The Fine Print of Faith: Amusing Errors and Biblical Misprints
An earlier article examined how misreadings of key phrases and terminology in Catholic prayers and doctrines had a lasting impact on how believers practiced their faith for many years. These issues were serious enough to require rectification, as in 2019, when the Italian Episcopal Conference—with Pope Francis’s approval—revised the Italian Missal, changing “do not lead us into temptation” to “do not let us fall into temptation.”
In comparison, the history of Bible printing provides a lighter catalogue of errors that aroused amusement rather than doctrinal crises. These errors were typically corrected quickly, but not before they embarrassed printers and delighted collectors, along with future historians with a taste for the footnote-odd and the archivally absurd. In this article, I offer a glimpse into some of the best-known printing errors—curiosities that reveal both the fallibility of human hands and the small pleasures of textual oddities.
If we close our eyes and imagine how early copies of the Bible were first mass-produced in the 15th century, we might see a worker, hunched over tiny pieces of lead type scattered across a work area, exhausted from such demanding labor. Or, before that, a proofreader dealing with copious amounts of text inside a room lit by dim candlelight. Such tedious conditions were ready-made for errors and resulted in several copies of “bibles of blunders.” From commands to commit adultery to parables about salad dressing, indeed, if one must make a mistake in sacred text, better a condiment than a creed.
Printed Bibles and the Humor of Archaic Words
Early English printings, especially in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, produced errors that now read as quaint archaisms. For instance, the 1568 Bishops’ Bible rendered Jeremiah’s question about healing, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” using the word “treacle,” a medicinal term rather than the modern sweet syrup—a lexical shift that gave the edition its nickname, the “Treacle Bible.” Theologically, the verse remained intact; linguistically, it now sounds as if the prophet were inquiring after a pastry glaze.
In the sixteenth-century, the English Bible remained in flux. Translators were wrestling with the nuances of the Hebrew and Greek languages, while printers were still figuring out how to keep their “p’s” and “q’s” straight and their “u’s” and “v’s” from staging a coup. This is the background in which the “He and She Bibles” of 1611 were produced. In Ruth 3:15, one impression read, “and he went into the city,” while another read, “and she went into the city,” a minor pronoun difference that became a bibliographical curiosity rather than a theological problem. However, according to Norton (2005), it did result in a kind of informal gender-pronoun scavenger hunt for seventeenth-century book collectors. One suspects that, for once, exegetes were genuinely content to say, “Either reading will do.”
In Psalm 91:5, the Coverdale and Matthew Bibles informed readers, “Thou shalt not nede to be afrayed for eny bugges by night.” “Bugges” was, of course, the Middle English word for “bogeys” (i.e., ghosts or “terrors.”) However, as the word evolved—referring currently to “insects”—the verse became increasingly ridiculous. Later versions updated the word to “terror,” which is arguably more correct but significantly less humorous than “bugs” (Hudson, 1988). One imagines generations of devout readers less spiritually edified than relieved that their piety came with a divine guarantee against bedbugs.
The Golden Age of Omissions
If the sixteenth-century examples above revealed odd vocabulary, the seventeenth-century ones showed why the word “not” should not be mishandled. In 1631, printers Barker and Lucas (1631) set out to print a new King James Version of the Bible. The infamy of this copy can be attributed to Exodus 20:14, where printers forgot to add the word “not” in the Seventh Commandment, encouraging readers with “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
King Charles I, who was not amused and evidently did not welcome this unexpected revision of marital ethics, summoned the printers, fined them £300 (about the same value as a small manor at the time), and revoked their license. Although most of the 1,000 copies were seized and burned, a few of these “adulterous Bibles” survived—now considered prized possessions of Bible collectors (Barker & Lucas, 1631; Norton, 2005). It may be the only instance in which a typographical error produced both royal outrage and a spike in future auction prices.
Amazingly, around the same time, another editorial offence was committed. In Psalm 14:1, the text “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God” was incorrectly published as “The fool hath said in his heart, there is a God,” thus reversing the logic. Although this was corrected almost immediately, it remains a reminder that in theology, a simple omission can transform a basic confession of one’s lack of faith into an awkward, if unintended, affirmation of it. Even fools, it seems, can be edited into orthodoxy.
The “Vinegar Bible” and the “Baskett-Full of Errors”
By the 1700s, the printing industry was more sophisticated and less prone to human error, yet spectacular examples still abound. In 1717, J. Baskett at Oxford produced a beautiful edition of the Bible intended as a collector’s masterpiece. Unfortunately, the heading for Luke 20 read “The Parable of the Vinegar” instead of “The Parable of the Vineyard.” Aside from not being able to tell the difference between a fruit and a condiment, this did not have a disastrous impact and was corrected in later printings.
Fortunately, no one ever took it as a meaningful textual reading, although perhaps the publisher’s ego may have been bruised, as this version was mocked by contemporaries as a “Baskett-full of errors.” At the very least, the blunder ensured that Baskett’s name would be preserved in the history of printing—even if not quite in the way he intended.
A 1716 edition offered another memorable slip in John 5:1, which was meant to read “sin no more,” but was printed instead as “sin more,” a change that turns moral counsel into comic provocation (Feather, 2006). I wonder how fast this translation sold out. It unintentionally supplied what might be the closest thing to a biblical slogan for the chronically unrepentant.
Sometimes a typo can also serve as a creative cry for help. In Psalm 119:161, King David said, “Princes have persecuted me without a cause.” However, in the “Printers’ Bible,” the text read, “Printers have persecuted me without a cause.” Given the low pay, long hours, and the high-pressure, backbreaking work of eighteenth-century printing houses, perhaps this wasn’t an accident at all. Was it a worker’s way of crying out and sharing their pain? This may be the first recorded instance of meta-humor in a biblical publication; a marginal protest smuggled into the main text (Darnton, 1979).
Modern Grammatical Gaffes and Murderous Claims
In “The Murderers’ Bible” incident, we find, in Jude 16, a verse describing certain people as “murmurers” (complainers). However, an 1801 edition accidentally changed the “m” to a “d” and a few other letters, resulting in: “These are murderers, complainers…” That was how an annoying habit almost escalated to a significantly higher level of crime. Since then, the nickname “Murderers’ Bible” stuck, mainly because the jump from a quiet mumble to a felony was so hilariously abrupt. It is arguably one of the few times a typographical error has single-handedly raised the stakes of bad manners.
Finally, in the “To Remain” Bible case, a proofreader noticed a comma was missing in a passage in an 1805 printing of the KJV. He wrote the correction in the margin and added the note “to remain,” meaning the original word should stay. The typesetter, unfortunately, took the note literally and inserted the words “to remain” directly into the middle of the verse (Gal. 4:29). This resulted in a nonsensical hybrid of scripture and office memos—or a nineteenth-century equivalent of someone hitting “Reply All” to a company-wide email. The sacred text thus briefly doubled as a record of workplace miscommunication.
Conclusion
The examples above indicate several things. First, faith is remarkably resilient to bad typesetting and proofreading; no creed has ever hinged on the “vinegar” versus “vineyard” distinction. Second, no human—especially those tasked with the enormous responsibility of mass-producing the Word of God—is perfect. These minor and amusing errors demonstrate the limitations of human messengers as conveyors of God’s words—a point that scribes, printers, and translators have been illustrating, sometimes unintentionally, for centuries.
Finally, regardless of the technologies involved, human error is constant, but faithful Bible readers will always spot and correct them. As such, the history of biblical misprints is not only a comedy of silly typos, but also a testimony to the vigilance of generations of readers who, by noticing what is wrong, affirm and bear witness to what is right.
