“I am a poor devil and my name is Titivillus.”He points out a hideous demon when an abbot confronts him. His job, the devil explains in the 15th-century devotional treatise Myroure of Oure Ladye, is to bring to Satan daily “a thousand bags full of errors and negligence in syllables and words, committed by his commands in reading and singing, otherwise I shall be severely beaten.”
The devil, Titivillus explains, holds these mistakes as evidence against people. in assessing what fate their souls will have at the end of their lives. “Although such things are soon forgotten by those who do them, the devil does not forget them.” Neither do others.
When it comes to that enough errors (and often even funny) remain in the cultural memory forever. And when the negligence has to do with the Divine Word, they not only make history, but can also decide the fate of the guilty long before the time of final judgment comes.
That’s what happened Robert Barkeran Englishman who was fortunate enough to inherit the title of His Majesty’s Printer in 1600. At that time it was not a meritorious investment, but rather an acquired, very lucrative investment that his father had made in 1589, and granted the Barker family an exclusive patent to print Bibles in Englandgranted by Queen Elizabeth I. Therefore, he was responsible for printing a new translation of the Bible into English, which was approved by King James VI. and I. was commissioned and would become the most widely distributed and influential book in English.
Baker received the manuscript of the Bible in 1610 and a year later from King James The precious work was published…with numerous printing errors. One of them led to two editions of it from 1611 becoming known “His big Bible” or “Your big Bible”because of the difference in the last verse of the book of Ruth (3:15): One says “he went into the city,” referring to Boaz, instead of “she went into the city,” i.e. Ruth.
However, it wouldn’t be this or any of the other blunders in the early issues that would truly seal his fate. The most serious would be an error of omission that he would commit 20 years later.
In 1631 Baker published in association with Martin Lucas another edition of the King James Bible. Once again they helped fill the sack of the demon Titivillus, with errors like one that appeared in Deuteronomy 5:24.
The problem was the English word greatness, which appeared as great-asse, i.e. instead “The Lord our God has shown us his glory and his greatness.”what he showed was “his glory and his hot ass”. They were lucky that the word “aces” at that time did not have the meaning that it would later mean, otherwise that would have been what God showed “Her glory and her big ass”.
But perhaps even that would not have been as serious as the other error that made this Bible famous. One of the 10 commandments in Exodus 20:14 was missing a short word that led to an unfortunate admonition: “You will commit adultery.”
Thousands of copies of the text went on sale and The typographic disaster was only discovered a year later. The consequences were serious, as the royalist priest Peter Heylyn (1599–1662) reported.
“Their Majesties’ printers had then made a scandalous error in our English Bibles by omitting the word ‘Necessity’ from the Seventh Commandment. His Majesty having been informed of this by the Bishop of London, orders were given to summon the printers to the High Commission, where, on the basis of the evidence, all printing and printing work was carried out Printers were heavily finedas they rightly deserve.”
For Barker and Lucas, in addition to the hefty fine, the court revoked their printing license, meaning the end of their careers and likely financial ruin.
Baker’s situation actually got worse, and in 1635 he was imprisoned as a debtor in a prison, where he died a decade later. Most of the unfortunate volumes were destroyed. But some have survived and are collectibles and are referred to as “The Evil Bible”“the Bible of adulterers” or “the Bible of sinners”.
Although the “Evil Bible” is one of the most notorious errors in history, it is far from the only one that confirms that it is human to err. If we limit ourselves to the biblical ones, the list is long and varied.
In the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript from around 800 AD created by Celtic monks in Ireland, Jesus brings a kinder message than elsewhere in the Gospel of Matthew (10:34). What I should say is: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”. But instead of the Latin word “gladium,” meaning “sword,” there is gaudium, which means “joy.” So even though it didn’t bring peace, it at least brought joy.
Another typographical error resulted in the 1562 second edition of the Geneva Bible being referred to as “…” “The Bible of Placemakers”since this word appeared in English instead of the correct one: “peacemaker.” Furthermore, in Luke 21, the same edition claimed that “God condemns the poor widow” instead of “God praises the poor widow,” again because of the confusion of “condemns” with “praises.”
In 1653, known as “The Unjust Bible,” the word “no” had also wreaked havoc. The text of 1 Corinthians 6:9 omitted the second rejection of the phrase, so Paul concluded by saying, “Do you not know that the unrighteous will inherit the kingdom of God?” And in 1763 the “No” disappeared again, this time calling the believer a fool. It is the so-called “Bible of Fools” from 1763, in which it says in Psalm 14:1: “The fool says in his heart, There is God,” although he should say, “There is no God.”
Other small omissions are blasphemous, such as the omission of a comma in Luke 23:32, which says that Jesus “also had two other criminals with him” instead of “He also had two other criminals with him.”
On his part “The Printers’ Bible” He noted in 1612 in Psalm 119:161 that “the printers persecuted me without cause,” when in reality it was the princes who had done it: they had confused printers with princes. “The Cannibal Bible” (1682) was nicknamed because Deuteronomy 24:3 said, “If the second husband… eats (his wife)” instead of “if the second husband hates her…”. In this case an “h” was missing: instead of “hate” it was “ate”.
If all this stuff about biblical errata seems like something from very ancient times, there is evidence that the demon Titivillus, who not only collects but also introduces and causes errors, existed in more recent times.
In 1966, the first edition of the “Jerusalem Bible” was missing an “r.”which resulted in the phrase “Pray for Peace” becoming “Pay for Peace.”
And the “no” had its effect again. In the 1970 “Darkness” Bible, John 1:5 says, “…and the darkness overpowered them” rather than “did not overpower them.” And in 1989, that little two-letter word in the Bible, “Unrepentant Nineveh,” appeared instead of disappearing.
In the New Testament by Heinz Cassirer it says in Luke 11:32: “For they did not repent when they heard the preaching of Jonah.” It refers to the residents of Nineveh who, according to the original story, actually repented.
Fortunately, the stories of the Old and New Testaments are so well known these errors and the many others were discovered, corrected and became curiosities. But errors will continue to creep into any text, sacred or not, because despite manual or automatic corrections, Titivillus has not stopped haunting us since he first appeared on the scene in 1285.
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