King James Exhibit

Visiting the "Life and Legacy of the King James Bible" exhibit at the Harold B. Lee Library was an interesting experience for me. Like Erin, I did not particularly enjoy the exhibit. I visited awhile ago, and all I really got out of the experience was a slightly increased appreciation for the history and evolution of the Bible. However, to me, a book is only as important as the knowledge inside it. If you're not going to actually read and handle a book, it is worthless. Books in glass cases are therefore worth only as much as what's on the open page: just a small coin compared to the wealth of knowledge potentially contained in the pages.

Visitors such as myself could not fully interact with the Bibles on display, ironically similar to the Bibles of the past. The first Bible on display in the exhibit is a Latin, or Vulgate, Bible. As English was the vernacular, very few had access to the scriptures and their meanings (not to mention most were illiterate). A hand-written Bible could take years to complete, limited the accessibility to an influence of the full text. Though it was possible for some to perhaps memorize a favorite verse, the main exposure the people had to the Bible was through the clergy. They couldn't use the text in its entirety.

In the late 1380's, John Wycliffe began to translate the Bible into English, trying to make it more accessible to a larger number of Christians. He was condemned a heretic, and after his death, his body was exhumed and burned at the stake. Many others followed him, translating, copying, and smuggling the Bible despite the risks. They gave their time, money, effort, and sometimes their very lives so that the book would be widely available. It seems to me that if these martyrs worked so hard to make a book accessible, perhaps we shouldn't keep them in glass cases.