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The Collation

Keeping your Jesus and Judas straight

One might think that when printing the New Testament, one would want to avoid at all costs mixing up Jesus and Judas. However, this month’s crocodile shows that such mistakes did happen:

the typo in the 1610 Geneva Bible in John 6:67, with "Iudas" instead of Jesus

the typo in the 1610 Geneva Bible (STC 2212) in John 6:67, with “Iudas” instead of Jesus

As two commentators simultaneously identified the mystery, the image shows a well-known misprint from the 1610 Geneva Bible (STC 2212) in John 6:67, in which instead of Jesus speaking to the apostles, Judas is identified as the speaker.

Bible errors can be amusing in and of themselves, but what brought this one to our attention is a recent class that Mitch Fraas was teaching with Zachary Lesser at the University of Pennsylvania. For that class, they pulled out Penn’s copy of this bible, and discovered that the error had been hand corrected: 

  1. You can read the details of their copy in the “holdings details” tab of the ESTC record.

Comments

We (Hekman Library, Calvin College) have a copy of STC 2206 (Geneva Bible, 1609) which has the misprint in John 6.67, uncorrected. (It’s uncatalogued, so it won’t show up anywhere.)

Lugene Schemper — April 17, 2015

Reply

Very cool—thanks for letting us know!

Sarah Werner — April 22, 2015

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In your fourth paragraph above, I chuckled to discover the new word ’emdending’ in this article about misprints. Joking aside, thank you for a fascinating article on this superb website.

John Bright — April 23, 2015

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Oh my goodness! I’ve now used the “del” tags to strike the error through (while also preserving it for posterity!) and replaced it with the correct emendation!

Sarah Werner — April 25, 2015

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