A war of wordsCenturies of struggle to control the Bible's content are beautifully detailed in an exhibit at the Florida International Museum.
By LENNIE BENNETT, Times art critic
ST. PETERSBURG - In the beginning was the Word.
And nothing was ever simple again.
That's the message of "Ink and Blood," an engrossing exhibition at the Florida International Museum tracing the evolution of the modern Bible, a document stained with martyrs' blood and scholars' pens through centuries of strife and struggle to control its content.
Almost 100 religious manuscripts and objects dating from the seventh century B.C. to the 18th century are on display, none a facsimile. Doubters and believers alike will find the beauty of the rare books and individual pages, or leaves, and the fragility of the ancient scroll fragments powerful transmitters of human aspiration. And the polyglot of languages, we learn, indicates fierce territorial motivations rather than appeals for multiculturalism.
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Regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls it says:
The discovery of a cache of religious writings in caves in Qumran, on the northeast shore of the Dead Sea, between 1947 and 1956 turned biblical scholarship on its head. The papers, mostly tiny fragments, became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls and were the oldest known examples of what today is called the Written Torah by Jews and the Old Testament by Christians. Before they were found, the oldest known Scriptures were ninth-century A.D. translations. Tiny pieces of the scrolls are under glass here, scraps of paper printed with indecipherable lettering. They look like nothing, yet reaching out across 3,000 years is the hand that wrote: "From the ends of the earth have we heard songs, (even) glory to the righteous" from Isaiah, translated for us on a label.
In other words, these particular fragments look like burnt cornflakes. If you want to see Dead Sea Scrolls, you may as well skip this exhibit. But some of the other manuscripts in it do sound worth a look.
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