.