Jan 03 2006
King James Bible Missprints…
Adam Nicolson’s ‘Gods Secretaries’, reports that over 24,000 variants of the King James Bible were printed. These, early, variations were mainly due to printing errors:
“littered with misprints, ‘hoopes’ for ‘hookes’, ’she’ for ‘he’, three whole lines simply repeated in Exodus, and alarmingly ‘Judas’ for ‘Jesus’ in one of the Gospels. None of these was quite so catastrophic as a misprint that would appear in a 1631 edition, the so-called Wicked Bible, which failed to put the word ‘not’ in Exodus 20:14, giving the reading ‘Thou shalt commit Adultery’” p226
The main text of this Bible is none-the-less impressive. Nicolson details the producion process as a group process. This Bible is largely a reproduction of earlier translations (William Tyndale) with significant distinctions. It deliberately attempts to
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avoid the language of the day
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focus on literal translation
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leave ambiguity where it already exists.
Arguably, achievement of these goals helped maintain its usefulness across continents and several centuries.
I adored Adam Nicolson’s book. Often re-reading paragraphs. Their meanings are thick, rich, multi-layered like the Jacobean text itself. Yummy, lickable.
I would highly recommend Nicolson’s book to people interested in:
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Jacobean England
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England/Scotland relationship
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the evolution of Christianity (the reformation)
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English influences on the US pilgrim settlers
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Language
W
write the first thought on King James Bible Missprints…
