Replica of oldest bible is taken home after 1,300 years

The TImes, 19/5/2014
By Simon Tait
It reads like a Dan Brown novel. In the year 716 a Saxon abbot, near the end of his life, decides to take one of the most beautiful books ever made from Jarrow in Northumberland to Rome as a gift for Pope Gregory II. Half way, at Langres in France, he dies but some of his companions decide to continue the pilgrimage on his behalf. They get within 100 miles of their destination, rest at the Gregorian abbey of San Salvatore at Monte Amiata in southern Tuscany, and mysteriously they all die there before they can deliver the book.
The book, now known as the Codex Amiatinus after the Tuscan town, remained at the abbey for the next 1000 years, but its ghost in the form of a perfect facsimile returns to Jarrow this weekend.
Codex Amiatinus is the oldest surviving Latin Vulgate bible, the 4th translation by St Jerome that became the official version for the Roman Catholic Church. But it was crafted by the Venerable Bede and his fellow Jarrow-Wearmouth monks over about 24 years to fulfill a commission from their abbot, Ceolfrith. Of the three that were made then, one was destroyed by fire and of the second only a single page survives and is in the British Library.
The Codex stayed at San Salvatore until the mid 18th century when it was removed to the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence, where it remains under lock and key, too fragile to be seen by anyone.
But bible is at last coming home to Jarrow in the shape of a facsimile created for Amiata by special licence with the help of Biblioteca scholars. An exhibition around it, Bede’s Great Bible, opens on Sunday (May 18) at Bede’s World, the museum built a few yards from the site of Bede’s monastery, running until September 21.
The facsimile was made to mark the Millennium in 2000 by a team led by Dr Manuela Vestri, a native of Amiata. “This book is the root of our knowledge about the Bible” she said. “I have spent the greatest part of my life following this manuscript, it is good that it comes home in this way.”
Composed of 1029 pages, measuring 540mm by 345mm and weighing 50 kilos, it was an enormous mission to carry it safely across the known world. The Codex was written by at least seven scribes, one of whom would have been Bede, the most gifted scholar of the age. Bede himself was in his 30s and 40s when the bible was made and at the height of his powers, but his fame was yet to spread overseas with his most famous work, An Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in about 731 when he was about 60. By then he was venerated across Europe, and though he spoke several modern languages he never himself travelled further from Jarrow than York. He died in 735.
Written on the finest Pergamon vellum, it is illuminated by brilliant miniature paintings, the most accomplished of which is probably the one portraying Ezra copying the Holy Scriptures in an echo, perhaps, of Bede himself at work on the bible. Having arrived at Amiata, the huge volume was kept in the abbey’s reliquary cupboard until 1782 and the suppression of the monasteries when it was confiscated and given to the Laurentian Library in Florence.
It took a year to for Dr Vestri’s La Meta Editore team of 20, the original being carefully unbounded and each page photographed in the highest resolution, transferred to vellum leaves and the facsimile assembled in the way the original had been, with four leather strings, and then bound in leather-clad wooden boards.
To help pay for the year-long operation, permission was given for 199 half-size copies to be made and sold, one of which was bought for Durham University. Only one full-size facsimile has ever been made, however, but it is hoped that the exhibition will help raise the £40,000 needed to commission a second for Bede’s World.
The museum was created in the 1970s to evoke the life of Bede and the Anglo-Saxon world of the 7th and 8th centuries in which he lived as an educational resource. The loan of the Codex facsimile is part of a new friendship agreement between the museum and Amiata, where a museum is being built to mirror Bede’s World. “There is a resurgent interest in Bede and for the museum,” said the Bede’s World director Mike Benson. “It’s exactly the right time for Bede’s bible to come home with the help of our new friends in Tuscany. The medieval world becomes larger for us with co-operation like this”.