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Getting the Word Out
An exhibit at the Huntington Library shows how Bibles big and small gave power to the people.
David Neff | posted 8/08/2008 12:33PM
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In the stairwell that leads to my study, there stands a six-foot tall bookshelf stuffed with all manner of Bibles. The Bible is, of course, God's word to all people. But it does not come to all people in the same form. The cornucopia of formats and translations in even my modest collection reminds me of the many creative ways the Bible has reached people in different places and cultural moments.
My smallest Bible weighs just a hair over 2 ounces. It is a 1961 vest pocket New Testament of the New English Bible from Oxford University Press. It is clearly produced for people who travel or who want to have a New Testament always available in pocket or purse.
The largest Bible in my collection weighs seven and one-half pounds. It measures eight and one-half inches by 12 inches, and is 2 and three-quarters inches thick. Carry it around for a few minutes, and you'll know that this Bible is not something to be taken lightly.
This weighty copy of the Word is a 1970 printing of Jerusalem Bible. The translation is Roman Catholic, and unlike most earlier Catholic Bibles, it is based on the original languages. It is also a Readers Edition, that is, it has footnotes that help explain the text or the translator's choices. But this Bible's large dimensions were designed to present 32 uncharacteristically abstract prints by surrealist painter and provocateur Salvador Dali. This is the Bible as coffee-table book.
Last week I looked at about 150 Bibles from the collection of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. The Huntington's Stephen Tabor and Claremont School of Theology Reformation scholar Lori Ann Ferrell have culled these from the library's rare book collections to create a nine-room exhibit entitled The Bible and the People. (The exhibit includes a doubly rare Gutenberg Bible. Rare because only 48 copies the Gutenberg Bible survive, and doubly rare because this copy is one of only 12 surviving copies on vellum.)
The Huntington's largest Bible is way bigger than mine: It is bound in 60 volumes. What sets this Bible apart is the amount of illustration. English printseller James Gibbs took apart one of John Kitto's annotated Bibles, and, according to the exhibit's brochure "underlined its key passages, assembled more than thirty thousand prints, drawings and watercolors, and rebound the whole." Now why did the exhibit's co-curator, Stephen Tabor tell me he thought Gibbs was "obsessive"?
conveys the Saul of Tarsus's life-changing turnabout
The size of the Kitto Bible, like that of my Dali-fied Jerusalem Bible, serves the purpose of art. The Huntington has removed from one of the volumes and framed an original watercolor by William Blake. The painting conveys the Saul of Tarsus's life-changing turnabout through Blake's dizzying, swirling composition.
But size serves Scripture in other ways. Among the smallest Bibles exhibited at the Huntington are four of the earliest mass-produced single-volume Bibles. These revolutionary volumes came into being 200 years before Gutenberg applied the invention of moveable type to the printing of Bibles. An enterprising businessman in 13th-century Paris realized that theological students at the Sorbonne needed practical portable Bibles. Before this time, Bibles were large, unwieldy and (in the case of heavily glossed Bibles) bound in up to 20 volumes. This prevented Bible students from easily comparing passages and tracing threads of meaning through the Bible.
The cost of commissioning small single-volume Bibles from copyists would have been prohibitive for most students, but some enterprising soul realized that he could mass produce such items by creating teams of copyists, each of whom would specialize in writing out a particular sections of Scripture. This Henry Ford of Holy Writ brought down the price and pushed up the volume of production.
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