Exhibit

The British Library is currently presenting Sacred, an exhibition featuring some of the world's greatest and most exquisite Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy books.
Images of some of the manuscripts in this exhibit are presented on-line.

http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/sacred/homepage.html

Beautiful. Thanks for the link.

This spring I went to the Smithsonian exhibit here in Washington, DC, on early Biblical manuscripts. I was floored at how beautiful they were, even after seeing pictures and reading about some of them for many years.

You do realize you're causing me to drool all over my computer . . .

The exhibit of Biblical manuscripts at the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery was called
In the Beginning: Bibles Before the Year 1000. It ran from October 21, 2006 to January 7, 2007. It was quite a spectacular exhibit.

There is an on-line version of the exhibit. It includes an audio commentary (an abridged version of the audio guide for the exhibit) and shows some of the manuscripts.

http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/online/ITB/html/introduction.htm

The exhibition Catalog, In the Beginning: Bibles Before the Year 1000 by Michelle Brown is extremely well done and beautifully illustrated.

The thing that astonished me about the Smithsonian exhibit was the sheer number of people that came out to see the manuscripts, even with the relatively light advertising for the showing. We waited 45 minutes in line to get in, and the lines were that long all day.

I was lucky enough to see the BL exhibit, and it was truly fantastic. All those amazing books in one room! The Codex Sinaiticus alone would have been worth the trip -- when I visited St. Catherine's recently, the monk librarian was lamenting its absence from his own library, and it simply sent shivers up my spine at the BL.

I was at a tour of the Papyrus Museum in Vienna last week. At the end the director went and got a papyrus someone particularly wanted to see. OK. It was two tiny scraps sealed in glass, but I had it in my hand and could really see it up close.

The interesting feature was that it was written in Greek, but the name of God had been left out and entered by another hand in Hebrew.

I wish both my Greek and Hebrew were better, so that I could have actually read some of the things on display. My next project is to copy out the first few verses of Luke 2 in Greek capitals and go back with that and see if then I can read the large Parchment manuscript on display.

BTW there will be a new exhibit there soon on one of the Egyptian monastaries. That will run through mid-November. Besides showing many of the manuscripts the National Bibliothek has from that monastary, there will be information on life there.

>>My next project is to copy out the first few verses of Luke 2 in Greek capitals and go back with that and see if then I can read the large Parchment manuscript on display.

Yes! It worked. I was there with a friend who reads Hebrew, and we had a great time.

...but I had it in my hand and could really see it up close.

***jealous****

It was amazingly thrilling. I have got to get back to see the new exhibit, but we're off to Iceland on Thursday. I understand that some of the saga manuscripts are on display in Rekjavik. I'll report back in three week.

The Chester Beaty has just reopened its first floor (it was closed for a year or so) Its collection is unrivaled http://www.cbl.ie/Collections/Introduction.aspx