The origins of the Wicked Bible go all the way back to 1631, just two decades after the first publication of the King James Version of the Bible, which is considered a landmark English translation. It was the work of Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, two London printers who were entrusted with producing a new print run of the holy text. Though the Guttenberg Bible had been around for two centuries by that point, printing was still a laborious and expensive affair compared to printing today and required a great deal of skill on behalf of the printers.
The edition’s commandment was in fact a misprint, which according to The Atlantic was only discovered a year after the print run began. By that point, around 1,000 of the offending Bibles had been printed, which were ordered to be gathered up under royal decree and, being considered blasphemous, summarily burnt. Barker and Lucas were taken to court, stripped of their printing licenses, and fined a sum of £300, a fortune at the time. Per The Guardian, some historians question whether the misprint was accidental or in fact a bit of intentional mischief.
