A remarkable array of ancient and antique biblical texts, including four fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, will be on exhibit at the Monroeville ExpoMart from Friday through June 20.

	Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette Lee Biondi, co-curator of the exhibit, "From the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Bible in America," talks about some of the bibles displayed behind him. Click photo for larger image.

Anyone interested in the origins of the modern English Bible "would have to visit six or eight museums in Europe and the Middle East to get this comprehensive historical arc," said Lee Biondi, a dealer in biblical manuscripts and a co-curator.

The exhibition, drawn from private collections by dealers in rare Bibles, intends to show how the Bible was preserved through the ages, with special emphasis on how it came to America and Pennsylvania's role in Bible publishing.

One theme is that the Bible survived against great odds. Most Americans don't know that "it was illegal to print scripture in English in Colonial America," Biondi said. That was because the Protestant king of England claimed a copyright on the King James Bible.

The organizers of "From the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Bible in America" are open about their faith and desire to show that the biblical text has not changed over the centuries. Local sponsors include the Christian radio station WORD-FM and the Cornerstone Television network.

Biondi said he preferred commercial venues over academic ones for their accessibility and for offering the show's curators more control over the display. But the choice also reflects philosophical tensions between antiquities dealers and academicians, who are troubled by private trade in rare artifacts.

Ronald Tappy, professor of Bible and archaeology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, was disturbed that a Web site belonging to one of the show's chief sponsors sells panels cut from 400-year-old Torah scrolls.

Joel Lampe, the co-curator who operates the rare Bible dealership at www.greatsite.com, said the scrolls were badly damaged in a fire more than a century ago and are beyond restoration.

"We are the largest restorers of biblical materials in the world," he said of his family's business at the The Bible Museum in Goodyear, Ariz. They create whole Bibles from damaged rare texts and sell only pages and panels left over from the restoration process, he said.

Tappy, who has a similar Torah scroll at his Bible Lands Museum, compared it to smashing an ancient jug missing its handles and selling the shards. "There is something unseemly about selling it, even if it is just a fragment," he said.

Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette Fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls will be on display at the exhibit "From the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Bible in America" at the Pittsburgh ExpoMart from Friday to June 20. Click photo for larger image.

But those academic debates will probably mean little to most people who tour the exhibit. The highlight will be what Biondi says are the only four biblical fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls in the United States.

The scrolls, which most scholars believe were copied by a Jewish sect between about 100 B.C. and 68 A.D., were discovered in caves by Bedouin shepherds in 1947. There are scholarly debates about why they were stored in the cave and about the beliefs of those who stored them. But to the show's curators they are primarily a testimony to reliability of the Hebrew text as it was transmitted over the ages.

"The Dead Sea Scrolls are the most important archaeological discovery in history," Biondi said.

Because Jews had been persecuted by nearly every other religious group they came into contact with over the centuries and their scriptures destroyed, the oldest known Torah scroll before 1947 dated from 1005, Biondi said. Some scholars argued that the Hebrew Bible was unreliable and that it had been revised many times, he said.

But when a 1st-century text of the 8th-century BC prophet Isaiah was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, "it matched the Hebrew from the year 1005 exactly" and showed that the text was not tampered with, Biondi said.

Other highlights include fragments of early New Testament manuscripts, medieval Greek and Latin biblical manuscripts and first editions of important printed Bibles, including the Gutenberg Bible of 1455 and the King James Bible of 1611.

Because of the injunctions against printing English Bibles in the colonies, the first Bibles produced in America were in Indian languages for missionary work, Biondi said. The first Bible in any European language was a German translation, published by Christopher Saur near Philadelphia at Germantown in 1743. The first English Bible also was published in Pennsylvania -- the New Testament in 1781 and the Old Testament in 1782.

"After the Declaration of Independence, once we were fighting a war, we figured that copyright violations wouldn't be such a big deal," Biondi said. Congress endorsed the project, which was done by the congressional printer at Philadelphia.

When Congress imposed no copyright, it "set scripture free," Biondi said.

Pennsylvania is also credited with producing the first Hebrew Bible and the first Catholic Bible in America, he said. The latter is a Douai-Rheims from 1790, which will be on display with other American "firsts."

When the earlier version of the show was in Dallas, a Catholic columnist accused it of anti-Catholic bias for highlighting Catholic persecution of early Reformation translators and downplaying the Church's role in preserving the biblical text.

But the Douai-Rheims testifies to persecution on all sides, Biondi said. "There is a phase of Bible history where the Bible is coming into the vernacular, where it is impossible to paint the actions of a lot of people involved in a good light," he said.

"People were killed so that you and I could have scripture in the language that we actually speak. But there is no anti-Catholic sentiment in that. ... The Reformers' hands weren't clean, either. It's an agonizing phase of history."

The show has had a somewhat troubled history of its own.

It toured several southern and midwestern cities as "From the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Forbidden Book." Then a collector who was a partner in the exhibit, William Noah, of Murfreesboro, Tenn., sued two other collector-partners, Biondi and Bruce Ferrini, of Bath, Ohio, over financing. The suit forced the exhibit into involuntary bankruptcy, and a trustee was appointed to sort through the competing claims.

Biondi said he was no longer involved in the suit and that Noah and Ferrini were not involved in the reconstituted exhibit. The trustee, lawyer Kathryn Belfance, of Akron, Ohio, was unaware of the Monroeville exhibit until a reporter called. She said she could not be sure whether it violated any court injunction.

"I don't know what assets they are using," she said. Unpaid bills remain from a March exhibit in Akron, which drew 2,000 visitors daily and had a gift shop that made "tons of money," she said.

Biondi hopes visitors will gain a renewed appreciation for American pluralism. "The great American experiment of religious freedom and tolerance is very far from the historical norm," he said. "We want to remind people not to take it for granted."

The show runs from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday from Friday to June 20. The box office closes at 6:30 p.m. daily and 4:30 p.m. Sunday. Adult tickets are $15 on weekends, $12 weekdays, $10 for groups of 20 or more and $8, students and senior citizens. Children under 7 are free. Tickets can be purchased at the box office or at www.DeadSeaScrollstoAmerica.com.