THROUGH OCTOBER 16, 2011 Oklahoma City Museum of Art Oklahoma City, Oklahoma www.okcmoa.com
To celebrate the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art is hosting Passages, a massive 14,000-square-foot exhibit that traces the history of the Bible across more than 2,000 years. The exhibit uses automated characters and interactive displays to re-create the various historical settings in which the Bible was written, codified, translated and published.
Visitors can tour a re-creation of a room in the ancient synagogue of Dura-Europos where automated Jewish scribes copy texts from the Torah and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Similarly, in a monastic cloister, early Christian monks copy and translate the Scriptures into Greek, while in a nearby cave, the fourth-century Church Father Jerome is seen writing the Vulgate, the first Latin translation of the Bible.
Highlighting these vignettes are scores of ancient and medieval artifacts and rare Biblical manuscripts that tell the story of each period and its significance. At right, for example, is an illustrated page from the Book of Revelation (16:1–21) in a 1524 edition of Martin Luther’s famous September Testament, one of the first major translations of the New Testament into German and a critical text in the history of the Protestant Reformation. The exhibit also showcases a fragment of the Book of Genesis found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the first translations of the Bible into English, and a first-edition King James Bible dated to 1611.
THROUGH OCTOBER 16, 2011Oklahoma City Museum of ArtOklahoma City, Oklahomawww.okcmoa.com
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