Handwritten Bible To Be Published
by on October 26, 2009
In a recent turn towards the medieval, a handwritten Bible will be published this fall by Zondervan Publishers.
On June 24th, after touring 100 cities in 40 states, the Bible Across America bus has collected handwriting samples from 31,173 Americans. Every verse of the Bible has been copied by hand, each sentence written by a different person.
During the Dark Ages, if you wanted a copy of the Gospel narratives, you would have needed to translate the Bible by hand, letter by letter, word by word. It often took Celtic scribes years to accomplish this, and their work is not only laboriously decorated, but also highly artistic (See Book of Kells, housed at Trinity College in Dublin).
Guternberg’s Press comes along in 1440 and revolutionizes the copying of the Scriptures. No longer did the Bible require a mixture of powdered ink and calf skin, now it could be replicated on cheap paper in mass production. The Protestant Reformation benefited greatly from this invention, and some argue it would not have happened without it.
Yet did Guttenberg’s invention come with a cost?
The creators of the St. John’s Bible think so. The Saint John’s Bible Project, scheduled to be completed this year, will be the first Bible to be copied by hand in the tradition of the illuminated manuscripts since the medieval era. It took four million dollars to complete, hundreds of 2X3 foot pieces of vellum and 160 illuminations. See a sample from the Gospel of Matthew.
The Word Made Flesh
Eugene Peterson’s translation of the Bible puts it this way: “Word became flesh and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14.)
Christians believe that Christ became real skin, bones, and blood. We call it the incarnation (literally, “into flesh”), and it’s the idea that God took a pilgrimage to our planet and walked a mile not only in our shoes but also in our feet. See Tom Torrance’s book on the Incarnation.
Because God really became a man, he is able to identify with human struggles. To put it poetically – Christ, the eternal Word of God, abandoned his paragraph in paradise to sink into the simple sentence of an earthly stable.
Both the handwritten Bible and the Saint John’s Bible speak to a puzzling question that theologians have been wrestling with for thousands of years: How does God use ordinary people to transmit extraordinary truths?
“On the Mystery of the Incarnation”
by Denise Levertov (1923–1997)
“It’s when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.”
Resources
What is the Incarnation?