Pre-Modern Bibles: From the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Complutensian Polyglot Bible

The largest collection of original and facsimile biblical manuscripts ever assembled in West Texas.

The exhibition illustrates the evolution of the physical Bible, the development of scholarly methods of biblical analysis, and the refinement of multiple ways to convey biblical learning, often to people of limited literacy. The highlight of the exhibition is the creation, in Spain at the end of the Middle Ages, of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible with its elaborate multilingual printing press fonts.

The Complutensian Polyglot can be traced back to a university in north-central Spain, the Universidad Complutense at Alcalá de Henares which relocated to Madrid during the 19th century.

The first part of the exhibit will attempt to show how the material Bible came to exist as it does. The second part of the exhibit attempts to reveal not only the sophistication of pre-modern biblical scholarship but also how it relates to academic traditions today.

This renaissance university was the creation of Cardinal Francisco Ximénes (1436‒1517), a former hermit who became the chaplain of Christopher Columbus's patroness Queen Isabella of Castille. Ximénes was a statesmen and reformer who believed that a proper understanding of the Bible could lead to a reformed Christianity. To that end he diverted whatever funds he could gather into his new university whose major project would be to create an edition of the Bible that, thanks to the new printing press technology, could make the word of God available in all the major biblical source languages.

The final section of the exhibition will be devoted to the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, whose pages are laid out to include bible passages in four columns in different languages: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Aramaic. The Complutensian Polyglot Bible will be presented as the culmination of a long tradition of themes related to multilingual, cross cultural, biblical scholarship, which will and demonstrate how the future was transformed by the technology of the printing press.

The exhibition features a variety of bibles and their colorful illuminations that focus on biblical scholarship over 1,000 years and its relationship to the development of western civilization in the middle ages.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.