The High-Tech Making of a Handwritten Bible, for $4 Million

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) With the help of computers, calf skins and turkey feathers, Donald Jackson is reviving a lost art form by creating a Bible by hand, at a cost of about $4 million. The Saint John’s Bible, a seven-volume, illustrated endeavor slated for completion in 2007, is the first handwritten Bible […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) With the help of computers, calf skins and turkey feathers, Donald Jackson is reviving a lost art form by creating a Bible by hand, at a cost of about $4 million.

The Saint John’s Bible, a seven-volume, illustrated endeavor slated for completion in 2007, is the first handwritten Bible to be commissioned by a major religious institution in 500 years.


According to a group of more than 200 monks at Saint John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minn., five centuries was too long to wait for an artistic reinterpretation of the Bible.

How monumental is the task?

It’s “one of the extraordinary undertakings of our time,” according to Smithsonian magazine.

“I think we should look upon it as something on the scale of a huge building project, as it would have been in the Middle Ages. Similar things, I suppose, are the Sistine Chapel, the building of Hadrian’s Wall, or these enormous artistic enterprises of the past,” Christopher de Hamel, manuscript scholar at Cambridge University in England, told the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Project coordinators say all Christian groups, particularly Catholics, lost something when the making of handwritten Bibles took a sabbatical.

“This project comes at a time when people don’t necessarily connect the Catholic faith with Bible reading,” said the Rev. Eric Hollas, director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at Saint John’s. “It’s important for us to make the point that the Bible is at the core of the Catholic heritage.”

Using close to 250 pieces of calf skin for parchment; traditional pens adapted from the feathers of swan, goose or turkey; and centuries-old pigment mixed with egg yolk, Jackson’s final 1,100-page Bible will dwarf most versions, measuring 15 7/8 inches wide by 24 1/2 inches tall.

Yet Jackson and his team benefit from state-of-the-art technology beyond the imagination of their 15th-century predecessors. The calligraphy filling the pages of the Saint John’s Bible is designed on computers for planning purposes, using fonts approximating Jackson’s handwriting.

The text, the New Revised Standard Version, is sent via computer from Minnesota to Jackson’s workshop in Great Britain. He uses the electronic aids to orchestrate each page before setting pen to parchment.


While printed Bibles allow greater accessibility, they sorely lack the elegance of their handwritten counterparts, Hollas said. Elaborate calligraphy forces Bible browsers to stop and consider the meaning of the text.

“Most appealing is the sense of importance of each and every word,” Hollas said.

In Jackson’s native Great Britain, where he and a team of experts have constructed a “scriptorium” to complete the project, the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has given his approval.

“This project not only revives the ancient tradition of the church sponsoring creative arts, it also offers an insight into that lost skill of patient and prayerful reading,” said Williams in a statement. “We tend to read greedily and hastily, as we do so many other things. This beautiful text shows us a better way.”

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Jackson, a former scribe to Queen Elizabeth, would not be interviewed while working on the project. But in a documentary, he told the BBC the art of calligraphy is “a rather peculiar thing” of expressing emotions in a world where such feelings are kept to a minimum in public life.

“So when you really mean something, when you want to say, `We think you’ve achieved something brilliant,’ you don’t type it out on a piece of paper and send it to them, you ask somebody like me to put those words into such a form so that it looks like you really mean what you’re saying,” he said.

Before the commission, the calligrapher journeyed frequently to Saint John’s for lectures and workshops, where his lifelong dream of producing a handwritten Bible found willing ears.


The monks approved the project nearly seven years ago, describing it as a way for the university to usher in the new millennium. Hollas calls it “a project in search of a reason to do it.”

Incorporating imagery from both Eastern and Western perspectives, Jackson’s hand-painted illustrations, or “illuminations,” include themes such as “the genealogy of Christ,” which illustrates the common Abrahamic ancestry of Jews, Muslims and Christians.

An illumination from the book of Psalms features the shadows of New York City’s Twin Towers, emphasizing the message that humanity must love its way out of the problems posed by the threat of global terrorism.

Though the monks coached Jackson, who shies away from describing himself as religious, on Catholic interpretations of the Bible, Hollas said the artist surprised the committee with some of his own insightful spiritual interpretations.

“I don’t know what I expected, but I was certainly amazed to see how his art could draw out meaning from the text,” Hollas said. “It has this mystical quality you don’t get from print.”

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The Bible includes manuscripts chronicling the Gospels and Acts, Pentateuch, Historical Books, Prophets, Wisdom Literature, Psalms, and Letters and Revelations.


The original artwork from several of the books began a worldwide tour last spring, starting at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in April 2005. Beginning Jan. 21, the artwork went on display in Omaha, Neb., and London, with those exhibits ending April 16. Future stops include Tyler, Texas (June 8-Sept. 3), Washington (Oct. 6-Dec. 15), New York City (May 18-July 27, 2007), Phoenix (Dec. 21, 2007-March 7, 2008) and Mobile, Ala. (Oct. 10, 2008-April 10, 2009).

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“It certainly can be appreciated as religious text, but it also presents a wonderful demonstration of the arts of calligraphy and bookmaking,” said Amy Rummel, spokesperson for the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, where 1,700 people viewed close to 100 displayed pages of the Bible.

While Christian booksellers now carry print copies of the first two manuscripts, Hollas says the “captivating” quality of the originals is not easily transferred to reproductions.

“Americans should see this Bible because it creates a striking connection between the individual, the art and the Bible,” Hollas said. “The world needs a 21st-century Bible to inspire our time. We think every generation needs to do this.”

MO/PH END RNS

Editors: To obtain photos of Donald Jackson and the Saint John’s Bible, including the presentation of the Bible facsimile to Pope John Paul II, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

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