Is it possible for The Bible to contain errors? For those who profess to follow the word of Christ, everyone agrees that the Bible is the infallible word of God as transcribed by many different men compiled together in one book. But for this question, I'm not talking about "The Bible" as in the idea of the perfect Bible, but of the copies and translations mankind reads; the one you and I have on our bookshelves. This may seem like a stupid question for some, and I apologize, but is it possible for these books to contain errors?

The way I see it, The Bible is a product of mankind, written by man, transcribed by man, duplicated on printing presses created by man, and thus it may contain errors, mistakes, even contradictions; these mistakes are the result of man's imperfection, not God's.

It occurred to me after reading through many questions on this site that some people think that The Bible is 100% infallible, let alone that their particular copy may be a poor/inaccurate translation. It's almost as if they believe it was written by God himself, so they tend to blame errors on our own reasoning and interpretation of the Bible, as opposed to the simple fact that a particular passage could have been translated incorrectly (which often seems more likely, especially when it stands out from all the rest).

Note that whether errors/mistakes do (or do not) occur in The Bible is irrelevant; this questions asks merely whether it is conceivably possible that it could contain errors.
Yes, it is absolutely possible for editions of the Bible to contain errors. There is no magical mechanism to prevent this. There are some notorious printing mistakes, for example:


A 1631 printing of the King James version is now called the "Wicked Bible", owing to its rendering of Exodus 20:14,


  Thou shalt commit adultery

In 1763, the "Fool's Bible" said in Psalm 14:1,


  The fool hath said in his heart there is a God

The "Owl Bible" of 1944 says in 1 Peter 3:5,


  For after this manner in the old time the holy women also, who trusted God, adorned themselves, being in subjection to their owl husbands.



Some more are listed at Wikipedia under Bible errata. These are mostly simple mistakes, but some of them might be deliberately introduced (like the Printer's Bible of 1612, having "Printers have persecuted me without a cause" in Psalm 119:161).

In earlier times, when books were copied by hand, monks attributed such slips (in jest) to a demon called Titivillus 1, whose job was to introduce errors into manuscripts, especially of important texts.

Even in the earliest Biblical manuscripts, there are disagreements, as can be seen by consulting most modern editions that have footnotes - it's not hard to find verses with annotations that note differences among early texts.

1 Or possibly Titivilus or Tituvillis, etc., it being perfectly in keeping with his nature that there is no correct way to spell his name.