The King James Bible, 1611

That noblest monument of the English Language, the Authorized Version of the Bible, resulted from a conference between King and churchmen in 1604, and was the work of forty-seven translators. This first edition was printed by Robert Barker, the royal printer, who also financed the editorial work to a considerable extent. Despite the somewhat tasteless mixing of types, it is a majestic folio, not unworthy of its text.

Actual page size – 39cm x 28cm, printed on both sides. Mounted on grey board.

Original Leaf from a Famous European Book, each work with one-page letterpress index, the idea is that each leaf is mounted and subsequently framed to provide a unique wall decoration.

This was an old fund-raising exercise perfected by the Folio Society

 The King James Version (KJV), also the King James Bible (KJB)  and the Authorized Version, is an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, which was commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611, by sponsorship of King James VI and I. The books of the King James Version include the 39 books of the Old Testament, an intertestamental section containing 14 books of the Apocrypha, and the 27 books of the New Testament. Noted for its “majesty of style”, the King James Version has been described as one of the most important books in English culture and a driving force in the shaping of the English-speaking world.

The KJV was first printed by John Norton and Robert Barker, who both held the post of the King’s Printer, and was the third translation into English language approved by the English Church authorities: The first had been the Great Bible, commissioned in the reign of King Henry VIII (1535), and the second had been the Bishops’ Bible, commissioned in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1568). In Geneva, Switzerland, the first generation of Protestant Reformers had produced the Geneva Bible of 1560 from the original Hebrew and Greek scriptures, which was influential in the writing of the Authorized King James Version.

In January 1604, King James convened the Hampton Court Conference, where a new English version was conceived in response to the problems of the earlier translations perceived by the Puritans, a faction of the Church of England.

James gave the translators instructions intended to ensure that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology—and reflect the episcopal structure—of the Church of England and its belief in an ordained clergy. The translation was done by 6 panels of translators (47 men in all, most of whom were leading biblical scholars in England) who had the work divided up between them: the Old Testament was entrusted to three panels, the New Testament to two, and the Apocrypha to one. In common with most other translations of the period, the New Testament was translated from Greek, the Old Testament from Hebrew and Aramaic, and the Apocrypha from Greek and Latin. In the Book of Common Prayer (1662), the text of the Authorized Version replaced the text of the Great Bible for Epistle and Gospel readings (but not for the Psalter, which substantially retained Coverdale’s Great Bible version), and as such was authorized by Act of Parliament.

By the first half of the 18th century, the Authorized Version had become effectively unchallenged as the English translation used in Anglican and other English Protestant churches, except for the Psalms and some short passages in the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England. Over the course of the 18th century, the Authorized Version supplanted the Latin Vulgate as the standard version of scripture for English-speaking scholars. With the development of stereotype printing at the beginning of the 19th century, this version of the Bible became the most widely printed book in history, almost all such printings presenting the standard text of 1769 extensively re-edited by Benjamin Blayney at Oxford, and nearly always omitting the books of the Apocrypha. Today the unqualified title “King James Version” usually indicates this Oxford standard text.

 NOTES:

• Robert Barker(died 1643) was a printer to James I of England and son of Christopher Barker, who had been printer to Queen Elizabeth I. Barker was most notably the printer of the King James Bible, one of the most influential and important books ever printed in the English language. He and co-publisher Martin Lucas published the infamous “Wicked Bible”, which contained a typographical error omitting the word not from the sentence Thou shalt not commit adultery.
• The Wicked Bible, sometimes called the Adulterous Bibleor the Sinners’ Bible, is an edition of the Bible published in 1631 by Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, the royal printers in London, meant to be a reprint of the King James Bible. The name is derived from a mistake made by the compositors: in the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:14, the word “not” was omitted from the sentence “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” causing the verse to instead read “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

There are two significant errors in the Wicked Bible. The first error is the omission of the word “not” in the sentence “Thou shalt not commit adultery” (Exodus 20:14), thus changing the sentence into “Thou shalt commit adultery”. The second error appears in Deuteronomy 5, where the word “greatness” was reportedly misprinted as “great-asse”, leading to a sentence reading: “Behold, the Lord our God hath shewed us his glory and his great-asse”. The existence of this second mistake is attested as early as 1886, in the Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, which gives the Rawlinson MS, A128 in the Bodleian Library as the source of the claim.^[4] Gordon Campbell notes that there are no surviving copies of the book that contain the second error (“great-asse”), but that in three of the surviving copies there is an inkblot positioned where the missing “n” would be, suggesting such a mistake may have been covered up in these copies. Campbell also highlights the fact that, at the time of the Wicked Bible’s publication, the word “asse” only had the sense of “donkey”.

About a year after publication, Barker and Lucas were called to the Star Chamber and fined £300 (equivalent to £50,322 in 2019) and deprived of their printing license.

Diana Severance, director of the Dunham Bible Museum at the Houston Baptist University, and Gordon Campbell have suggested that the potential second error could indicate that someone (possibly a rival printer) purposefully sabotaged the printing of the Wicked Bible so that Robert Barker and Martin Lucas would lose their exclusive license to print the Bible. However, Campbell also notes that neither Barker nor Lucas suggested the possibility of sabotage in their defence when they were arraigned.

The Wicked Bible is the most prominent example of the bible errata which often have absent negatives that completely reverse the scriptural meaning.