THE SACRED EXHIBITION at the British Museum is covered in a Times article from Apri:

The writ and wisdom of the Almighty
The British Library’s collection of books and manuscripts from three of the world’s great religions demonstrate what divides us, but also what should unite us
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Rachel Campbell-Johnston

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British Library curators can draw on rich resources. An unparalleled archive includes treasures that range from papyrus scraps rescued from an Egyptian rubbish dump to the most sumptuously ornamented of manuscripts. These are supported by loans of key texts from other museums, including a Dead Sea scroll fragment (one of several pieces never before shown in this country), and by objects from private collections, from an exquisite silver set used during the Jewish ceremony of Passover through the richly decorated curtain that once hung over the door of the Kaabah (the cube-shaped stone structure in the Grand Mosque in Mecca that forms the focal point of all Muslim worship) to the shalwar kameez that Jemima Khan wore at her wedding.

But at the heart of the show are the manuscripts: those most precious survivors of centuries of pogroms and wars and oppressions, of years of neglect and accident. To- gether they tell a story as vividly intriguing as psalter illuminations, as intricately complex as an Islamic carpet, as minutely detailed as the masoretic notes that weave their patterns around the writings of a Jewish Pentateuch.

The more ostentatiously dramatic of these texts seem more like objects than mes- sages, more like spiritual icons than mere books. Admire the wonderful calligraphy on a leaf of the Lindis-farne Gospels, for instance. This manuscript was far more than a practical text. Transformed by the artistic talent of its maker, it attained a symbolic power. It was not there to be read. It was meant to be glimpsed from a reverent distance by those who queued up to bear witness to this piece of solid proof of Christianity’s strength. Jewish scriptures took on a similar totemic importance. They became a sort of substitute for the Temple of Jerusalem after it was razed by the Romans in AD70. “Where two or three study the Torah together,” explained the rabbis, “the Shekhinah [divine presence] is in their midst”.

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Some of the most fascinating displays are the most visually unappealing. A page of inscrutable scribbling, it turns out, is the Diatessoron — an attempt to combine the four Gospels into one narrative account that was so ruthlessly suppressed that no single complete manuscript sur- vives. And yet curators are keen also to show off their most exotic treasures, the most sumptuously ornamental of their manuscripts. Here are Korans in pure sweeps of burnished gold, Hebraic texts scrolled about with extravagant creatures, Christian stories illuminated with a vig-our that brings them springing to life.

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