Злобная Библия: Ошибочное издание 1631 года

1631 edition of the King James Bible

The Wicked Bible, sometimes called the Adulterous Bible or 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 , the word "not" was omitted from the sentence, "Thou shalt not commit adultery," causing the verse to instead read, "Thou shalt commit adultery."

The Wicked Bible is best known for the omission of the word "not" in the sentence "Thou shalt not commit adultery" , thus changing the sentence into "Thou shalt commit adultery". The 1886 Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission (which gives the Bodleian Library manuscript Rawlinson A 128 as its source) lists this as one of the "two grossest errors", among "divers other faults". Gordon Campbell reports 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 where the missing "n" would be, suggesting such a mistake may have been covered up in these copies. He also notes that, at the time of the Wicked Bible's publication, the word "asse" only had the sense of "donkey". 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) purposely sabotaged the printing of the Wicked Bible so that Robert Barker and Martin Lucas would lose their exclusive license to print the Bible. About a year after publication, Barker and Lucas were called to the Star Chamber and fined and deprived of their printing license. The Wicked Bible is the most prominent example of the bible errata which often have absent negatives that completely reverse the scriptural meaning.

The nickname Wicked Bible seems to have first been applied in 1855 by rare book dealer Henry Stevens. As he relates in his memoir of James Lenox, after buying what was then the only known copy of the 1631 octavo Bible for fifty guineas, "on June 21, I exhibited the volume at a full meeting of the Society of Antiquaries of London, at the same time nicknaming it 'The Wicked Bible,' a name that has stuck to it ever since."