According to an account in today's Guardian, a copy of the so-called ‘Wicked Bible’ has turned up in New Zealand. By omitting the word “not” from the seventh commandment, this edition, of 1631, appeared to advocate adultery. No one knows how the mistake occurred (or whether it was a mistake at all, rather than, say, an act of literary sabotage by an underpaid and under-appreciated printer’s apprentice). The printers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas were summoned by King Charles I and hauled before the court, where they were fined £300, admonished for their sloppy workmanship and stripped of their printing licence. With the court ordering all Wicked Bibles to be burned, only about twenty copies were saved from the flames.
One aspect of this quirky footnote to biblical history had passed me by. I wasn’t aware, until I read it today, that it took a year for the original typesetting error to be discovered. A year! The Bible is a hard slog, even for the most assiduous readers, which may explain why so many Christians hug their Bible to their chests, wave it like a flag or brandish it like a weapon, instead of actually reading it. In 1631, as now, most Christians would have read a selection of carefully curated excerpts from the good book, and little else. I wonder what percentage of even the most committed Christians have read the Bible in its tedious entirety, from Genesis to Revelation.
Licenced today, for a fee that wouldn't even buy a Big Mac...
No comments:
Post a Comment