Talk:Wicked Bible

Star Chamber punishment
I am a bit confused about the fine. The lede says the publishers were fined £300 but a bit further on it says a the authors were fined the equivalent of a months salary or 120 hectares. Is this the same fine or something different? Is 120 hectares meant to be the equivalent of £300 or was that part of the judgement? Also, publishers is plural, was it a months salary (£300?) each? Great article though, that bible reads like a vandalised Wikipedia page!  Sp in ni ng  Spark  10:05, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Also reference 3 says the fine was £3,000, not £300 which is indeed an enormous fine.  Sp in ni ng  Spark  10:47, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Ok - The publisher was the King or more correctly The Kings Printing House - He didn't get fined. The Author was a vast team of academics gathered together to write the first official english language bible - they didnt get fined either. The printer got fined - he was the Royal Printer and he was called Robert Barker. Poor old Lucas just happened to be the executor of an associate of Barkers, who died the year before - lucas werent a printer.

the fines were £200 to Barker and £100 to Lucas - but they were later converted to supplying some greek typefaces. A hectare is a unit of land measurement - no-one ever gets fined in hectares, especially not in the 1600's when acres, or chains or furlongs were all the rage. £100 pounds was a years stipend for samuel pepys as the secretary for the admiralty in 1666 - equivalent job to high ranking government post - extrapolate from that and you get a sense of the size of the fine - but then the edition cost £8,000 to produce - these men were very wealthy (except perhaps poor old Lucas. K?  82.24.57.18 (talk) 02:19, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Great arse? /great-asse - Disputed accuracy
Sounds like a joke to me. None of the other sources I could find mentioned it. I'm going to remove it for now. If anyone cares and can find a source, go ahead and add it back. – &#160;Þ&#160;  22:55, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
 * So you didn't check the main source. Added back. Timpul my talk 12:47, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Is it only mentioned in that one source? If it is true, it would suggest that the errors in this Bible were deliberate parody/sabotage rather than typesetting errors.  Weasel Fetlocks (talk) 18:42, 31 December 2008 (UTC)


 * National Geographic, December 2011, page 45, cites Deuteronomy 5:24 as saying "great asse". 198.151.130.54 (talk) 16:55, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I have consulted an actual copy of the book in the University of Cambridge library, and although it does have the adulterous error, Deuteronomy 5:24 spells it as "greatnesse" and not "great asse". I have subsequently searched for all instances of "greatness" in the book and found no such error.Cambsgooseking (talk) 13:29, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Cambsgooseking (talk) 15:07, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Cambsgooseking (talk) 16:18, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Apart from the question raised above about whether this misprint is present, the article's claim that the misprint created "the sense of God showing his great rear" is highly dubious, because historically (as still today in most English-speaking countries) the word "arse" contained an R. The spelling without R isn't attested until the 1670s. So in all probability no reader would have understood "great-asse" as meaning great rear. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.197.29.82 (talk) 18:41, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

It's also interesting to note that if you search Google NGrams, it doesn't find any matches for "great-asse" or "greatasse", whereas it does find references going back 200+ years to the "thou shalt commit adultery" misprint. While several sources have been cited to support the existence of the great-asse misprint, we need to be sure that those sources didn't simply get their information from Wikipedia. 16:03, 15 March 2021 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.197.29.82 (talk)
 * I was doing the NGrams search incorrectly. There are in fact 19th century printed references to the error, lending credence to it (if it is a myth, as Cambsgooseking asserts, it's a very old one). ( https://books.google.se/books?id=iKI1R0UJT4kC&pg=PA305&dq=%22great+asse%22&hl=sv&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjN7vyo2LLvAhUEIcUKHelAC-gQ6AEwAHoECAAQAg#v=onepage&q=%22great%20asse%22&f=false )   However, my point still stands that "asse" back then didn't mean "rear"! 95.197.29.82 (talk) 16:15, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

I've edited the page to include the 1886 source citing the second error, and added another contemporary source that also discusses it - including explaining that the word only referred to a donkey, not a butt. The only remaining issues are a) whether someone who can be bothered to check has access to the Rawlinson MS to check whether it does say what is claimed, and b) the fact that one of the copies Campbell claims contains the 'great-asse' error is the Cambridge copy. He includes photos of the three copies with the ink blot in his book, so it seems they definitely exist, but as Cambsgooseking's photo shows, the ink blot clearly isn't there. The most likely - and frustrating - explanation is that Campbell is mistaken over which three copies it is that contain the inkblot. Endlesspumpkin (talk) 11:16, 28 April 2021 (UTC)


 * As for "the word [ass(e)] only referred to a donkey, not a butt", it is interesting that in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, of some 35 years earlier than this edition of the Bible, a weaver gets magically transformed into an ass - at least, from the neck upwards. And the weaver character's name is  ...  ...  BOTTOM !!!   Heraldica (talk) 22:41, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Not Barker and Lucas.
This 1631 edition of the KJ Bible was printed by the Kings Printing House. The Royal Printer at the time was Robert Barker. Although Barker and Lucas were both fined, Lucas was not a printer, he was the executor of the will of John Bill, who was an associate of Robert Barker with some stake in the costs of the edition. two other men were also involved in this series of events John Bill as mentioned before and Bonham Norton. Regarding the fine - Barker was fined £200 and Lucas £100 - but both were subsequently converted to "the supply of a greek letter font" for the OUP. plus a comitment to print an edition a year at their own expense for the archbishop of Canterbury. there is no record of either being done.

to put the costs of the fine into context - Barker payed £3,500 for the manuscript - and it is said that the cost of the edition, which he met from his own pocket was £8000. So if anyone fancies finding the sources, they are easily got online, there is a lot more to be had from this subject. 82.24.57.18 (talk) 02:06, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Todays equivalent of a £300 fine
I have just found a website that calculates the value of the pound across time. It reckons that: In 2007, £300 0s 0d from 1631 is worth £32,473.29	using the retail price index. £555,237.41	using average earnings. check it at: http://eh.net/hmit/ 82.24.57.18 (talk) 03:28, 1 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Comparing the values of goods or currency between different eras is notoriously difficult as the entire economic systems are different. Eg, western nations have predominantly service based economies today but even 50 years ago services were only a small proportion of the economy.  While we can say for sure that the fines are very large we can't really put a meaningful modern value on the fines.Robert Brockway (talk) 03:32, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Pullquote in lead
I must say I'm not a big fan of having a pullquote in the lead. As it stands now, the lead is longer than any other section of the article — and at least as long as the article itself. Scartol •  Tok  12:13, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Are you talking about the extended quotation by the Archbishop of Cantebury?


 * Your comment prompted me to reread the introduction, and now I think it could be much improved if it were shortened. The lead is redundant in that it says multiple times that the printers were fined and the print run was withdrawn. I suggest moving the Archbishop's statement to the section that says "Public reaction" and rename that "Reactions". Loves  Macs  (talk) 12:23, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Mistranscription?
The excerpt displaying the mistake has the following sentence: "Thou ſhalt not couet thy nighbours houſe, thou ſhalt not couet thy neighbours wife (…)" Is the misspelling of "neighbours" as "nighbours" the printers' error, or the WP editor's? Artie P.S. (talk) 12:33, 1 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Just looked at one of the sources, which shows the transcription is accurate. Boy, these guys needed to pull their socks up. Artie P.S. (talk) 12:36, 1 April 2009 (UTC)


 * They used a cheap font that didn't include spellcheck.


 * As a former editor, I agree the "arse" mistake looks like a deliberate joke.


 * BTW, dropping "not" out of a sentence used to be a common mistake. Consequently, decades ago the AP in its wisdom decreed that reporters were to write "innocent" rather than the statutory "not guilty" in court stories. Sca (talk) 15:55, 1 April 2009 (UTC)


 * So how come did the "joke" showed up as fact in the December 2011 National Geographic (inscribed as "great asse" in that magazine)? 198.151.130.54 (talk) 16:52, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, when did it first appear in Wikipedia? Perhaps Wikipedia was National Geographic's source?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.197.29.82 (talk) 23:11, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

The Wicked Bible is "Cancelled"?
How? Are the pages torn out and they start the page again? Or do they stop the Bible at that point and start at the very beginning? Obviously it cannot function as a Bible (which is one form of cancellation) but who cancels it? Slightnostalgia (talk) 21:49, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

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Extant Bibles
The list of known existing copies of the Wicked Bible is either outdated or incorrect - there is also a copy in the possession of, and on display at, York Minster. Have edited the article to reflect this as it resolves a discrepancy, before it stated that twelve were known to exist but only eleven were listed. 78.147.206.12 (talk) 13:48, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Number of copies left
I don't know which is the right one, but this page says there are fifteen, and Bible errata says there are 11. Alien333 (talk) 14:26, 3 April 2024 (UTC)