The Bible is consistently ranked as the best-selling book in the world. It is an inspiration to millions of believers and is seen by many as the direct word of God. Whether this is true or not is more a matter of faith. What is true, however, is that the very physical form that the Bible takes was produced by the hands of fallible humans.
The results of this clash between the human and the sacred can sometimes be downright funny. One such incident occurred in 1631, when a seemingly innocent typographical error drastically changed one of the Ten Commandments.
The resulting text caused quite a stir at the time. Known as ‘The Wicked Bible’, the copies of the text that survived the destruction remain today among the rarest and most sought-after printings of the Bible in the world.
The birth of wickedness
The story started innocently enough. King Charles I of England ordered 1,000 copies of the King James Bible from London printers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas. Now we have to understand that printing back then was not as easy as it is now.
Early printing presses required printers to set each letter by hand. The process was laborious and tedious, although it was leaps and bounds better than the previous method of producing books, which required people to laboriously copy texts by hand. Yet printing was an error-prone process that required careful, sharp-eyed proofreaders to spot errors.
Apparently Barker and Lucas’s proofreader was bad at his job, because a crucial error had entered the edition. It was only discovered after the edition of 1,000 copies had already been sold. In one of the Ten Commandments, the seventh to be precise, the word ‘not’ was missing. So the text read: “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
Needless to say, the mistake (if it was a mistake) caused quite a stir. King Charles I and the Archbishop of Canterbury were outraged by the typographical error. Barker and Lucas were taken to court, where they were fined £300 (£35,000 in today’s currency) and stripped of their printing license.
All available copies of the so-called ‘Wicked Bible’ were rounded up and destroyed. It is said that only a dozen have survived, although some question that number because so many copies were sold before the alteration was found.
In any case, it is a rare book that is highly sought after by collectors. It is difficult to attach value to such a text because other factors, such as the quality of the copy, come into play. Taking that into account, one copy costs $99,500. Most copies are probably worth much less, as this is the full retail price, but it does give an idea of how much collectors would be willing to pay for this rare book.
A typo? Or a joke?
The generally accepted idea is that the infamous omission of the word “not” was a simple mistake resulting from the cumbersome and error-prone printing process of the 17th century. However, there are some reasons to believe that this may have been an intentional act.
The first is that there is another such error, this one in the book of Deuteronomy. In chapter 5, verse 24, the word “greatness” was replaced with “big ass.” So the text was that God showed his glory and ‘big ass’.
One unfortunate typo is one thing, but two of them are starting to show a pattern. George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, thought the error was due to poor workmanship. He was quoted proverb:
‘I knew the time when great care was taken in printing, especially in the Bibles, good compilers and the best correctors were employed as serious and learned men, the paper and type were rare, and in every respect of the best, but now the paper is nothing, the composers boyes, and the correctors unlearned.
It is interesting to note that he said the composers were ‘boyes’. The errors are second-degree in nature, especially the “big ass” line.
It sounds like something a bored teenager would slip into a text message when he thought no one was looking. Perhaps the printers hired the late medieval equivalent of temporary workers, and a disgruntled young man subtly changed the text of the print to thumb his nose at his employer, or just for fun. Perhaps he expected the ‘corrector’ to discover the error before the book was printed.
We can never know for sure whether this was the case or not. A simple human error could have inadvertently created one of the most infamous Bibles in history, but due to the nature of the ‘typos’, a bored prankster seems more likely.
Regardless, the Wicked Bible will remain a historical curiosity, a testament to the fact that even humanity’s holiest works can be subject to a very human quality: imperfection.
