You did WHAT to the Bible?!?!?!

Going to the King James Bible exhibit, I imagined that the professors wanted, in addition to our gaining a greater appreciation of print culture, for us to become more appreciative of the great men who translated the Bible. This is not exactly how my experience went, though...

As far as the print medium idea goes, I was a little surprised in the number of mistakes in the books and how widespread these mistakes became. The exhibit stated that Bishop's Bible that was displayed had an error in the printing (I'm pretty sure it said the printing and not the translation, but I'm not sure. Either way, it comes out to the same thing.) where one verse said that the "righteous would be punished" or something like that. What it was supposed to say was (obviously) that the "unrighteous would be punished." However, this error slipped through into countless bibles. If the error had been made in a written bible without anyone noticing, no big deal: it's only one bible. Because the error was made with a print medium, however, many copies were made without the error being corrected. I see this as another example of the weakness of a print medium over a written medium: it is so expensive to change something once it has been done that too frequently publishers choose to keep errors, outdated information, etc. because it would significantly reduce their profits if they had to correct it.

The thing that jumped out at me more was the religious controversy than the print medium. When Mary I became queen of England after her half-brother Edward's death (actually, it was after Mary got Lady Jane Grey out of the way, but that's another story to itself), she re-instituted Catholicism in England. As she began to execute Protestant leaders, those who could left for Switzerland, where they made the Geneva Bible, another English translation. In their translation/edition, they also inserted marginal notes about their personal views on different verses.
My question is this: Who gave them the right to add their own personal opinions into the Bible and then present it as The Bible??? I can imagine these ideas going through Mary's head: God instructed prophets to write his words in the Bible. These Geneva Bible writers don't profess to be prophets, so they can't authoritatively add on to the Bible. Therefore, any modifications or additions they make are heretical, and heresy is an offense for which the law prescribes capital punishment (on a repeat offense). Now, I'm not justifying the murder of 280 Protestants, but I sympathize with the Catholic English monarchy and its opposition to these men blatantly adding onto the Bible as if they were God or prophets, which they did not claim to be. Not even the Papacy claimed the authority to add additional (especially contemporary) writing onto the Bible, and there wasn't a whole lot of authority the Papacy didn't claim... Even worse is that this additional commentary was frequently aimed against Mary's Catholic monarchy. These men were inserting their own political views into the Bible and publishing it on the same page as God's word. If someone did this today, would we ("we" being the entire Christian world, not just the LDS Church) take kindly of it? I think not.

So while my trip to the King James Bible exhibit may have been counter-productive in regard to one of the professors' goals for us, I feel like I learned and realized a lot from it, and I really enjoyed the exhibit.