It is affirmed, in the manuscript account already referred to, that one Bible swarmed with six thousand faults! Indeed, from another source we discover that “Sterne, a solid scholar, was the first who summed up the three thousand and six hundred faults that were in our printed Bibles of London.”[274] If one book can be made to contain near four thousand errors, little ingenuity was required to reach to six thousand; but perhaps this is the first time so remarkable an incident in the history of literature has ever been chronicled. And that famous edition of the Vulgate, by Pope Sixtus the Fifth, a memorable book of blunders, which commands such high prices, ought now to fall in value, before the pearl Bible, in twenty-fours, of Messrs. Hills and Field!
Mr. Field and his worthy coadjutor seem to have carried the favour of the reigning powers over their opponents; for I find a piece of their secret history. They engaged to pay 500l. per annum to some, “whose names I forbear to mention,” warily observes the manuscript writer; and above 100l. per annum to Mr. Marchmont Needham and his wife, out of the profits of the sales of their Bibles; deriding, insulting, and triumphing over others, out of their confidence in their great friends and purse, as if they were lawless and free, both from offence and punishment.[275] This Marchmont Needham is sufficiently notorious, and his secret history is probably true; for in a Mercurius Politicus of this unprincipled Cobbett of his day, I found an elaborate puff of an edition published by the annuity-granter to this worthy and his wife!
Not only had the Bible to suffer these indignities of size and price, but the Prayer-book was once printed in an illegible and worn-out type; on which the printer being complained of, he stoutly replied, that “it was as good as the price afforded; and being a book which all persons ought to have by heart, it was no matter whether it was read or not, so that it was worn out in their hands.” The puritans seem not to have been so nice about the source of purity itself.
These hand-bibles of the sectarists, with their six thousand errata, like the false Duessa, covered their crafty deformity with a fair raiment; for when the great Selden, in the assembly of divines, delighted to confute them in their own learning, he would say, as Whitelock reports, when they had cited a text to prove their assertion, “Perhaps in your little pocket-bible with gilt leaves,” which they would often pull out and read, “the translation may be so, but the Greek or the Hebrew signifies this.”
While these transactions were occurring, it appears that the authentic translation of the Bible, such as we now have it, by the learned translators in James the First’s time, was suffered to lie neglected. The copies of the original manuscript were in the possession of two of the king’s printers, who, from cowardice, consent, and connivance, suppressed the publication; considering that the Bible full of errata, and often, probably, accommodated to the notions of certain sectarists, was more valuable than one authenticated by the hierarchy! Such was the state of the English Bible till 1660![276]
The proverbial expression of chapter and verse seems peculiar to ourselves, and, I suspect, originated in the puritanic period, probably just before the civil wars under Charles the First, from the frequent use of appealing to the Bible on the most frivolous occasions, practised by those whom South calls “those mighty men at chapter and verse.” With a sort of religious coquetry, they were vain of perpetually opening their gilt pocket Bibles; they perked them up with such self-sufficiency and perfect ignorance of the original, that the learned Selden found considerable amusement in going to their “assembly of divines,” and puzzling or confuting them, as we have noticed. A ludicrous anecdote on one of these occasions is given by a contemporary, which shows how admirably that learned man amused himself with this “assembly of divines!” They were discussing the distance between Jerusalem and Jericho, with a perfect ignorance of sacred or of ancient geography; one said it was twenty miles, another ten, and at last it was concluded to be only seven, for this strange reason, that fish was brought from Jericho to Jerusalem market! Selden observed, that “possibly the fish in question was salted,” and silenced these acute disputants.
It would probably have greatly discomposed these “chapter and verse” men to have informed them that the Scriptures had neither chapter nor verse! It is by no means clear how the holy writings were anciently divided, and still less how quoted or referred to. The honour of the invention of the present arrangement of the Scriptures is ascribed to Robert Stephens, by his son, in the preface to his Concordance, a task which he performed during a journey on horseback from Paris to London, in 1551; and whether it was done as Yorick would in his Shandean manner lounging on his mule, or at his intermediate baits, he has received all possible thanks for this employment of his time. Two years afterwards he concluded with the Bible. But that the honour of every invention may be disputed, Sanctus Pagninus’s Bible, printed at Lyons in 1527, seems to have led the way to these convenient divisions; Stephens, however, improved on Pagninus’s mode of paragraphical marks and marginal verses; and our present “chapter and verse,” more numerous and more commodiously numbered, were the project of this learned printer, to recommend his edition of the Bible; trade and learning were once combined! Whether in this arrangement any disturbance of the continuity of the text has followed, is a subject not fitted for my inquiry.
[270] Harl. MS. 6395.