|
To speak of The Saint John’s Bible: Gospels and Acts as a printed book, we might ask how it can be used. Since it is quite large (10 x 15 inches), it is quite suitable for public display. But for purposes of public reading, I would find the text a bit too small. This is because this facsimile is only two-thirds of the original. It is fine for personal lectio divina even for old eyes like mine, but I would not advise anyone to try to decipher the tiny, tiny footnotes without a magnifying glass. These notes were included only because the biblical translation that was used, the Revised Standard Version, requires them for all printed versions.
Someone who has not studied the whole project in Calderhead’s Illuminating the Word may be puzzled at what appear to be faint smudges on the text. In fact, these are not smudges at all but the writing on the obverse side of the page. This is because the original is not written on paper, but fine leather (vellum) pages, which are slightly translucent. Another startling detail in this volume appears in the text of Mark 3: 21: a little bird flying with a line of text in its mouth, a line which the scribe left out.
That is a charming little joke, but it is also a reminder of what an unforgiving process it is to write on vellum. You can erase as you go along, but when you have spent seven hours writing a page, and you see you have left out a line, you can either throw out the whole skin, jump off a bridge or devise a clever little scheme like this one. To me, the important thing about this mistake is that it tells us that this book was written by human beings. Of course, all books are written thus, but there is something quintessentially human about writing a book by hand. In that sense, The Saint John’s Bible does us the great favor of repeating one of the great human achievements.
Not only do we have a facsimile of the finished product of this process in The Gospels and Acts, but with Christopher Calderhead’s book, we also have an excellent record of the process itself. Anybody who wants to know what it is like to actually produce a handwritten Bible will surely want to read this book. I was vaguely aware of some of the skills and techniques required, but Calderhead takes you into the details in a way that you almost feel you are there. Sometimes we almost feel we are getting under Jackson’s feet, but it is worth his wrath to see what is going on.
Take the matter of the vellum. To put it in quantitative terms, it took 1050 calfskins to make this book. These are not just ordinary calfskins, of which there are plenty at any stockyard, but first quality skins. Apparently, there is only one firm left in existence that could provide Jackson with enough good vellum, namely, the same one that provides the British Parliament. But Jackson had to inspect every skin because only one out of three was large enough and sufficiently unblemished to suit his standards. Yet even with the best skins, this is still organic material and full of irregularities. After all, the scribes of the Book of Kells had to work around a few wormholes.
It is also the best handwriting material in the world. I myself have never written on vellum but it must be a quasi-mystical experience to work with a surface that provides just the right bite for your pen, absorbs the ink uniformly and permits you to make clean thicks and thins. In order to come up with such a material, the Jackson team has to spend endless hours soaking, scraping and generally coddling the vellum. And they have to be especially careful when they are laying all kind of paint and gold leaf on it for the illustrations. One can imagine how easily things can go wrong.
A lot can go wrong with the pens, too. These people write with quills, not out of antiquarian stubbornness but because apparently quills are simply the best pens there are and have ever been. Obviously, a quill takes a lot of maintenance. The scribe has to cut the nib angles just so and keep them trimmed. Most of all, one has to start with the right kind of quill, namely, the lead feather of a turkey or goose. In this case, Jackson was able to acquire as many good wild goose feathers as he wanted in Minnesota, which is full of the Canadian variety.
Speaking of Minnesota flora and fauna, The Saint John’s Bible also features insects from the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Every now and then we find them adorning the margins of the text, and sometimes they figure in the illuminations as well. They are beautifully painted by Chris Tomlin, a specialist in this kind of art. One might ask, though, what beetles and grasshoppers are doing in a Bible? The answer is that this is nothing new, for medieval Bibles were full of fanciful and playful creatures. Apparently, the purpose was to keep the pages sufficiently lively to the eye. The handwritten Saint John’s Bible is thus hymn to God’s creation.
|
