The St. John's Bible

From an article by Jason Byassee, pastor of Shady Grove United Methodist Church in Providence. North Carolina. and a Ph.D. candidate in theology at Duke Divinity School. This article appeared in The Christian Century, August 9, 2005, pp.20-23. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation; used by permission.
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The St. John’s Bible is being produced by dozens of scholars and artists who have been laboring for almost a decade, at a cost of about $4 million, to create the first handwritten, illuminated Bible in five centuries. Chief calligrapher Donald Jackson and his colleagues are producing something priceless -- a Bible beautiful enough to make readers want to keep reading, and even want to praise God.
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The project began with a decision by St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, to commemorate the second millennium of Christ’s birth in grand fashion. The Benedictine order has long been devoted to manuscript preservation. In the Middle Ages the order copied precious books that would otherwise have been lost.
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St. John’s decided to produce a Bible with all the trappings of the greatest editions of the past -- using gold leaf, calfskin pages, quill pens and so on. But the project would also draw on modern resources, such as computers to plot out the spacing and provide schemata for the calligraphers. To oversee the work they tapped Jackson, chief calligrapher for the queen of England, whose life ambition was to produce a handwritten Bible. St. John’s allowed him to choose a team of assistants. A committee of theologians and biblical scholars directs the project from Minnesota.
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The St. John’s Bible has been called "America’s Book of Kells" by Newsweek. It may be far more important than that, for this text is meant not only to be beautiful, like a museum object, but to inspire a renewed love of scripture. It is meant to be read at home and used in liturgy.