Christian History magazine has put together a special issue commemorating the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible. Among the articles about its history and influence is a short piece that highlights eight different printing errors that have appeared in the KJV:

Printers do interesting things to texts sometimes, and the KJV was no exception.  In various printings over the years, certain errors were so egregious that those editions got their own sarcastic titles. Among these:

1. The 'Judas Bible' 1611: This Bible has Judas, not Jesus, saying, 'Sit ye here while I go yonder and pray' (Matthew 26:36).
2. The 'Printers Bible' 1612: In some copies, Psalm 119:161 reads, 'Printers have persecuted me without a cause' rather than 'Princes have persecuted me...'
3. The 'Wicked Bible' 1631: Omits an important 'not' from Exodus 20:14, making the seventh commandment read, 'Thou shalt commit adultery.' The printers were fined £300 and most of the copies were recalled immediately. Only 11 copies are known to exist today.
4. The 'Sin On Bible' 1716: John 8:11 reads, 'Go and sin on more' rather than 'Go and sin no more.'
5. The 'Vinegar Bible' 1717: The chapter heading for Luke 20 reads, 'The Parable of the Vinegar' instead of 'The Parable of the Vineyard.'
6. The 'Fools Bible' 1763: Psalm 14:1 reads, 'the fool hath said in his heart there is a God,' rather than '...there is no God.' The printers were fined £3,000 and all copies ordered destroyed.
7. The 'Lions Bible' 1804: 1 Kings 8:19 reads, 'thy son that shall come forth out of thy lions,' rather than 'loins.'
8. The 'Owl Bible' 1944: 'Owl' replaces 'own,' making 1 Peter 3:5 read, 'For after this manner in the old time the holy women also, who trusted God, adorned themselves, being in subjection to their owl husbands.' The error was caused by a printing plate with a damaged letter n.

You may recall from a short time ago that the printers of the ESV have had their issues as well.

I wrote this review of Mark Noll's book, The Old Religion in the New World, back in January for the research study I'm doing on the history of Christianity in America. Don't feel any obligation to read it—in fact, not doing so will save you from using up ten minutes of your life unnecessarily. The only reason I'm posting it here is to test out how Posterous embeds PDF files. The book, however, unlike my review, comes highly recommended if you are looking for a good introduction to the factors that shaped American Christianity. Go and read the book.

Click here to download:

noll_review.pdf (13 KB)

I first heard about Pripyat a couple of years ago. Pripyat is an abandoned city built in the 1970s primarily to house those who worked at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located in the north of the Ukraine close to the border of Belarus. It was abandoned in 1986 following the disaster at the plant. The ferris wheel you see in the photo to the left has become somewhat iconic—an amusement park had been built there just prior to its evacuation. It was never officially opened.

The nearly 50,000 residents of Pripyat were evacuated in short order. They were not allowed to take any of their belongings with them, save the clothes on their backs. In the years following the disaster, as radioactive levels in the region began to drop, looters ran rampant through the city, taking every valuable thing in sight. Though the city still stands today, it is decaying; not only have the looters done a great deal of damage to the existing structures, but the natural environement and time have taken their toll as well.

It is easy for us, I think, to look at disaster like Chernobyl as just an abstract even in history. We are far removed from it, not so much by time, but by the vast expanse that separated the worlds of the Soviet Union and the rest of the Western world.

Earlier today I was looking at photos of the abandoned city, and on the website where I had found them, a number of people had commmented that the images were "hauntingly beautiful." To be honest, I was quite disturbed by the comments. There is nothing "beautiful" about Pripyat. To begin with, its construction was typical of the Soviet era—long rows of uniform apartment blocks entirely lacking in character and aesthetic sensibility, built to house the faceless masses that would keep the communist machine running. And then an explosion, following which 50,000 people are forced to leave their whole life behind, carrying with them only their memories, whatever they could fit in their pockets, and for many, radioactive isotopes in quantities that would later claim their lives or the lives of their loved ones.

Perhaps the decaying, empty city is appropriate, reflective of the incredible brokenness of the lives of its residents, almost irreparable. It hardly needs to be said that here we see the effects of sin in an especially poignant way.

It is hard for us to enter into that brokenness, to understand what they went through. There was a short film shot partly on location in Pripyat in 2008, called The Door (it was nominated for an Academy Award) Only fifteen minutes long, the film conveys in a powerful way that brokenness, and the horror the residents of Pripyat lived through that fateful year. If you watch this film, I am certain that you will never again be able to think of the disaster at Chernobyl as an abstract historical event. I've embedded it below.

Κύριε ἐλέησον. Lord, have mercy.

There is a little town in western Ontario called Chesley. It's largely a farming community and I likely would not have even heard of it except that I have relatives living just outside of it. Recently, I learned something interesting about the town. It houses a small, Presbyterian Reformed church, which would be rather inconsequential if not for one peculiar claim to fame.

If you are into Reformed theology, you will likely be familiar with the name of John Murray, the noted systematic theologian who taught at Westminster Theological Seminary for many years. Murray was good friends with William Matheson, who was the pastor of the church in Chesley around the same time Murray taught at Westminster. Their friendship had been solidified during a controversy in the Free Presbyterian Church years earlier. Murray would often travel to Chesley to visit Matheson and preached in the church on quite a number of occasions, especially after Matheson died in 1957. In fact, Murray would say of the church, “I think I feel most at home here and at Chesley of all the places I visit.” You can read more of the story of the church here.

Perhaps this is only of interest to me, but I thought it was worth sharing. My relatives might be interested to know that their little town has a small place in Reformed history.

Incidentally, the photo of the 14th concession on the Wikipedia page for Chesley is taken by my dad. My grandparents live just over the rise on the right side.

Oliver O’Donovan, the noted ethicist, says this about history in his contribution to the first volume of David K. Clark and Robert V. Rakestraw’s edited collection, Readings in Christian Ethics:

Within Christianity one cannot think or speak about the meaning of the world without speaking also of its destined transformation. The problem of evil is met, not by asserting a profound cosmological order in the present, but by confident announcement of God’s purposes for the future. He who has come to earth as the meaning, has come also as the Purpose or Fulfillment. To understanding the coming of Christ it is necessary to expect the second coming.

There are, of course, notoriously, two ways of living in expectation. We can believe in the value of intermediate transformation, ‘preparing the way of the Lord’, and so commit ourselves to a life of activity; or we can feel that the ultimate transformation renders all penultimate change irrelevant, and so resign ourselves to a life of hopeful suffering. But what these two attitudes have in common is far more important than what differentiates them. They both take a negative view of the status quo. There is no natural purpose to which we can respond in love and obedience. The destiny of nature has to be imposed on it, either by our activity or by God’s. The purpose of the world is outside of it, in that new Jerusalem which is to descend from heaven prepared as a bride for the bridegroom.

Any thoughts?