The Saint John's Bible on CBC Radio!

Jason Engel is a frequent author/commentator on this blog, former ambassador of the Saint John's Bible, as well as a good friend.  Recently, he did a fascinating interview on CBC Radio discussing my favorite 21st century illuminated bible and how it had the power to gather people from diverse situations around it.  You can check it out here.

Christmas Illuminated: Saint John's Bible 2016

Guest Post: Creation, Science, and Wisdom in The Saint John’s Bible

A hearty thank you to this guest post from Jonathan.  As you know, I am a huge supporter of the Saint John's Bible, so this post was especially interesting for me to read.

Over the past two years, I have shown the Heritage Edition of The Saint John’sBible to over 500 people in my student job in Archives & Special Collections at Santa Clara University. Whether my audience is church groups, undergraduates, or (more recently) the Catholic Biblical Association, people are invariably amazed by the beauty of this work.

The more I show The Saint John’s Bible, the more I notice two features of this landmark manuscript. First, I notice the way it creates conversations between different parts of Scripture. It creates these conversations by repeating symbols in different illuminations. Second, I notice how these conversations between images and text reflect contemporary themes in Catholic biblical interpretation.

Take, for example, the theme of creation. Ever since John Paul II kicked off the creation care movement, environmental stewardship has become a part of Catholic social teaching. Pope Francis especially emphasizes the presence of God in creation in Laudato Si’, in which he writes: “Soil, water, mountains: everything is, as it were, a caress of God” (84). How might we read Scripture in the light of this call to creation care?

One of the most famous illuminations in The Saint John’s Bible is the Creation frontispiece to Genesis. This illumination follows Genesis 1’s account of the seven days of creation. Each vertical column is one of the seven days.

God’s repeated refrain that His creation is good makes Genesis 1 a crucial text for contemporary Catholic creation care (e.g. in Laudato Si’ 65–67). Unlike Genesis 2, Genesis 1 situates the creation of humankind in the creation of the cosmos and all other living things. Although humans are special, we are a part of creation, and we are dependent on this planet Earth for our survival. Modern evolutionary theory similarly shows the continuity between humanity and all other living things.

Donald Jackson alludes to scientific research on humankind’s origins by including scientific imagery in this illumination. The chaos and formlessness, the tohu wabohu in Hebrew, are illuminated as disjointed fractal patterns. The fish in the sea are images of fossils. Most importantly, the creation of humankind is depicted using prehistoric cave art from Australia and Africa. This cave art reminds us of the scientific account of humanity’s origins as primates. Rather than any kind of “war” between science and religion, this illumination reflects the Catholic idea that scientific truth leads to God, and that the Book of Nature is just a crucial as the Book of Scripture (e.g. Laudato Si’ 6). The Saint John’s Bible brings the scientific account of creation into the theological account, not just as a theory that can be reconciled with Scripture but as another window into the glory of God’s creation.

When I show this illumination, one aspect that often puzzles viewers is the raven in the center. After all, would it not make more sense to include the dove from the flood? However, Noah did send a raven to find land before he sent the dove. Also, one legend about St. Benedict recalls him feeding ravens in the wilderness. (This Bible was sponsored by the Benedictines!) Other viewers have pointed out to me that the raven represents wisdom in many cultures, such as in indigenous American myths.

The raven appears in Wisdom quite literally in the frontispiece to Ecclesiastes in the Wisdom Books volume. Ecclesiastes chronicles the search of one man for order in the chaos of life. The raven at the center immediately connects this illumination to Creation. But rather than the order of the cosmos in Genesis 1, this image depicts a tension between order and chaos, just as the sage of Ecclesiastes seeks order in the chaos of life.

The most obvious chaos in this image is in the way the text relates to the art: the illumination is not neatly confined to a page, but is spread over two pages in an asymmetrical, borderless chaos. The word for “vanity” in Ecclesiastes’ famous line “all is vanity!” can also be translated as “breath” or “wind,” and here the wind has become a whirlwind reaching beyond the borders of the physical page. The butterfly wings, another motif in The Saint John’s Bible, are blown about seemingly unattached to any butterflies. And if we see the raven as an allusion to the flood, then perhaps we can see this illumination as reflecting the chaos of the flood, the heavy winds that Noah would have sheltered from in his ship.

Yet even here there are indications of order. We see small columns of rainbow patterns, another frequent motif in The Saint John’s Bible, a reference to God’s promise to Noah after the flood. In the upper right, Jackson included an astronomical diagram. This is reminiscent of the cycle of the moon in the Genesis 1 illumination, the structure of the cosmos as created by God.

Scholars who study the way the Bible depicts creation note that in the prophets, when humankind turns wicked, the earth groans under their sin. In this illumination of Ecclesiastes, the reverse happens: the torment and chaos faced by the sage are writ large in the cosmos. As Old Testament scholar Choon-Leong Seow writes of the sage: “the real world is full of inconsistencies and even flagrant contradictions that cannot be explained away. The world is not an orderly place, and meaning is not always discernable, despite the best human efforts” (Ecclesiastes, Anchor Bible Commentary, p. 41).

Although the sage does not always see the divine wisdom behind the chaos of life, he still upholds its value (7:11). The Saint John’s Bible responds to Ecclesiastes’ lament with an illumination depicting the House of Wisdom in Proverbs 8:22-9:6.

This illumination replicates the whirlwind background of the Ecclesiastes illumination. But beneath the whirlwind we see a place where the winds have calmed into flat horizontal lines: an order, a structure, rather than chaos. In the House of Wisdom, we see the plan God has placed in creation. The seven pillars of this house become here seven candles, with one burning brightly with the interconnected circles motif found throughout the Wisdom Books volume. In the text, Wisdom invites the reader to “eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed” (9:5), depicted here in clearly Eucharistic terms. The House of Wisdom is the Temple with its lampstands, but also the Church with its Eucharist.

If Ecclesiastes struggles to see the order in creation, Proverbs 8:22-9:6 and Genesis 1 help us see that order. By repeating symbols such as the whirlwind, the raven, and the rainbow, The Saint John’s Bible brings together these different passages into a conversation on creation. This conversation asks: how do we relate scientific and theological accounts of creation? How do we see order in creation when all seems to have fallen into chaos? How does the beauty of God in nature call us to care for creation?

Too often, when we look at The Saint John’s Bible we look only at individual illuminations. I have only started to see these conversations between art and text, between texts, and between this Bible and contemporary Catholic biblical interpretation because I have worked with this Bible closely for two years. Now, Michael Patella’s Word and Image and Susan Sink’s The Art of The Saint John’s Bible are superb works. But neither of them systematically survey this Bible’s symbolism and how it creates conversations between different texts. In understanding this Bible and its unique message, we have a long way to go.

Author Biography:

Jonathan Homrighausen is a graduate student in Biblical Studies at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University, and a Student Assistant in Archives & Special Collections at Santa Clara University. Previously, he spent two years in the Catholic Biblical School in the Diocese of Stockton. His article on The Saint John’s Bible and Donald Jackson’s earlier work appeared in the Summer 2016 issue of The Scribe, the newsletter of the Heritage Edition. He is currently writing a book on The Saint John’s Bible, and blogs at Jdhomie.com.

More from The Saint John's Bible

Saint John's Bible

The Saint John's Bible at McDonalds

My friend Jason, who is an ambassador for the Saint John's Bible, has committed a great deal of his time sharing this masterpiece with people.  Last October, he traveled up to the high school where I teach and presented the Saint John's Bible Heritage Edition: Gospel and Acts to all my classes.  It was an amazing day, one which I will never forget.  One of the stories he shared with us is recounted below.  I am glad that Jason has allowed me to share this with you.  It is an excellent example of not only the power of the Word of God, but also the committment of one man to share it in any place and circumstance.  May I have the same love and patience to share the scriptures with others, in season and out.   

In July of 2013, I had scheduled a presentation about the Saint John's Bible at a major university in downtown Chicago. At the time my wife was just a couple months into her fight with cancer, and I couldn't schedule anything in my life a week in advance much less months out. Thankfully, Jim Triggs, the director of the SJB Heritage Edition program agreed to come to Chicago from Minneapolis to give the presentation for me. As luck would have it, on the day of the presentation my wife was feeling OK (or feeling irritated by my constant pampering of her, I'm still not sure which), so I was able to join the presentation after all. As always, Jim's presentation was smooth, experienced, and professional, and after that we split duties and each took a different Heritage Edition volume to different parts of the room to give our audience plenty of opportunity to explore the pages and ask questions. It was an exciting night, all the more so because it was held in a large cathedral and attended by many theology degree, graduate, and even doctoral students who all had great questions and insights.

The event ended. We all went our separate ways.

As was my custom after a presentation, on my way home I stopped at a McDonald's restaurant to have a burger and to read in my little blue pocket Bible that I take with me everywhere. That's when Michael saw me. He walked up to me while I was waiting to order and asked, "Are you a Christian?"  "Well, yes, I am." I was holding a Bible in McDonald's, not easy to dodge that question.

"Me, too," said Michael. There was something slightly ... different ... about him. "I'm homeless." Well, that explained a few things. "And I used to be a drug addict." And that explained a lot more. "But Jesus saved me a couple months ago. My name's Michael. Do you want to have dinner with me?" "Yeah, sure." Suddenly, all those Benedictine values I learned about as an undergrad at Saint John's University came flooding back, and there was just something really intriguing about Michael. So we took our food and found a table and sat down to eat. Michael had just spent his last $3 on a cheeseburger and a soda. I gave him my fries.

Over the next half hour, Michael told me about how he used to be a really bad drug addict and he wasn't proud of several "bad things" he had done. I could tell as I listened to him that his addiction had cost him a lot, mentally and physically, but still he exuded this peace and calm. He told me how Jesus saved him just a few months ago and he had been sober since then and found a bed at a shelter, but he missed the last bus home that night so he was back to being homeless until tomorrow. I gave him half my burger after he finished his, and got him a refill on his soda.

"Now I write poetry for Jesus. Would you like to hear some?" It was getting very late, but there was just something so ... different ... about Michael, something that made it so hard to consider saying No to him. He started searching his coat pockets, then his pants pockets, but gave up with a sad look on his face. "I think I lost my poetry book. Can I just say some to you?"

After seeing such unhappiness suddenly cross his face, there was no way I could decline. "Lay it on me, Michael. Bless me with your poetry."

Oh. My. God. Bless me he did. Michael proceeded to recite poetry from memory for almost an hour. Grand poetry. Beautiful poetry. His words expressed such pain and misery yet soared to the heavens with gratitude and a love for God so profound I lost track of time listening to him. He may have lost most of his intellect and everything else to his addiction, and here he was moving my soul with his joyful spiritual fervor. It was as if he was singing new psalms inspired by God.

When finally he stopped I could think of only one thing I could do in return. "Wait right here, Michael. I need to go to my car and get something. I want to share something with you now."

I walked back in a moment later with a volume of the Heritage Edition of the Saint John's Bible in hand. Now, for those of you who don't know what I mean about "Heritage Edition", allow me to explain in brief. The original hand-written hand-illuminated Saint John's Bible resides in Collegeville, MN, in the abbey and university's rare arts vault. In order to better share it, the university spent years creating fine-art replicas of the original pages, 299 sets in all. These Heritage Editions are the same size as the original - more than 2 feet tall and 3 feet wide when open. These are HUGE books, much larger than the coffee table versions you can buy at a book store. They are bound in Italian leather, printed on special cotton paper, and all of the artwork illuminated with gold and silver in the original is also illuminated with gold and silver foil in these replicas.

Yes, I had just set down a $25,000 book on a table at McDonald's and opened it to the beginning of Genesis, to share it with a homeless drug addict. And I began to give my presentation.

Every single time I have ever had the pleasure of sharing the Saint John's Bible with people, they have this reaction. This awe. This child-like wonder. And then come all the questions. Like the graduate theology students just hours before, Michael started asking me all kinds of questions about the meaning of each illumination we explored together.

No long passed before an elderly woman joined us at the table where I was giving my impromptu presentation. While Michael turned pages, I asked her about herself. She hesitated, "I'm... I'm a widow. And I don't like to leave home much. Sometimes I come here to watch TV at night when all the kids are gone and it's quiet. But tonight I heard the most wonderful poetry, and now I get to see this amazing Bible." So as I looked on and occasionally answered questions, Michael and this elderly widow turned pages of the Saint John's Bible together, and read scripture to each other.

Clearly, this was not a normal Sunday night at McDonald's, and the staff could tell something strange was going on in the booths. First one teen walked over and peeked shyly. Then another. Then all of them, about a half-dozen at least. They listened to Michael and the widow read from the Bible. Their manager came over a moment later, angry that all her staff had left their posts and were standing around a table. That is, until she saw what we were all looking at, an enormous hand-written Bible. Apparently not all of the teens could read or speak English, so as this strange blend of people touched pages, asked questions, pointed at illuminations, and read scripture aloud to each other, one girl would translate into Spanish.

So yeah, that's how the Saint John's Bible shut down a McDonald's restaurant one night and converted it into a church whose members included a homeless drug addict, a lonely widow, a bunch of immigrant children, a harried restaurant manager, and me. Our communion table had a McDonald's logo on it. We broke cheeseburgers together and drank diet soda. I know Jesus was present because I saw him in every person around that table.

Around midnight, I watched Michael walk down the road and into darkness, on a search for a place to sleep. He had asked me if I could give him enough money to buy breakfast, I gave him enough for lunch and dinner, too.

Today, my photo of my print edition of the Saint John's Bible was taken at that same McDonald's restaurant.

7 Questions: Christopher Calderhead

Christopher Calderhead is a visual artist and graphic designer who has exhibited his letter-based works in the United States and Great Britain. He graduated from Princeton with a bachelor's degree in art history. In 1998 he obtained a master of divinity degree from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. Ordained the same year, he has served parishes in the Church of England and the Episcopal Church USA. He is editor of Alphabet, a journal of the lettering arts published by the Friends of Calligraphy, and author of One Hundred Miracles (2004), a collection of miracle paintings by the great masters.  He recently published, through Liturgical Press, Illuminating the Word: The Making of the Saint John's Bible Second Edition.  I believe it is the best book, currrently in print, concerning The Saint John's Bible.  Christopher blogs at Studio Notes.

1) To start off, could you tell my readers a little bit about the work you do?  How did you get involved in calligraphy?  Was this something that was a passion of yours from early on?

I have been interested in calligraphy and lettering since I was a boy. My father had his own advertising agency in New York, and I grew up in the art department. I remember looking at headlines in the ads the art directors created and pondering the letterforms: Why are the strokes of the sans-serif type Kabel cut off at an angle? How do you draw the fat, balloon shapes of the typeface Cooper Black?

When I was in fourth grade, I traced out a series of alphabets from an old 1930s lettering manual. I used to carry this tracing in my pocket, and when I had to add a heading to an assignment in school, I would carefully unfold it and trace my heading out, letter by letter.

In college at Princeton I majored in Art History, and a lot of the papers I wrote had to do with fine printing and graphic design.

After college, I studied calligraphy and bookbinding at the Roehampton Institute. Ann Camp was my principal teacher, and she grounded me in the rich tradition of edged-pen writing. At Roehampton, for the first time, I was surrounded by people who would sit and discuss the shape of the lower bowl of the lower case g through an entire tea break! It was wonderful.

Since then—that was 25 years ago—I have had a very varied career. For the last ten years, I have concentrated mostly on teaching and writing books. Since 2007, I have been the editor and designer of an international quarterly magazine, Letter Arts Review, which covers all aspects of lettering art, from calligraphy to typography and text-based art.

My own calligraphic and lettering art has evolved over time. Fresh out of Roehampton, I worked in fairly classic styles. Since then, I’ve broadened my approach. I’m not actively seeking commissions these days; most of the lettering art I do is designed as a fine art, and I explore both direct pen- and brush-made lettering along with photomontage and other techniques.

2) Could you talk a little bit about how you got involved with The Saint John's Bible project?

I was living in Cambridge, England, at the time (this is around 1999). I knew Donald Jackson already—I had written an article about him for The Scribe, the journal of the Society of Scribes and Illuminators, and I had visited him and his wife Mabel at their home in Wales.

Jo White was the person who put the deal together. She was one of the most important people involved in making The Saint John’s Bible happen in the first place. She has been one of the great movers and shakers of the Calligraphy world, organizing conferences and workshops, and creating a genuine network for calligraphers to gather and work together. Jo and I knew each other fairly well, and she really pushed for me to be hired to write about the project.

Everyone involved in The Saint John’s Bible knew that the project should be documented. Donald’s staff were careful to collect and save all the sketches and preparatory material. The Bible project sent photographers to shoot Donald and his team at work.

When I was brought on board, I was something of an unknown quantity to the people at Saint John’s. So the initial idea was that I would write a series of articles documenting the process of making the Bible. Each article existed in a long (5000 word) form, and also in shorter excerpt format which could be immediately published. That these would later turn into a book was not guaranteed—but it was a start, a foot in the door, and an opportunity to show I had the chops to do the work.

By the time I left England to move back to the States, I had written about seven or eight articles.

I was at Saint John’s in the summer of 2002, and I pushed the matter with Carol Marrin, who was then Director of the Bible project: Is this going to turn into a book or not? I did a book proposal, and everyone agreed to go ahead and turn my articles into a full-fledged book. (I am simplifying here what was in fact an extremely protracted process!)

3) What was a typical day like observing and documenting the process?

Donald’s Scriptorium in Wales is about 5 hours by train from Cambridge. I had a wonderful boss who gave me some flexibility with my time, so I would go to Wales for short visits—just three days and two nights at a time. Sometimes, I would my vacation days to accommodate a trip.

Donald ran his studio in a very old-fashioned way: his model was very much the old apprenticeship model, and family life and the life of the studio were in many ways complementary.

Sometimes I stayed with Donald and Mabel at their house, which was across the lane from the Scriptorium and its attendant outbuildings. On other visits I would stay with my friend Sally Mae Joseph, who was the studio manager in the early years of the project, and lived in a cottage down the road.

The setting was incredibly bucolic, with the houses and buildings nestled in a hilly countryside surrounded by fields of sheep and small patches of woods.

I would walk over to the Scriptorium after breakfast, and Donald or members of his staff would unpack things for me to look at, talk about the work on the drafting tables, and generally help me explore what it was they were doing. Donald would come and go, but at some point we would sit down for a good, long interview. Sometimes we sat for two or three interviews over the course a visit.

I generally had lunch with the staff in the kitchen of the Scriptorium, and in the evenings we might have dinner out at a pub, or sit down to one of Mabel’s beautifully cooked meals at the big house.

The feeling of these visits was never rushed; I really can say I had the privilege of entering into the ongoing life of the Scriptorium.

4) For those who don't realize how immense and complicated the Saint John's Bible project was, what would you say was one or two of the biggest obstacles Donald Jackson and his team had to overcome?

Now that’s a hard question.

It took well over a decade to complete the manuscript of The Saint John’s Bible. Donald had to assemble teams of scribes and artist to collaborate with him. All the money—and it was serious money—had to be raised for the project. And while the manuscript volumes were being made, an ambitious program of exhibitions and promotional tours was taking place. In addition, once the full-sized printed facsimile, the Heritage Edition, went into production, the project became vastly more complex. All the while, Donald and his counterparts at Saint John’s had to figure out how they planned to work together. It was long learning process for both sides of the negotiation between the artist and his client.

But I will hazard a guess that one of the most challenging aspects of the project arose from the choice of the actual text. The contract specified that Saint John’s would chose which translation was to be used. When they opted for the New Revised Standard Edition (the Catholic edition), they locked in some very specific challenges for Donald. The NRSV has extremely detailed guidelines for how the text may be used. For example, there are four levels of text indentation that have to respected, and the chapter and verse numbers are set up according to a complex formula. As a result, every page had to be set up first on a computer, proofread and approved, and then given to the scribes to write. This not only limited Donald’s freedom to format the text, but introduced a massive logistical issue in coordinating different stages of design and execution with proofreading and computer layout.

The other greatest important challenge, I think, was the simple fear involved for Donald in making what had to be his masterpiece. This project is the culmination of his whole career—the biggest, most sustained project he has ever done. And to take on something as weighted with tradition as the Bible and make something fresh and new and worthy is an enormous, frightening challenge.

One of the things I admire most about what Donald produced is that the Bible looks very much of our own period—it is not an antiquarian exercise. It draws from tradition in many key ways, but this is a contemporary response to the biblical text.

5). Which of the various technical aspects of the project impressed you the most and why?  (Like vellum preparation or making ink or creation of rough drafts...)

Donald is a master with using gold and working on vellum, so of course those aspects were fascinating to see. But the one thing that impressed me the most was the way he created a team of scribes with a unified style.

Most calligraphers today work alone, and so they develop their own personal styles. And calligraphers aren’t used to working like gig musicians, picking up on the riffs of other artists and playing in sync. It’s just not the way the world of modern calligraphy works.

If you go back to the big scriptoria of the Middle Ages, however, you had whole trams of scribes working in a house style. We can look at medieval manuscripts and detect personal characteristics of individual scribes, but we can also see that all the scribes working on a project had a common ethos or way of writing. It’s a very subtle thing—on one hand, there is plenty of personality in those scripts, while on the other hand, their communal effort holds together as a unity.

So the most remarkable aspect of the project—for me—is that Donald assembled a group of contemporary calligraphers and recreated that unifying feel, while not extinguishing the unique personality of each scribe. I don’t think anyone but Donald could have pulled that off. He’s so deeply embedded in the tradition that he understood how to get the group to coalesce into a team.

One of the striking things about his method was that he refused to give them an exemplar—a standard sheet showing the Bible Script. Instead, he talked and demonstrated and the team spent hours writing together to get a feel for the script. As the writing continued, the scribes would gather at intervals in Wales and they would compare their writing. Inevitably, when they were each writing alone at home, their styles would slightly diverge. But by gathering every few months, they would come back into sync with one another.

That’s something really unique about this project.

I contrast that with another 20th century project—the series of Royal Air Force memorial books in St Clement Danes church in London. Those were written in the 1950s, I think—maybe 1960s. The artistic director of that project set a pattern for the scribes to follow, and each book was handed to a separate calligrapher, who worked alone on his or her volume. That project, as fine as it, doesn’t have that unitary flavor that Donald achieved in The Saint John’s Bible.

6) Liturgical Press recently published the second edition of your book "Illuminating the Word: The Making of the Saint John's Bible".  Of all the books concerning the Saint John's Bible it is easily my favorite.  Although it is in the form of a "coffee table" book, I read it so often that it rarely sits on my coffee table, so I hesitate even calling it that.  Could you talk a bit about what the process was working on this book?  What is unique to the second edition?

Of the books I’ve written, this one is very special to me.

There’s a real pressure when you have an institutional client—like a monastery or a university—to write an “official” history of a project like this. It’s simply in the nature of human institutions. You end up having to interview the provost and the dean, each of whom say something pleasant about the project. It’s easy to end up with a lot of platitudes that aren’t very interesting to read.

I was determined when I began writing the chapters that became Illuminating the Word that I wanted to tell a good story, and give people the feeling of being there in the moment. I took a risk by writing it in the first person, because the book is not about me. But that seemed the best way to capture the immediacy of the scenes I was describing.

Although the chapters in the first book were written to specific themes such as the layout of the pages or the search for the proper writing surface, I chose to treat them in a narrative fashion. So in effect, I take the reader on a journey to visit the project and discover it alongside me. I think that’s why a lot of people have reacted positively to the book. It’s not dry. It’s a good story.

The first book was published to coincide with the first exhibition of the Bible at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 2005. At that point, Donald had completed only three of the seven volumes of the manuscript, so my book detailed the making of Gospels and Acts and the Pentateuch and ended with the Psalms volume. We knew that once had finished all seven volumes we would probably need to do a second edition and bring the story to its close.

The second edition preserves most of the chapters of the first one. We made as few changes in those as possible.

We then added a whole new section that told the story of each volume in a step-by-step fashion, detailing which artists and scribes joined the project at each stage, how the layout and design of the volumes developed, and recounting some of the difficulties and challenges that arose along the way.

The third part of the new edition looks at specific aspects of the production of The Saint John’s Bible. Tim Ternes, the current director of the Bible project, has a lot of experience talking to visitors who come to Saint John’s and to the exhibitions, and he knew what kinds of questions people asked. As a result, we added a very technical chapter on the scripts of the Bible, geared toward accomplished calligraphers, and explaining the characteristics of the various scripts in the book. We also added a chapter on how the pages were prepared for exhibition and stored. And we added a full chapter with interviews with each artist and scribe who participated in the project.

Probably one of the most important new chapters is the one that describes the printing of the full-size facsimile Heritage Edition. I have to say here that I can be kind of old-school sometimes, and I always thought that the manuscript was the main thing. People are so used to printed books that they assume the point of a project like this is to produce an edition. But I feel quite strongly the manuscript is the original artwork, and any printed edition is essentially something else. So it was always clear to me that such offshoots of the project like the reduced-size “trade edition” facsimiles were wonderful in their own right, but quite secondary to the main project, which was to produce a manuscript.

The Heritage Edition really changed the game. It was produced at the full size of the original, and it was lavishly printed and bound. Eventually, it became a project of its own, and Donald split his time between finishing the manuscript and working with the printers and other skilled craftspeople to produce a really exquisite printed version of the manuscript. Now we can really say that The Saint John’s Bible exists both as an original manuscript and as a full-size printed edition.

That change in the nature of the project was very important to capture, which is why we added a separate chapter to describe it.

Altogether, the second edition gives a really comprehensive account of how The Saint John’s Bible was made.

7) Finally, do you have a favorite illumination or text treatment from the Saint John's Bible?  Why?

Oh man. It’s very hard to choose.

Of the illuminations, the one that consistently sticks my mind is the image of Wisdom from the Wisdom of Solomon. Donald rendered her as an old, wise woman, who looks directly at the viewer. The background is metal leaf in two tones, so the effect is like that of a mirror, as though one is both seeing the figure of divine Wisdom and looking at oneself at the same time. I love the fact that the face is rendered in a somewhat photographic manner, although without color and half-tones.

In that illumination I think Donald really succeeded in creating a brand-new image that has an iconic quality. It’s not like anything in the long history of Christian art, yet it also has the distilled quality of devotional imagery.

I also appreciate the fact that that illumination reflects a theological interest in mining the Bible for images of the feminine. The Bible is clearly the product of patriarchal societies, and reflects the values of those societies. In our time, many Christians have wanted to redress the balance and find messages and images that celebrate women and their role within the communities of faith, as well as seeking to move away from purely masculine understandings of the divine.

In the end, however, I like that image simply because it sticks in my mind, and that’s a mark of an effective work of art.

But I should close with this—whenever I spend time looking at The Saint John’s Bible, I almost always look carefully at the large blocks of capitals that make up the beginning of some of the books. Genesis 1 is a perfect example. Those massed caps are incredibly subtle. Donald uses his quill to make shapes that often depart from the purely classical forms of traditional scripts. Those caps show how deeply he understands the way our letters function, and he has no need to be consistent with his letterforms. In fact, he plays with them, pushing and distorting them in incredibly sophisticated ways. It’s looking at those caps that really sends the shiver down my spine.