Stop press: the Bible encourages us to have sex outside marriage.
Or at least one Bible translation did—the so-called "Wicked Bible", a 1631 edition of the King James Version which managed to miss the word "not" out of the seventh commandments.
It's going on display, along with a lot of other very old (and much more correct!) Bibles, at Cambridge University.
Got me thinking: first, were there any happily-married 17th-century readers who immediately ran out of the house to obey the command?!
And second, what Bible verse today do we most often act as though it said something very different? Mine would probably be replacing the word "pure" with "zero" in James 1 v 2.
Carl is Publisher and Co-CEO at The Good Book Company and is a member of Life Church Hackbridge in south London. He is the bestselling author of The Garden, the Curtain and the Cross and God's Big Promises Bible Storybook, and also serves as Series Editor of the God's Word For You series. Before joining TGBC, he worked as a journalist and then as a teacher, and pastored a congregation in Hull. Carl is married to Lizzie, and they have two children. He studied history at Oxford University.
