Jots & Tittles

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Pristine Sistine

The Sistine Chapel is back. The vivid colors of the wall and ceiling frescoes are visible once again—thanks to the generosity of donors and the efforts of restorers, who have swept away centuries of soot and dust in a project that began 20 years ago.

“It’s magnificent,” effused Cardinal Edmund C. Szoka, who previewed the restoration before a ceremony with Pope John Paul II. “It’s back to its original beauty.” The restorers began with Michelangelo’s ceiling frescoes of the Creation and Flood and moved on to the Last Judgment scene painted on the wall above the chapel’s altar. Most recently, restorers completed work on the side-wall frescoes of St. Peter receiving the keys to Rome, the life of Moses, and other scenes by Botticelli and other 15th-century artists.

Gianluigi Colalucci, chief of the restoration team, told the Associated Press that their efforts should last for decades, perhaps even a century or more. “And then we’ll need only a light intervention,” he said.

An air-filtering system will help remove pollutants that enter the chapel on the heels of 3 million visitors each year. The system’s effectiveness will be tested next year, as 30 to 40 percent more visitors are expected to pass through the Vatican museums during the millennial year.

Jesus Beats Shakespeare, Lenin

Religious figures top the list of the most famous historical figures—if fame is measured by the number of books written about a person. Peter Dickson, a former CIA analyst, recently completed a sweeping analysis of the 18 million books owned by the Library of Congress, the world’s largest library. Counting the titles devoted to various historical figures, Dickson found that Jesus tops the chart, with 17,239 books written about him. The Virgin Mary weighs in at 7th, with 3,595 books, while Paul ranks 31st, with 1,341 titles. Paul is outdone by Buddha (12th, with 2,446 books), Martin Luther (14th, with 2,291 books) and Thomas Aquinas (27th, with 1,424 volumes). As a topic, God falls between Shakespeare and Lenin, with 7,719 volumes. (God was not included in Dickson’s list, however, because deities lie outside the traditional definition of “historical figure.”) Dickson notes in the Washington Post Book World that “scientists and inventors…may have had great long-term impact on the world, but they do not seem to generate the same public fascination that political, religious or cultural figures do.” Here’s Dickson’s top ten list, with the number of volumes devoted to each historical figure in parentheses.

1. Jesus (17,239)

2. William Shakespeare (9,801)

3. Vladimir Lenin (4,492)

4. Abraham Lincoln (4,378)

5. Napoleon Bonaparte (4,007)

6. Karl Marx (3,817)

7. Virgin Mary (3,595)

8. Johann von Goethe (3,431)

9. Dante Alighieri (2,894)

10. Plato (2,878)

Debunking the Bible Code

The mathematics journal that first gave “Bible codes” a boost now says the system for finding hidden messages in Scripture is baloney. “Despite a considerable amount of effort,” write four authors in the May 1999 issue of Statistical Science, “we have been unable to detect the codes.”

In 1994 the journal created a stir when it published an article by a trio of authors who claimed they found statistically significant patterns when they applied a technique called equidistant letter sequencing (ELS) to the Bible. ELS treats the text of the Bible as a long string of letters with no spaces in between and then looks at letters equal intervals apart (say, every ninth letter, or 4,000th) to see if they spell out a message. The authors of the 1994 article reported finding the names of medieval rabbis embedded in the Bible close to the dates of their birth or death (see Jeffrey Satinover, “Divine Authorship?” BR 11:05).

Others then used ELS to make more spectacular claims, including the assertion that the Bible predicted the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and that an earthquake would hit Los Angeles in 2010 (see Ronald Hendel and Shlomo Sternberg, “The Bible Code—Cracked and Crumbling,” BR 13:04).

Dror Bar-Natan, one of the authors of the new study, said the first article allowed itself a lot of latitude, particularly in deciding how the names of the rabbis should be spelled. The 1994 study had “enough wiggle room to produce whatever you want,” Bar-Natan told the Associated Press. With stricter criteria, the Bible was no better at producing messages via ELS than other long texts, such as the Hebrew translation of War and Peace.

Pristine Sistine

The Sistine Chapel is back. The vivid colors of the wall and ceiling frescoes are visible once again—thanks to the generosity of donors and the efforts of restorers, who have swept away centuries of soot and dust in a project that began 20 years ago.