Most of the biblical books were written in the 8th-6th centuries BC. e. More than three billion people consider it sacred. It has been called the best-selling book of all time, with approximately 6,000,000,000 copies of the Bible printed in whole or in part in more than 2,400 languages.
One of the oldest publications in the world is 1500 years old. This Bible was found in 2010 in Turkey. The book was written in Aramaic. The cost of the book, the pages of which are made of real leather, is about 40 million Turkish liras. The cost of even photocopied pages is high - about 3 million.
It is possible that this book is a copy of the famous Gospel of Barnabas, which was banned at one time. The oldest copies of it were created in the sixteenth century, that is, they are almost three times newer than this book.
Another ancient Bible was found a year later by a Bedouin in northern Jordan, in a cave in a remote desert area. The discovery was made in 2005-2007, but the general public became aware of the discovery, which, according to scientists, would change the entire biblical history, only in the spring of 2011.
By chance, a flood in one of the caves located in northern Jordan revealed two secret niches in which there were seventy lead books connected to each other with wire.
Each ancient manuscript, engraved on lead plates, consists of 5-15 pages the size of a regular credit card.
Metal studies have shown that the artifact may date back to the first century AD. It is believed that this ancient Christian relic was created in 70 AD. e., the first Christians to hastily leave Jerusalem after its fall.
Scientists also believe that the manuscripts constitute the Book of Revelation mentioned in the Bible and are proof of the non-Jewish origin of Christianity. This is evidenced by the symbols depicted on the covers: seven-candle lamps (Jews were strictly forbidden to depict them) and crosses related to Roman culture.
Part of the text of the oldest Bible, written in Hebrew using hieroglyphs, has already been deciphered. It talks about the Messiah, the Crucifixion and the Ascension.
The Bible is an ancient book, composed of texts written long before the beginning of our era, as well as those that appeared immediately after the crucifixion of Christ. However, its antiquity is very doubtful.
If we are not talking about individual texts, but about relatively complete copies of the Bible and the oldest ones that have come down to us, then the situation looks like this.
The oldest manuscript of the Bible is the Vatican, so called because it was discovered in the Vatican. This happened in the second half of the 15th century, and no one knows where it came from. Next comes the Alexandrian Bible, the history of which can only be traced back to the first half of the 17th century, when it was received as a gift from the Alexandrian Church by the English king Charles I. The Alexandrian period of life of this manuscript is unknown. And, finally, the Sinai manuscript, which “surfaced” only in the 19th century.
The above three handwritten Bibles are considered the oldest, because they were allegedly written in the 4th century. However, there are no reliable facts indicating this. Before the 15th century, their fate cannot be traced, and where and how they were stored for more than a thousand years is a mystery.
Even more interesting is the history of the first printed editions of the Bible.
In the mid-15th century, Johannes Gutenberg (d. 1468) invented the printing press, and the first book to come out of his press was the Bible. Some of its copies, printed by Gutenberg, have survived to this day and are now kept in various museums around the world. Let's see what we know about them.
The oldest book, based on references in sources, is kept in the British Museum. Made from parchment. It came to Great Britain in 1775 from France. It is known that in France it was owned by the collector of ancient books, Girardot de Prefont, who bought it from one of the French collectors. He, in turn, purchased this Bible in 1768 from a monastery in Mainz, which did not hesitate to sell a holy book, and such an ancient one at that. In the monastery, traces of its presence are found in the inventory of 1728, which notes that the Bible was donated to the monastery by a certain Gutenberg Faust. There are no further mentions of this book and nothing is known about its fate before 1728. It is also unknown whether Faust indicated in the inventory and the first printer Johannes Gutenberg are the same person.
There is information that Johann Gutenberg opened a printing house with the money of a certain Johann Faust, with whom they shared the income from the profits. Later they quarreled, had a lawsuit and separated. It’s hard to say how much you can trust Gutenberg’s biography, which describes this - all this happened a long time ago. But now we see that in the papers of the monastery there is someone presented who combines the names belonging to the two aforementioned companions. This fact has given historians grounds to claim that we are talking about a gift from Johannes Gutenberg himself. But the history of the first printer becomes vague and unreliable.
Portrait of Johannes Gutenberg, made by an unknown artist in the 17th century, that is, one and a half or two centuries after his death.
The next oldest copy of the Gutenberg Bible, a parchment one, is located in one of the libraries in Berlin. It is mentioned in the book "An Essay on the History of the Royal Library in Berlin", published in 1752. What happened to this Bible before this date is unknown.
The third copy has been kept in the Library of Congress in Washington since 1930. This book is also printed on parchment. The German antiquities enthusiast Volbert, who sold it, in turn, four years earlier, bought this Bible from the Abbey of St. Paul in Southern Austria. Before that, it belonged to one of the monasteries built by the Benedictines in southern Germany. In 1809, the monks, fleeing the invasion of Napoleonic troops and taking the Bible with them, fled first to Switzerland and then to Austria. It is assumed that it was Folbert who acquired it, although what happened to it for more than a hundred years up to this point is unknown. As for the storage of this Bible by the Benedictines, the abbot of their monastery, Martin Herbert, mentioned it in 1767. Until this date, its history is not visible.
Another Bible, already printed on paper, is kept in the National Library in Paris. In 1763, the book “An Instructive Bibliography or Treatise on the Knowledge of Rare and Exceptional Books” was published. Its author, bibliographer and publisher Guillaume François Debourg, described this Bible by calling it "Mazarin's" because he found it in the library of Cardinal and First Minister of France Mazarin. However, the famous bibliographer Gabriel Naudet, who created the library at the request of Mazarin and was its librarian almost until his death, does not mention the Gutenberg Bible in any of his treatises. So it is not possible to trace the fate of the “Mazarin” Bible before 1763.
The remaining copies of the Gutenberg Bible became known even later. At the moment, their number has grown to almost fifty, but they have no history earlier than the second half of the 18th century, and in many cases even later! The elegant marroquin bindings for a number of copies were made in the same 18th century.
That Bibles printed by Gutenberg appeared so late is not surprising. Considering that in the 18th century there was a sharp increase in interest in antiques, the sale of items of which turned into a profitable business, “finds” of ancient books were quite natural. Moreover, it was not difficult to pass off a modern item as an ancient one back then: art criticism and related technologies designed to distinguish a fake from a real item did not yet exist. What can we say if even in the 20th century it was not possible to cope with the flow of counterfeit products.
Gutenberg's biography is vague, and the history of his Bibles unreliable. In this regard, the traditional dating of the first printed books to the mid-15th century is questionable.
Moreover, in Russian history, the printed Bible appeared almost a century and a half later! Why is there such a lag, after all? Russian state was in Europe, and not on the other side of the globe? For comparison: thirty to forty years after the invention of Gutenberg printing presses worked in many large European cities. And only a century after this, in 1581, the Ostrog Bible of Ivan Fedorov was published. This picture of the spread of new knowledge is implausible and shows the fictionality of Western European history.
Title page of the Gutenberg Bible from the British Museum. Material - paper. The text begins immediately with holy scripture. None title page with names and dates no.
The Gutenberg Bible is the most expensive book in the world. Recently one of her copies sold for £1,200,000. Naturally, with such a “price of the issue”, no one is interested in the present, that is, the later history of its appearance. The older, the better. And the Bible is obviously no exception here.
“The grass dries up, the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever,” wrote the prophet Isaiah.This is a quote from the Bible, the Book, which is also called the Word of God. According to it, God never left His creation without His word. This word has always been with humanity: in the form of cuneiform on stones, hieroglyphs on papyrus, letters on parchment, and even in the form of the Man Jesus Christ, Who Himself is the Word made flesh. Probably everyone understands why people need the Word of God? Man has always thirsted and thirsts to know the “three eternal questions”: where we come from, why and where we are going. There is only one truly authoritative answer to them - the answer of the Creator of all that exists, and it is found in the Bible.
At the same time, supporters of other religions are trying to prove that their sacred scriptures are true, because they also explain in their own way the world. To support their words, they point to the supposedly very ancient age their books. Although antiquity is not synonymous with truth, it seems to many a convincing argument. The antiquity of pagan books, as well as some similarity of plots, allowed some philosophers to even put forward the hypothesis that the Bible is supposedly secondary in relation to ancient pagan books, and that, supposedly, Biblical Christianity borrowed its religious system from the more ancient pagan religions that preceded it. Moreover, the supporters of this hypothesis are not only atheists, but also people who call themselves Christians. An example is the Orthodox writer Alexander Men, who defended the theory of evolution not only in the development of earthly life, but also in religions. But is the Bible really younger than pagan sacred traditions?
The first book of the Bible is the book of Genesis, and therefore the degree of antiquity of the Bible, and therefore the religion of Christians itself, depends on the determination of its age. If we accept the point of view that the entire Pentateuch was written by Moses, and this dates back to 1600 BC, then, of course, it will be true that the Bible is younger than many Hindu, Babylonian, Egyptian and Tibetan records. However, the authorship of the entire book of Genesis by Moses alone has long been disputed. There was even a version that the authors of the book were 4 people, designated by the letters J, E, D and P. In general, the developers of this version were deeply mistaken, attributing the authorship to some nomads who lived much later than Moses himself.
However, in the New Testament the book of Genesis is mentioned 200 times, but notice that it is never said that the author of any phrase is Moses! In general, the majority modern people, and sometimes even Christians, for some reason thinks that the prophet Moses began to write the Pentateuch only on Mount Sinai, where he also received the Tablets with the 10 Commandments. But that's not true! The first time the command to make a record in a certain Book is in the book of Exodus: “And the Lord said to Moses: Write this in a book for a memorial...” (Ex. 17:14). What preceded this? Having crossed the parted Red Sea on dry land, the Israelites entered the Sinai Peninsula and were attacked by the Amalekites in the area of Rifidim. God gave Israel victory, and this is what the Lord commanded Moses to write down in the Book. Therefore, THE BOOK ALREADY EXISTED!
Who was the author of Genesis? - you ask. In a Christian way, you can immediately answer without hesitation: the Holy Spirit, that is, God Himself, inspired the scribe-prophet to record His words in the Book. Therefore, the only question is who were these first prophets who wrote down the First Book of the Bible.
The Pentateuch, indeed, was all written down by Moses. He was an eyewitness and participant in the events that he described in four books. The events of the book of Genesis tell about what happened long before his birth, including long before anyone else’s birth. The very word “being”, conveying Greek word“Genesis” means, by the way, “genealogy”, “genealogical record”, that is, something clearly related to history, to the past. The Gospel of Matthew begins with this very word: “The Genesis of Jesus Christ...” Therefore, it is logical to assume that Moses simply collected, edited and rewrote what had already been written down by someone before him, accompanying it all with his own comments! Naturally, such work was carried out by him through inspiration from above.
God has never left humanity ignorant of Himself. Man first had direct communication with his Creator in the Garden of Eden, and was quite likely able to speak with God personally after his fall. However, gradually, moving further and further away from God, building their own earthly civilization, sometimes turning to dark forces, Satan, man has lost the ability to communicate directly with the Lord. New generations of children and grandchildren grew up and needed to pass on information about their origins. It was then that the need arose to tell descendants about God and His creation of the world, about the path of salvation from sin and death. In antediluvian times (before the Great Flood), people lived 800-900 years, and this allowed us to limit ourselves at first to oral tradition alone. But in the book of Genesis we read about the development of civilization among the ancient descendants of Cain, about the development of science, music, and poetry among them. Why, in fact, did we decide that they did not have writing? The advantages of writing are its durability, precision of wording, the ability to store, accumulate, compare, view and send over distances in large quantities without the need to memorize. With the development of civilization, it is unthinkable to talk about the absence of writing. There was writing. And so, first one, then another person, then another and another, wrote down what God said and did in their lives, not forgetting to reproduce or save the records of their predecessors. Signatures are usually placed at the end of the letter. In the book of Genesis they are also there, several of them: 2:4, 5:1, 10:1-32, 37:2. These tedious genealogies, which atheists mocked so much, are the SIGNATURES of the patriarchs who wrote the Word of God in ancient times!
However, there is no signature in the first (1:1-2:3), clearly finished, passage. And indeed, who could be an eyewitness to the creation of everything that exists: the sky, earth, stars, plants and animals? Who could write the first chapter so accurately and clearly that it has not yet been refuted by any science? Only God Himself! God! Just as the Tablets of the Covenant were inscribed on Mount Sinai “by the hand of the Lord Himself,” so the account of the creation of the world was written by God and then given to Adam. The first chapter is a record of God Himself.
Adam's records speak only of what he himself witnessed. His records end at Genesis 5:1. This, by the way, explains why in the 1st and 2nd chapters in the original God is called differently. In the first passage, God Himself writes about Himself, and in the second narrative, the man Adam writes His name. This also explains the repetition of the events of creation in chapters 1 and 2. Adam, outlining the history of the origin of all living things, including his wife Eve, did not dare to destroy the previous words of God Himself. Two complementary views of creation remain in Scripture. All subsequent scribes and prophets of the Bible did the same - they left records of previous authors word for word, sign for sign. This is how the Word of God was preserved for centuries. The first Bible consisted of only five chapters, but it was already the Bible - the Word of God. It already contained the news of the One who would be born of the “seed of the woman” and bruise the serpent’s head.
Who was the second author of the Bible after Adam? Perhaps it was his son Seth, but it is possible that it was one of his great-grandsons, because Adam himself lived 930 years. However, we know for certain that the last scribe and keeper of the Word of God before the Flood was Noah. He not only preserved the Holy Scriptures inherited from his predecessors, but also turned out to be the first post-flood patriarch to have this Word, because all people were destroyed. From him the Bible, supplemented by the story of the Flood, passed to Shem, from him to Eber, Peleg, and, ultimately, to Abraham. Not all of them wrote anything into the Bible, but they may simply have been the guardians and copyists of the true Word of God, the people responsible for passing the Bible on to the next patriarch. It is likely that some copies of this Bible were distributed throughout the world of that time, preached and copied by everyone. In this regard, the king of Salem Melchizedek, who was at the same time the priest of the true God, to whom the patriarch Abraham brought tithes, is noteworthy. This suggests that people in ancient times who believed in the true God always existed, had true concepts about God, about the creation of the world, and even served Him.
The last signature in Genesis comes before 37:2. Then there is a story about the sons of Jacob, about the resettlement of the Israelis to Egypt, that is, about the history of the emergence of the Israeli people. A book with such content could well have existed among those ancient Jews who were to be led out of Egyptian captivity by Moses.
Moses, as a direct descendant of Abraham (this is again reported by the genealogy), who studied and lived in the court of Pharaoh in complete safety, had and kept these Sacred Records of his ancestors. They, apparently, were scattered, written on papyri or some other short-lived material. It was these that Moses systematized, rewriting and combining them into a single Book, for which he was allotted 40 years of life in the desert, when he was hiding from Pharaoh. This book was later called the FIRST BOOK OF MOSES.
After Moses, the Bible passed to Joshua, about whom we read about the assignment to write down in I.Joshua. 1:7-8. Then the Israelite judges, the prophet Samuel, kings and priests also kept and continued to record the Word of God. By the time of Jesus Christ, the Old Testament was known in Greek translation(called the Septuagint) far beyond the borders of Judea. So the ancient Bible has reached our days absolutely undistorted, which is confirmed by data archaeological finds. For example, ancient Qumran papyri containing records of the books of the Old Testament, found in 1947, confirmed that the text had not undergone any distortion for 2,000 years.
During the coming to earth of God Himself, who became man, Jesus Christ, the authority of the Bible was fully confirmed by Him, and the Bible was given to Christians as the “faithful prophetic Word.” Therefore, to summarize the above, we Christians have every right claim that we are the heirs and custodians of Records that trace their origins back to the very creation of the world! The Bible is the oldest book in the world, the most unique, harmonious, consistent, internally consistent and the truest!
The writings of people of other religions, alas, are only weak shadows and echoes of this Book. It’s like information from a “damaged phone”, the output being something different from what was input. We have already said that the people of antiquity were aware of the true faith in the true God. All nations descended from the same people - Noah and his sons, who had a complete understanding of the true state of things in the world. After the Babylonian pandemonium, and this was a rebellion of the new population of the Earth against God, different peoples, which have scattered across the planet. Naturally, they lost their common language; they could not or did not want to read the Sacred texts in the original, or perhaps they deliberately refused. Perhaps, after acquiring their national languages and dispersing, they began to recreate the previous Bible stories from memory, coloring them with their own fantasies and plots, supplemented and distorted by subsequent generations. It is also likely that the forces of darkness - the devil - will intervene through his supporters in the clergy. Revelations, dreams and signs inspired by Satan could be added to the true Word of God and thus distort the true face of God's original religion. As a result, what we have today is that all the religious texts of the world in describing some ancient events are often very similar, being in essence either a more or less exact copy of the Original. Of course, some distorted versions of the Original look very beautiful and logical, but still, for the correct resolution of the main issues of life and death, the guidance of only a trustworthy, verified Original - the Christian Bible - is necessary.
Supporters of pagan religions, such as Hindus, say that their scriptures are true because they are the most ancient. For Christians, this, of course, is a weak argument, because Satan, the opponent of true faith in God, is also a very ancient person, and could well have been the author of very ancient, alternative to the Divine Bible, writings. But in fact, it turns out that, indeed, the most ancient Book is also the truest! This is the Bible! But it is true not because it is older than other books, but because it originates from God Himself - the Creator of everything visible and invisible. To know it and live according to it means to go to the true God and to the eternal life given by Him through Jesus Christ!
Muslim: The Bible has been changed many times, so it cannot be considered the original Scripture revealed to Moses, Jesus and other prophets. What evidence do you have that the Bible is reliable and trustworthy?
Many years ago, a young Muslim woman asked me, “Has the Bible ever changed?” I told her: “Of course not.” To this she said: “But doesn’t she teach that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?” I confirmed: “Teaches again and again.” In response, she stated: “Then she had to change.”
Any Christian who reads the works of Muslim authors will be surprised to find that the arguments put forward in them to refute the authenticity of the Bible texts are often extremely weak and unconvincing. This happens for one reason only - Muslims do not believe in the complete preservation of the Bible, not because they have found adequate evidence that changes were made to its text, but because they must deny its authenticity in order to support their conviction that The Qur'an is the Word of God. Two Books that conflict with each other cannot both be the Word of God. When Muslims discovered in the early centuries of Islamic history that the Bible clearly and definitively set forth basic Christian doctrines, such as the divinity of Jesus Christ and His atonement, they could no longer approach it objectively. Since then, they have striven to prove what is in fact nothing more than an assumption - the Bible must have changed! main reason Muslims' disbelief in the authenticity of the Bible lies in the lack of choice: they cannot believe the Bible if they must be faithful to the Koran.
It is important to know the evidence for the unchangeability of the biblical texts, especially the fact that there are authentic manuscripts that predate the birth of Islam by many centuries and prove that the Bible we hold in our hands today is the same Bible that the Jews and early Christians revered as their only Holy Scripture .
Three major manuscript copies of the Bible
There are still three major manuscript copies of the Bible in Greek (including the Septuagint (Old Testament) and original text New Testament), several centuries ahead of the appearance of the Koran.
1. Alexandrian list. This volume, written in the 5th century AD. BC, contains the entire Bible with the exception of a few lost leaves from the New Testament (namely: Matt. 1:1–25:6, John 6:50–8:52 and 2 Cor. 4:13–12:6). It does not include anything that is not part of the modern Bible. The manuscript is kept in the British Museum in London.
2. Sinai list. This is very ancient manuscript, dating from the end of the 4th century. It contains the entire New Testament and a significant part of the Old Testament. For centuries it was kept in the St. Petersburg Imperial Library and was sold to the British government for one hundred thousand pounds. Currently also in the British Museum.
3. Vatican list. This is probably the oldest surviving complete manuscript copy of the Bible. It dates from the 4th century and is kept in the Vatican Library in Rome. The last part of the New Testament (Heb. 9:14 to the end of Revelation) is written in a different hand than the rest of the manuscript (probably the scribe who began copying the text for some reason was unable to complete the work).
These manuscripts convincingly prove that the only Scripture given to the Church at least two centuries before the birth of Muhammad is the Old and New Testaments known to us.
Other Evidence of the Bible's Authenticity
There are many other pieces of evidence that prove the authenticity of the Bible, going back several centuries to the time of the birth of Islam. The following points should be highlighted in discussions with Muslims.
1. Masoretic texts. Ancient biblical manuscripts belong not only to Christians, but also to Jews, who revere the Old Testament as the only Scripture given to them. These are texts written in Hebrew, the original language of the Old Testament, and are at least a thousand years old. These are known as the Masoretic Texts.
2. Dead Sea Scrolls. First discovered in the caves of the Qumran desert near the Dead Sea in Israel, these scrolls contain many passages from the Old Testament in Hebrew and date back to the 2nd century BC. e. They include two copies of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, containing prophecies about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (see: Is. 53: 1-12), about His immaculate conception(see: Is. 7:14) and about His divinity (see: Is. 9:6–7).
3. Septuagint. The Septuagint is the name of the first translation into Greek of the Old Testament. It was copied in the 2nd century BC. e. and contains all the main prophecies about the coming of the Messiah, the statement that He is the Son of God (see: Ps. 2:7; 1 Chron. 17:11–14), and some details of His suffering and atoning death (see: Ps. 21:68). The early Church made extensive use of the Septuagint.
4. Vulgate. In the 4th century AD e. The Roman Catholic Church translated the entire Bible into Latin language, using the Septuagint and ancient Greek manuscript copies of the New Testament. This list is known as the Vulgate and contains all the Books of the Old and New Testaments as we know them. This translation has been approved as the standard text for the Roman Catholic Church.
5. Excerpts from the Greek text of the New Testament. There are many fragments of the original Greek text of the New Testament surviving from the 2nd century AD. e. All of them, collected together, constitute the content of the New Testament in the form that we know. It is very interesting to compare the abundance of this evidence with the texts of ancient Greek and Roman classical works, many of which were written no earlier than a thousand years after Christ. Truly there is no other literary works of the same era, which would have as much manuscript evidence as the Greek text of the New Testament.
Most importantly, and this should be emphasized when talking to Muslims, there is no source suggesting that the Bible misrepresents the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. All apocryphal books rejected by the Church, at least in general outline, follow the same narrative line as the New Testament manuscripts. There is certainly no historical evidence to suggest that Jesus was in fact the prophet of Islam, as the Quran makes Him out to be.
Finally, it would be a good idea to ask Muslims to bring historical facts to support their claim that the Bible we read is a modified Bible. What was it like originally? What was changed about it that made it the Book we have today? Who made these changes? When was this done? Ask your interlocutor to name real people who he suggests corrupted the Bible, the time it occurred, the specific changes made to the original text of the Bible, and you will find that he is unable to do so because such evidence simply does not exist. Always remember that the vicious attack of Muslims is not based on the scientific evidence they have, but on assumptions. The Bible, in their opinion, had to change since it contradicts the Koran. Unfortunately, too often Muslims approach the Bible not with a desire to understand its teachings, but solely with the goal of finding errors in it that justify their prejudice against it.
John Gilchrist "God or Prophet?"
The Bible was included in the Guinness Book of Records as the book published in the largest circulation. Over the last 2 centuries alone, the total circulation of the Book of Books has amounted to 8 billion copies. The Bible has been translated into more than 2,500 languages and dialects around the world. On January 10, 1514, the world's first edition of the Bible in several languages was printed in Spain. Today we offer an overview of the most unusual publications.
The most expensive Bible
The most expensive Bible is the Gutenberg Bible. This book, published in 1456, became the starting point for the history of printing in Europe. Gutenberg printed 180 copies of the Bible: 45 on parchment and the rest on watermarked Italian paper. Only 21 books have survived to this day in their entirety. Various copies of it are estimated from $25 million to $35 million.
Smallest Bible
Scientists from the Israeli University of Technology “wrote” the entire text of the Old Testament on a silicon plate with an area of 0.5 square millimeters. Visually, this plate cannot be distinguished from a grain of sand. To write the text, a focused beam of helium ions was used, knocking out gold atoms from the gold coating of a silicon wafer. The process took only 1 hour. During this time, 300 thousand words in Hebrew were applied to a silicon wafer.
The biggest Bible
The world's largest Bible, 249 cm long (opened) and 110.5 cm high, was created in 1930 by American carpenter Louis Waynai. The Bible weighs 496 kg and contains 8,048 hand-printed pages. The text font is almost 3 cm high. The world's largest Bible was created using a homemade printing press. The project took 2 years and $10 thousand to implement. Currently, this book can be seen in the library of Abel Christian University, where it is stored in an oak case.
Bible in Zion
The Deutsch Publishing House (Russia) published the 6-volume “The Bible in Zion” - the only publication in the world. The uniqueness of the Bible lies in the fact that the volumes of the Holy Book are placed in the Zion - an ancient repository of church utensils, which is practically not found today. Zion is made of silver with gilding and bronze. Book volumes are inserted into niches covered with velvet. The weight of Zion with six volumes of the Bible is more than 40 kg. A special mechanism developed at the Vadim Wolfson Book Museum allows you to rotate the sion so as to take required volume.
IN Soviet time gaining access to religious literature was very difficult. In the 1960s, Korney Chukovsky requested permission to publish biblical legends adapted for children by famous writers. The project was allowed, but only on the condition that neither God nor Jews should be mentioned in the book. Chukovsky came up with the pseudonym “Magician Yahweh” for God. The Bible for children was published in 1968 by the publishing house "Children's Literature" and was called "The Tower of Babel and Other Ancient Legends", but was almost immediately destroyed. The next edition of the book took place only in 1990.
The Bible of Salvador Dali
In 1963, collector, millionaire and true Christian believer Giuseppe Albaretto invited Salvador Dali to illustrate a new edition of the Bible. Dali happily agreed. In 2 years, one of the most daring painters of the 20th century created his largest graphic cycle - 105 works in mixed media (gouache, watercolor, ink, pencil and pastel). It took another 3 years to transfer the drawings into lithography. After the release of the first edition, a special copy was released in Italy in white leather binding with gold. This book was presented to the Pope.
In 2013, the Bible with illustrations by Salvador Dali was released in Russian for the first time. The Russian text of the Holy Scriptures is provided by the publishing house of the Moscow Patriarchate.
It is worth noting that Dali was not alone in his creative impulse. Modern designers create.
Largest handwritten Bible
Sunil Joseph Bhopal from India created the world's largest handwritten Bible. Holy book consists of 16,000 pages and weighs 61 kg. An enthusiast copied all the verses of the New Testament by hand in 123 days.
We invite you to read the review.
