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A scribe bends intently over a worktable in his scriptorium in Monmouth, Wales. The page before him is vellum—calfskin sanded to a velvety smoothness. His goose quill pen has been hardened in hot sand and cut with a knife to hold ink and to create a precise line. He dips the end into vermilion pigment mixed with egg yolk for luminosity and begins to shape the first capital letter of a new chapter of the Bible he is copying.

Finishing this page will take a day. If he makes a mistake, he will have to scrape the vellum and write the word or line over again. The pressure is greater because the other side has already been illuminated—biblical themes spun into a visual tapestry of brilliant colors, evocative imagery, and radiant gold.

But the scribe's hand is guided by long experience and a clear idea of the words' pattern on the page. The line length has already been worked out by computer to ensure a perfect fit. The accompanying illustrations are the result of months of e-mail messages between the scribe and those who have commissioned him, discussing theological interpretation and symbolism. Medieval artistry with a modern twist: That's the achievement and the challenge of the Saint John's Bible, the first handwritten, illuminated Bible in 500 years.

"We had no idea what we were getting into in 1998," jokes Father Columba Stewart about the decision of Saint John's Abbey and University to celebrate the new millennium in this countercultural and artistically massive way. The forward-looking community of 200 Benedictine monks in Collegeville, Minnesota (known as the locale of Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk and unfortunately as the scene of a recent abuse scandal) commissioned Welsh calligrapher Donald Jackson to create a "Bible for the 21st century." It is made with medieval techniques, but uses the NRSV translation (including the Apocrypha) and incorporates contemporary allusions in the art and modern technology in the planning.

By the time the Bible is finished (scheduled for 2009), the 1,150 handwritten pages will represent a decade of conversations and labor by artists, theologians, and scholars on two continents. Eventually, the pages will be bound between boards of Welsh oak into seven volumes and displayed in the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library on Saint John's campus.

Smithsonian magazine says that the Bible, expected to cost $4 million in donations, is "one of the extraordinary undertakings of our times." According to Saint John's, the endeavor is "a bold and dignified witness to the enduring importance of the Word of God."

Saint John's has taken the unfinished Bible on a national tour called "Illuminating the Word." Its 2005 debut at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts drew 60,000 people. Since then it has traveled to various parts of the U.S. and is scheduled to hit Arizona, Canada, Washington, and Alabama in 2008. (See saintjohnsbible.org/exhibitions for the schedule.)

Visitors peruse artists' sketches, calligraphers' tools and pigments, and around 100 pages from the Gospels and Acts, the Pentateuch, and the Psalms. In large exhibit cases propped at an angle for easy viewing, two-feet-tall by three-feet-wide spreads are arranged to make you feel as if you were gazing at an open book. The magnetic combination of ancient Scripture and contemporary art draws Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and atheists. People lean in and read.

Artistic director Donald Jackson, a renowned calligrapher and senior scribe to the Crown Office of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, calls himself a "spiritual" person but "not an affiliated religious person"—not a regular churchgoer. Yet his dream has been to write the Bible. "It's the sacred text of the Western world," he explains. "It is the pinnacle of a person's life to be working with God's words. … There couldn't be a better, higher use for one's skills." The Saint John's Bible, he says, is his "Sistine Chapel."

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September 2007, Vol. 51, No. 9