Baylor KJB@400 conference and exhibition

KJB@400 WATCH: Baylor University is holding a conference and exhibition in honor of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible:

Baylor also will host a free exhibition of more than 100 items — among them a Dead Sea Scroll, an illustrated Gutenberg Bible and a text handwritten by King Henry VIII about the sacraments — on loan from the Oklahoma-based Green Collection.

The conference — “The King James Bible and the World It Made, 1611-2011” — will be hosted by Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion from Thursday, April 7, through Saturday, April 9, at George W. Truett Theological Seminary on the Baylor campus in Waco. The exhibition will run concurrently in the Hankamer Treasure Room at Baylor’s Armstrong Browning Library.

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Visitors to the free exhibition may view 100 items on loan from the Green Collection, including early printings of the Bible, Hebrew scrolls and medieval manuscripts, said Dr. David Lyle Jeffrey, Distinguished Professor of Literature and the Humanities in Baylor’s Honors College, as well as a Distinguished Senior Fellow and Director of Manuscript Research in Scripture and Tradition at the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion.

Among the items will be a Dead Sea Scroll containing Genesis 31; a Torah taken from a Jewish community in Spain during the Inquisition; and the so-called “Wicked Bible,” in which the printer made an error and left out the “not” in the commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” Jeffrey said.

“There were unfortunate consequences for the printer — a big fine and some jail time,” he said.

Another remarkable item is the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a manuscript of Scripture that dates from the sixth century. It was written on vellum in Palestinian Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. But Greek became the preferred translation, and because vellum — skin of calves, goats or lambs — was so costly, a writer re-used it, gently scraping away much of the Aramaic and writing a commentary in Greek atop the original script. But with a particular type of camera, a viewer can see through the overwritten text to the Aramaic beneath, he said. The commentary previously was kept in a library of St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, Egypt, Jeffrey said.

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Background on Codex Climaci Rescriptus is here.