History is silent about events between the general meeting and the eventual publication of the King James Bible in 1611. It’s likely that the final printed version was prepared, not as we might have expected from a full manuscript of the translators’ work, but from scribblings onto a particular copy of the Bishops’ Bible. The transcript had been unbound and its individual pages separated. The translators’ amendments and alterations were little more than notes in the page margins. The whole thing had been passed on to the printers to prepare the final version.22
This sounds like a clumsy way of going about things. Notes in the margins are unlikely to be very clear, the possibility of misprints finding their way into the printed text is very high. It would seem more reasonable to assume, even at the dawn of printing technology, that the printers would receive a clean copy of the translation, proofread and laid out the way the editors wanted it to appear. But there is an annotated Bishops’ Bible in Oxford’s Bodleian Library23 which contains a clue suggesting that this was the copy that was sent to the printers. A direct translation of the original Hebrew in Hosea 6.5 reads ‘Therefore I have hewn them, through the prophets’ and from its second printing onwards the King James Bible reads ‘I have hewed’. But the first printing reads ‘I have shewed’. Presumably the printers of the second edition assumed this was a misprint; ‘shewed’ is not a correct translation of the Hebrew and it is quite reasonable to assume that a careless printer slipped in an extra ‘s’ at the front of ‘hewed’ by mistake. But that is not so. The hand-written margin notes in the Bodleian Library’s copy of the Bishops’ Bible also read ‘I have shewed’. This strange rendering may have been an attempt by the translators to make sense of a difficult Hebrew verse, but it raises the possibility that the first edition of the King James Bible was printed from the Bodleian’s annotated version of the Bishops’ Bible, and not as we might have expected, from a clean, well-laid-out draft.24
The details of how and when the King James Bible was published are equally cloudy. Because it was little more than an upgrade on previous versions of the Bible it was never registered as a new publication in the Stationers’ Register, the official register of published books. Nor is there any record of its actual publication date. And even though it is known as the Authorized Version, no document has ever been found granting it this title, nor declaring that it is indeed Authorized. It is not even known whether James’s stipulation that the Bible be ratified by royal authority was ever carried out.
Given the unlikely manner of its production, it is not surprising that the newly published Bible was full of errors. And not just because the Bible may have been typeset from hand-written notes in the margin. Early printing was still a laborious, complicated process. The printed King James Bible comprised 366 sheets, of four pages each. Each sheet needed to be typeset, printed and proofread individually. All this required considerable effort and the opportunity for slip-ups was substantial. Then there was the question of cost. Printing may have been cheaper than manuscript writing, but it was still expensive. Corners were cut wherever possible to try and save money. David Norton counts 351 printer errors in the first edition and another 28 ‘hidden’ mistakes, where a typo would not be noticed because the reading continues to make sense, even though it is wrong. Like the misprint in Daniel 6.13 which reads ‘the children of the captivity’ instead of ‘the captivity of the children’. But, as Norton points out, this number of less than 400 words represents about one mistake for every three and a half chapters, which is not bad, considering the scale of the task. Certainly none of the errors come close to the classic misprint in the 1631 ‘Wicked Bible’ which forgot to include the word ‘not’ in ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’. The careless printers of that edition were fined £300; every copy they had sold was recalled, their entire stock destroyed and their licence to print the Bible revoked. But not every owner of the Wicked Bible returned their copy. It is still, according to some internet sites, possible to acquire one. It will cost you in the region of $100,000.
Despite the build-up, the effort and the expectation, when the King James Bible hit the market, it flopped. It didn’t win many fans among the general public, and as every church already had their Great Bible, most were not willing to run to the cost of replacing it with the new version. A long time passed before it found favour. Oliver Cromwell’s puritan-leaning Protectorate, which had come to power in 1653 in the aftermath of the Civil War, were implacably averse to the King James Bible. It represented everything they despised about the monarchy. In the guise of a unifying project the translation had proved to be little more than a tool to diminish the influence of the Puritans. It was not until 1660, when Cromwell was dead and the throne restored in the person of Charles II, that the time grew ripe for the King James Bible to capture the stage in all its majestic, Protestant, English glory.
Notes
22 McNamara, 2010.
23 Moore, 1927. p. 176.
24 An excellent account of the discovery of the Genizah, and of the roles of Mrs Lewis and Mrs Smith in its discovery, is in Soskice, 2009.
25 I think it preferable to follow Sokoloff and translate Memra in this way, rather than adopting McNamara’s translation of Memra as Word, which of course predetermines the point he is trying to make. Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Bar Ilan University Press, Ramat Gan, 1990.
26 Targum Pseudo-Jonathan to Genesis 2,8.
27 For a discussion of Logos in a targumic context, with reference to Memra, see McNamara, 2010.
28 (Flesher, 2011). The Targum in question is Pseudo-Jonathan, an interesting but relatively unimportant Targum in the grand scale of things, which was unknown until the thirteenth century and which happens to have a high profile because a medieval printer decided to include in it his compendium of Bible commentaries. It is still printed in what are known as ‘rabbinic bibles’ (mikraot gedolot) today.
By Harry Freedman in "The Murderous History of Bible Translations", Bloomsbury Press, London, UK, 2016, excerpts chapter 2. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.