TYLER.- The Tyler Museum of Art presents the exhibit Illuminating the Word: The Saint John's Bible. The show presents what has been called "the most significant handwritten and illuminated Bible" commissioned since the advent of the printing press. The Saint John’s Bible, a richly ornamented masterwork hand-illustrated with gold leaf on oversized vellum, is an unprecedented undertaking in contemporary book arts and a major cultural and interfaith endeavor.

The Saint John's Bible is the first illuminated, handwritten Bible of monumental size to be commissioned by a Benedictine Monastery in 500 years. Each page is 24.5 x 15.875 inches, making an open volume almost three feet wide. The completed works will contain 160 illuminations and marginalia (small decorative illustrations appearing in the margins, often created with gold leaf and other gilding) among the approximately 1,150 pages which comprise all 73 books of the Bible (New Revised Standard Version).

Theologians from Saint John’s Abbey and University and the College of Saint Benedict, together with consultants from Protestant and Jewish faiths, have worked with Donald Jackson, the artistic director, providing theological briefs that direct the interpretation of scripture in the illustrations. Based on these briefs, Jackson and his team of scribes and artists have created illuminations reflecting a multicultural world and humanity’s enormous strides in science, technology, and space travel. Because the project is an interfaith undertaking, Jackson has incorporated imagery from Eastern and Western religious traditions, as well as influences from Native American cultures. For example, an illumination in Gospels and Acts depicts the Earth as seen from space, a contemporary interpretation of our place in the universe. Illuminations throughout Psalms show artistic renderings of digital voice prints of Saint John’s monks chanting the Psalms–intersected with digital voice prints of calls to prayer in Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Sufi, and Native American religious traditions.

The exhibition at the Tyler Museum of Art will feature approximately 100 original unbound pages from Gospels and Acts, Psalms, and Pentateuch, the first three completed volumes of The Saint John's Bible. Among the pages on view are The Seven Days of Creation, Adam and Eve, Jacob’s Ladder, The Ten Commandments, The Parable of the Loaves and Fishes, The Sermon on the Mount, The Parable of the Sower and the Seed, The Birth of Christ, Dinner at the Pharisee’s House, The Woman Accused of Adultery, The Raising of Lazarus, The Death of Moses, The Crucifixion, the frontispieces for the four Gospels, and images of flora and fauna indigenous to Minnesota. Additional items in the exhibition include original text and illuminated pages from the Bible, Donald Jackson's process sketches, as well as other manuscripts (including examples of sacred texts from non-Christian religions), Bibles and art from special collections at Saint John's University. Original artist sketches also will be on view, as is a worktable from Jackson's scriptorium in Wales displaying materials such as quills, hand-ground pigments, gold leaf, calfskin vellum, and ancient inks from China.