La Roche College celebrates addition of hand-made Bible
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Tim Ternes, project director of the St. John's Bible project, gives a presentation Wednesday at La Roche College's Wright Library. The college is in the process of acquiring one of the hand-illuminated Bibles. -
A page from a reproduction of the St. John?s Bible at La Roche College?s Wright Library. The St. John?s Bible is the first Bible that Benedictine monks have illustrated by hand in 500 years.
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In 2000, some 500 years since Catholic monks had last created a hand-written and illustrated Bible, quill tip was put to vellum in the creation of a new Bible that is hailed as both word of God and work of art.
La Roche College in McCand-less is acquiring one of just 299 full-sized paper copies of the original, at a cost of $125,000. Each of the seven volumes measures 2-by-3 feet when open, and weighs about 30 pounds. The vellum, or calf skin, originals will weigh 50-70 pounds when bound in wooden cover.
Sister Candace Introcaso, president of La Roche, dreamed of bringing a St. John's Bible to La Roche since she first saw pages five years ago. She plans to incorporate it into the curriculum, from history to design.
"Being a Catholic college is at the very core of our mission. ... All that we strive to do is informed and guided by the word of God," she said at a presentation Wednesday. "The college has been offered this opportunity to make God's word visible in a very physical sense."
The school now has four volumes. Donors have given about half the money needed, she said.
It is called the St. John's Bible because the Benedictine monks of St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minn., commissioned it and provided the theological guidance to the artists. But it originated with the vision of renowned Welsh calligrapher Donald Jackson, and was created by a team of lay calligraphers and artists.
Mr. Jackson, senior calligrapher to Queen Elizabeth, had dreamed of writing a Bible by hand from the age of 13. He began collecting materials 40 years ago, acquiring 144 sticks of black ink made from candle smoke in China in 1870. The St. John's Bible used 142 of them. Each of the sticks would have cost $1,000 at today's prices, according to Tim Ternes, director of the St. John's Bible, who spoke at La Roche.
Mr. Jackson proposed the project to the monks in 1995. They agreed three years later, and settled on the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible because it was literal, scholarly and approved by the Catholic Church and most other major Christian bodies, Mr. Ternes said.
Although the techniques and materials are ancient, the 150 images are contemporary in style. A committee of theologians wrote a brief caption for each image, and there was intense-back-and-forth until monks and artist agreed that a proposed image was "theologically and artistically sound," Mr. Ternes said.
He showed a slide of the image for the creation story in Genesis 1. His audience broke into intense discussion of what they saw. It showed seven panels: The first was dark, but with splashes of red that could be fire, mathematical fractals used in chaos theory, the Hebrew lettering for "formless and void" and a thin band of gold breaking through the darkness. The panels progressed through images of mist, land masses seen from space, planets, birds and fish, and primitive people, including an image of a woman from a prehistoric cave in Nigeria.
God is represented by the use of gold, since readers can see their image in it and the Bible says that humans were made in the image of God, Mr. Ternes said.
"The St. John's Bible is not a picture book," Mr. Ternes said. "These are visual, spiritual meditations. They are designed to invite you into scripture."
But even error corrections are artistic, employing the ancient monastic device of drawing a creature in the margin to direct the reader to missing words below. In one case a bumblebee uses a pulley designed by Leonardo DaVinci to hoist a missing verse.
The artists used ancient inks, with reds of vermilion and blues of lapis, bonded with egg.
Writing and art done with such materials doesn't fade, even when it isn't well cared for, he said.
The original St. John's Bible "will have a shelf life of 1,500 to 2,000 years," he said.
The paper reproductions are printed at an art house in Arizona. The Abbey's publishing house, Liturgical Press, has coffee table versions at $55 to $79 per volume. Information is at www.SaintJohnsBible.org .
For now, Sister Candace keeps the books in her office. She has asked design students to help plan a display for them. She dreams of inviting all sorts of groups to La Roche to see and discuss them.
The original draws 15,000 pilgrims a year to St. John's Abbey, and 2 million people have seen a traveling exhibit of some pages.
In five to 10 years, Mr. Ternes said, the original will be bound and will remain at the abbey, where it will be carried in processions and used at Mass.
First Published January 19, 2012 12:00 am
