'Thou shalt commit adultery,' proclaims rare Bible found in New Zealand

A few years back, University of Canterbury professor Chris Jones received an email from a former student that read: "Something wicked this way comes." He knew exactly what the cryptic message meant.

"There's really only one thing it can refer to, but I thought, this cannot possibly be the case. And then my former student arrived in my office with what at first looks like a very scruffy, oversized paperback," said Jones, an associate professor of medieval studies in Christchurch, N.Z.

"On opening it up, we discovered that it is exactly what she thought it was — a Wicked Bible," he told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann.

Wicked Bibles — also known as Adulterous or Sinners' Bibles — come from a 1631 misprint, in which the word "not" is omitted from one of the 10 commandments, so it reads: "Thou shalt commit adultery." 

One thousand copies were printed with this missing word, but only 10 to 20 remain in circulation — including one in Canada at the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.

The New Zealand copy is the first one discovered in the southern hemisphere, Jones said.

"I just thought this is just not something that would happen in Christchurch, but it did," Jones said. "The first time I saw it, I thought: This is the find of a lifetime. This is not something that I'm ever going to see again."

Joke, gaffe or sabotage?

The infamous misprint occurred under the stewardship of Robert Barker English, printer to King Charles I, according to the University of Canterbury.

It was so scandalous, the King had Barker and his business partner Martin Lucas hauled before the court to answer for the error. They were admonished, fined and stripped of their printing licence. 

While many of the Bibles were destroyed, Jones says a handful were returned to the printers, who were ordered to fix them.

He suspects the New Zealand copy is one of the returned books, as it has "traces of someone having tried to stick, basically, a piece of paper over the top that would have added the word 'not.'"

Some have theorized the omission was no accident at all, but perhaps an act of industrial sabotage by a rival printer. 

Jones called the idea "interesting" but "very, very unlikely," noting there were no such allegations in the court records. 

"[The printers] basically try to blame it all on the workmen. They basically said, 'Well, this is their fault,'" Jones said. 

Timothy Perry, medieval manuscript and early book librarian at Toronto's Fisher Rare Book Library, agrees — although he says the sabotage theory is not entirely without merit.

"There certainly would be some motivation for a rival printer doing that, whether or not it happened," he said.

"There was a very reliable market for the Bible in 17th century England, but very, very few are allowed to print the Bible. You have to have a licence, a privilege to print the Bible. So if you can get one of those licences, if you can get one of those privileges, then then obviously you're onto a very good thing."

Nevertheless, both men agree that a more likely explanation is that either a worker slipped it in for a bit of saucy fun, or the printer was simply cutting costs on copy editors. 

After all, Jones says the 1631 Bibles were rife with typos.

"One contemporary estimates there were something like 20,000 errors in these Bibles. And certainly in this Bible, if you just flick to another page, you'll find chapter numbers repeating, you'll find problems all over the place," Jones said.

"There's other print runs from 1631 with fantastic errors in them. The best one of all is one that is supposed to say 'the greatness of the Lord,' but actually in the print run says, 'the great ass of the Lord.'"

Perry says that as far as he knows, there are no copies of that particular misprint in circulation.

Digitized and free 

The New Zealand Wicked Bible was acquired at an estate sale, Jones said, and once belonged to a bookbinder who arrived in New Zealand in the late 1950s from the U.K.

It's clear the bookbinder didn't know what a rare treasure he had, Jones said, because it was in seriously rough shape by the time it arrived at the University of Canterbury. 

But it's also clear that someone, at some point, knew about the misprint, as the damage on the spine indicates the book had been open to that particular page many times before.

Sarah Askey, a book and paper conservator, has been working for months to undo the damage to the book and preserve it for future generations, Jones said. 

If you want to see a Wicked Bible in Canada, you can request to view the copy at the University of Toronto library — but you won't be allowed to take it home with you.

Jones says the New Zealand copy will be the first to be fully digitized and posted online for anyone to see, free of charge.

"We will just make the whole of this rather wonderful book available to scholars and everyone else around the world just to look at," Jones said. 

Written by Sheena Goodyear. Interview with Chris Jones produced by Kevin Robertson.