Letter from the Editor
Michael D. Coogan, Editor in Chief
Dear Reader:
In my classes, more and more students use their computers to access the Bible, both in multiple translations, as on this website, and in the original languages. This is an enormous advantage educationally—and in terms of the load they carry around campus. The English-speaking world has just celebrated the four-hundredth anniversary of the King James Version of 1611, the "Authorized Version" with appropriate pomp and circumstance. Before printed Bibles—and printed books—become quaint curios, it's appropriate to reflect on the history of printing Bibles.
The history of printing begins with Johannes Gutenberg in the early 1450s, and the first book he printed was the Latin Bible, in the Vulgate translation originally made by Jerome in the late fourth and early fifth centuries CE, which was the official translation of Western Christianity until the early Reformation. Since then the entire Bible has been translated into and printed in its entirety in nearly four hundred languages; in English, pride of place goes to the King James Version.
Before the invention of printing, all books were hand copied. Although scribes intended to reproduce exactly what they were copying, inevitably they made mistakes. Sometimes these were corrected in the manuscript (which etymologically means something written by hand), and sometimes they were undetected and then repeated when the manuscript itself was copied. But the number of copies was small, because of the labor involved. That changed with the onset of printing, when hundreds, thousands, and now even millions of copies of the same text could be printed. Like their scribal predecessors, not all printers have been equally careful. But once the type was set and the book printed, any errors made were disseminated in large numbers rather than in single copies, as was the case with handwritten scrolls and codices.
The printer of the first edition of the Authorized Version was Robert Barker. He was also responsible for the most notorious error in printing the Bible. In a printing of 1631, the word "not" was inadvertently omitted in Exodus 20:14, so that the commandment read "Thou shalt commit adultery"! This edition came to be known as "The Wicked Bible." It was withdrawn from circulation and ordered destroyed, but many copies still survive. As a result of this egregious error, Barker's career as a printer was effectively over. The same word was omitted in a printing of 1653, so that 1 Corinthians 6:9 read: "Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God?" A last example might have been muttered by authors ever since Gutenberg: in a Bible of 1702, Psalm 119:161 was rendered "Printers have persecuted me without a cause." (For further examples of such errors, click here.)
In addition to the issue of accuracy, which required and continues to require careful reading of proofs, printing Bibles has other complications. Except for large display Bibles such as those used at lecterns, one goal is to get the entire text of the Bible into one fairly compact volume. (The same is true of one-volume editions of such literature as the complete works of Shakespeare.) To do so requires the use of very thin, yet opaque rather than translucent paper. One of the Bibles on my bookshelf is an edition of the King James Version, bound with a soft imitation-leather cover and about the size of a mass-market paperback book. But while such a book will often have only 400 to 500 pages, this edition of the Bible has nearly 1,600, with two columns to a page and a very readable 10-point font.
Because their production was so labor-intensive, books—that is, manuscripts—were relatively expensive and so also relatively rare. It has been estimated that in the fourteenth century about three million manuscripts were produced in Europe. In the century following the printing of the Gutenberg Bible, the number of printed books produced was more than 90 million, and in the next century well over 300 million. Increased supply meant lower prices, and that in turn led to a much wider circulation and also greater demand. More and more people wanted to and were able to have access to books, including the Bible, and as has often been observed, this was a major factor in the speed with which the Reformation took hold.
We are now, it seems, on the cusp of a major change in how written works are distributed and read, a revolution as momentous as that begun by Gutenberg. It isn't clear yet that the printed book will have no future; publishers, including publishers of Bibles, are hedging their bets, continuing to produce hard copies for those who still want them, but also marketing electronic versions as well. One advantage of digital publishing is that mistakes can easily be corrected, so that we are less likely to see for very long Bibles in which God commands adultery and promises the unrighteous an eternal reward. A corollary benefit of the digital age is that early printed books are no longer accessible only in a few museums and libraries. Fewer than two dozen complete Gutenberg Bibles have survived. I have seen several copies, and in them, the printer's skill is manifest: the glossy ink looks as if still wet, more than five centuries later. Now, thanks to the internet, you can see good images of each page: take a look for yourself here and here.
Michael D. Coogan Editor in Chief, Oxford Biblical Studies Online April 2012
