People of the Book

...We’re told, for example, that the complete text of the book of Isaiah found among the scrolls “shows over a thousand variations from the standard text” that is read today...

...BY JOE LOCONTE London Earlier this year the British Library hosted a lavish exhibition of the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam...

...The Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible and Qur’an therefore form one linked textual tradition...

...With its more than 150 manuscripts and printed works from several continents and spanning more than 1,500 years, it wasn’t too large a boast...

...Certainly not in the sense of being a prologue for subsequent divine revelation...

...Likewise, it is unhelpful to say that Muslims “draw a great deal” from the Bible without adding that they regard its text as tragically corrupted...

...In what sense, for example, would a rabbi say the Torah was “linked” to the Koran...

...And Christians do not merely “acknowledge” the Hebrew Bible, they deem it holy scripture...

...shows the Roman emperor on one side and the Temple of Artemis, the favorite goddess of the city, on the other...

...The most popular exhibition in the history of the British Library, “Sacred” drew over 200,000 visitors during its April to September run...

...In Judaism and Islam there is only one language invested with sacred authority, Hebrew and Arabic respectively,” a panel read...

...As Armstrong explains, believers are perplexed “when archaeologists prove that many of the Biblical narratives have no basis in fact...

...Entitled “Sacred: Books of the Three Faiths,” the show was billed as “the world’s greatest collection of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim holy books...

...In some instances, the arrangement of diverse texts in a shared space was evocative—and misleading...

...One of them read, “Each succeeding religion acknowledges the texts of those preceding and draws a great deal from them...

...The claim is unexceptionable as far as it goes—unless infl uence over decoration, script, and layout is meant to imply infl uence over doctrine...

...William Tyndale himself was executed for heresy, though his translation would become the basis for the King James Version...

...An explicit aim of the exhibition was to overcome what its promoters called a “patent lack of charity” from religious believers on all sides...

...In Christianity, the Scriptures have spiritual authority regardless of the language into which they are translated...

...The coin’s image and Greek inscription match precisely those described in the New Testament book of Acts...

...These are puzzling claims...

...Toward the end of the exhibition, visitors were blandly instructed that after Muhammad’s death, “Islam spread rapidly” and “expanded into the Iberian Peninsula...

...The exhibition did acknowledge one consequence of this belief...

...But she mentions no narratives that have been so discredited...

...That is why Muslims the world over recite their prayers in Arabic—while Christians are busily translating the Bible into the most obscure tribal languages under the sun...

...Alongside it was a Koran, similarly designed and dated, from Egypt...

...Like Christianity, Islam is a universal religion...

...discovered between 1946 and 1956 which included copies of the Hebrew scriptures, illustrates this bias...

...Christians had a strategic reason for packaging their scripture in culturally familiar forms: Because they regarded Jesus’ message as intended for all people, Christians from the beginning sought ways to overcome cultural barriers in order to spread the faith...

...The planners deliberately chose not to cluster the works on display in separate “faith zones,” explained Graham Shaw, the library’s lead curator, but instead “to show these wonderful manuscripts side by side and demonstrate how much we share...

...There was a stunningly beautiful illuminated Koran from Mosul, in what is now Iraq, dated 1310, a reminder of the artistic heights of Islamic culture...

...Unmentioned was the fact that this rapid early advance was inseparable from Islam’s military campaigns—or that the early spread of Christianity occurred through preaching and persuasion, often met with persecution and martyrdom...

...Exhibitions elsewhere— the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati has a program on “spirituality and art” due to open early next year—may take some inspiration from the London show...

...But it misses the point...

...Christian fundamentalists prefer the vengeful book of Revelation,” she writes, “rather than the Sermon on the Mount, while Muslim extremists emphasize those passages of the Qur’an that preach jihad, and ignore the far more numerous exhortations to forgiveness, kindness, courtesy, and tolerance...

...The program’s catalogue, Sacred, a gorgeously illustrated 224-page volume (available from amazon.co.uk), sometimes adds to the confusion...

...The problem began with the exhibition panels, meant to guide the uninitiated...

...Nor does she let on that archaeological discoveries have lent support to numerous events recorded in the Old and New Testaments— including artifacts displayed nearby in the British Museum...

...The exquisite adornment of this Christian manuscript,” writes critic Yasmin Khan, was “heavily influenced by Middle Eastern culture in its decoration, script, and layout...

...Despite these good intentions, the exhibition repeatedly managed to distort the history and beliefs of the three religions in ways that make interfaith dialogue not easier but more difficult...

...The overall impression—contested among scholars—is that a process of revision, manipulation, and distortion shaped the Bible and the Koran...

...Certainly a little more charity is in order if people with confl icting ideologies are to move beyond mere toleration of one another...

...More crudely still, Armstrong lumps some believers together with religious terrorists...

...Unlike Christianity, it deems only Arabic to be the language of God...

...By contrast, neither Jews nor Christians “acknowledge” the Koran as inspired or authoritative...

...But it’s presumptuous to assume, as the catalogue repeatedly does, that they had little interest in preserving the original integrity of the texts...

...it calls for the conversion of every person...

...It is true that the authors of these sacred books and the scribes who copied them had certain audiences and objectives in mind as they went about their work...

...In one display case sat a 14th-century manuscript of the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, discovered in Palestine and written in Arabic with an Islamic-style carpet page...

...Indeed, a slippery narrative of religious unity is unlikely to inspire respect among competing faiths or help them live together amid their deepest differences...

...An introductory essay by Karen Armstrong—a former nun turned bestselling religion author and a member of the controversial Jesus Seminar—typifi es the problems with the exhibition, recycling tiresome stereotypes about religious belief...

...It received rave reviews from the British and international press, and its success no doubt will magnify its infl uence...

...But jabs at the integrity of religious texts, the sanitizing of religious history, and caricatures of conservative believers all seem ill-designed to achieve that end...

...The sacred texts are shot through with historical flaws, we learn, but nonetheless contain a remnant of spiritual truth...

...To cite a single example, a bronze coin minted in Ephesus in the fi rst century A.D...

...It was an effort designed to ease simmering religious tensions in the United Kingdom...

...But the remarkable fact, ignored by Sacred’s editors, is that the ancient scroll was identical to the text in the standard Hebrew Bible more than 95 percent of the time, and virtually none of the variations involved matters of doctrine...

...Already, a spinoff educational program, “Sacred on Location,” is touring museums and libraries in Britain...

...It emphasizes, for example, the “literary transformation” that allegedly occurred in the texts of all three faiths...

...And there was a Tyndale Bible (1526), one of only three copies of this English translation known to have escaped its public burning...

...Sure enough, the Jewish texts on Joe Loconte is a senior fellow at the London Centre for American Studies and a commentator on religion and politics for National Public Radio...

...From Faro, Portugal, came the only surviving copy of the fi rst book ever printed in that country— the Pentateuch...

...display were almost exclusively in Hebrew and Aramaic and the Islamic texts in Arabic, while the Christian texts were in Arabic, Armenian, Catalan, Coptic, English, Greek, Latin, Syriac, and more...

...The intent was apparently to suggest Christian cultural borrowing from Islam...

...The discussion of the Dead Sea Scrolls, manuscripts from the fi rst or second century B.C...

...Planners of future exhibitions, however, will do well to avoid the confusions and distortions of the original...