Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibition Opens at The Arts House

Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2009 Posted: 10:18:22PM HKT

The 'Holocaust Scroll' on display at the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition held at The Arts House. (Photo: CP)

A historic Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition opened today at The Arts House. This is the first time that fragments from the Scrolls, touted as the most important archaeological discovery in human history, are being displayed in Asia outside of Jerusalem.

Along with the Scrolls, artifacts dating from antiquity – as early as 5,000 years before – and marking various phases in the development of writing are shown. Divided into three segments, the exhibition takes visitors from pre-modern history in which symbols were used to the era of manuscript transmission to printing to electronic transmission.

The event features tablets from Abraham’s lifetime, showing how people were able to count and transmit other information with a restricted symbol language.

Three of the four Scroll fragments on display are the earliest biblical fragments in existence, dating back to around 100 BC. The Dead Sea Scrolls, a third of which are from the Old Testament, is evidence of the incredible accuracy with which the Bible was copied over the centuries of human history.

Antique Bibles in Greek, Hebrew and English dating to the 15th and 16th centuries are on display. This includes a page from the original 1455 Gutenberg Bible, the first and most valuable book ever printed, and the groundbreaking Erasmus New Testament in Greek and Latin, the first Greek translation of the New Testament, a critical Latin translation, and the source text used by Protestant Reformer Martin Luther.

Other highlights are the Martin Luther Reformation Bible in German, the first edition of the Geneva Bible, the first Bibles printed in English and the first edition, first print of the King James Bible.

The exhibition also features rare books and manuscripts by reformers John Calvin, Martin Luther, William Tyndale and John Wycliffe.

A testimony of advances in electronic writing is the Lunar Bible, a microfilmed King James Version Bible that an astronaut carried down to the lunar surface before returning with it to earth. Two inches by two inches wide, this chip contains the full text of the KJV and can be read under a microscope.

Shut away in a dark room elsewhere, there are computer terminals enabling visitors to access any page of a complete scan of the original King James Bible and print out their favourite verse. To the side, there are the numerous tomes of an inscribed English and Chinese Bible copied by members of The Presbyterian Church in Singapore.

A 430 year-old ‘Holocaust Scroll’ is on display for the first time at the exhibition, according to Dr Joel Lampe.

The Bible Museum curator hopes that the museum exhibition, which unlike most others covers a wide time-frame, will encourage people to “explore things they never thought about”.

For Dr Lampe, the 110 artifacts confirm that one thing will never change, and will always be trustworthy: God.

“So much of what you will see is Him,” he said, introducing the exhibition to guests at the opening ceremony.

“It’s His story,” he said.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, according to Biondi, is a misnomer, because they exist in fragments rather than entire scrolls and had to be reconstructed by DNA testing to match the animal skin fragments. The extremely tedious and laborious process that took academics in Jerusalem and other places more than 60 years to complete put together more 20,000 pieces in over 800 scrolls.

These fragments were purchased from private collectors. Another 100 fragments are still in private hands; the speakers are part of an effort to find, purchase and return these fragments to the public domain.

Lampe is leading regular tours of the exhibition along with Private Dealer Lee Raffaele Biondi. Organisers expect an attendance of 50,000 people. The exhibition opens to the public tomorrow and will run until September 20.

The event is organised by Cashcor International Pte Ltd.

Edmond Chua
edmond@christianpost.com