Handwritten bibles were common before the invention
of the printing press, but nowadays they are considered a rarity. 63-year-old
Philip Patterson, a retired interior designer from New York, has
spent the last four years copying every single word in the King James
Bible by hand.
Philip Patterson is not the most religious person
in the world. He goes to church regularly, but he has never been particularly
zealous. One might think the man from Philmont, New York, set out on
this painstaking quest as a spiritual journey, but Philip says he did it
out of curiosity, to learn more about the Book of Books. It all started one day
in 2007, when his longtime partner, Mohammed, told him
that Muslims have a tradition of writing out the Quran. Patterson
replied that the Bible was too long, but Mohammed said that was more of a
reason why he should do it. “The next day I started researching pens and
pencils and paper and never looked back,” Philip said. 2007 was the year he
started working on his prototype, copying the first five books of the
Bible, known as the Pentateuch, which allowed him to figure out
the technique, layout and the type of paper and writing instruments that were
most suitable for his grand project. Two years later, he started work on the
entire King James Bible.
The exact word count of the King James Bible depends on who
is doing the tallying, but most sources estimate it contains 788,000 words, all
of which were painstakingly copied by Philip Patterson, on 2,400 blank pages
of 19-by-13-inch watercolor paper. He worked at a wooden desk by his bed,
for up to 14 hours a day, but AIDS and anemia brought down the daily work
schedule average to between six and eight hours. And as if writing every word
in neat, loopy cursive wasn’t difficult enough, the modern scribe
also penciled in ruled lines on all the pages to guide his writing,
erasing them after he was done. “I hadn’t counted on the fact that it
would end up being beautiful,” Patterson told the Associated Press. “Or that it
would be so exhilarating. And so long.”
Asked what part of the Bible he enjoyed writing most, Philip
said the Book of Ruth was particularly enjoyable, because it was a tale of
people acting loyally and doing the right thing. He disliked the killings,
plagues and other kinds of violence in the Bible, and said that although he
respects Jesus for promoting peace and love, he found the character described
in the Gospel too glib and condescending to his disciples. After thousands of
hours of writing, Philip Patterson concluded that the Bible is more than just a
bunch of stories from thousands of years ago. “The begetting and the
begatting and all of that, that’s really incidental,” he said. “These people
are trying to understand where they fit into this world.” As for the effect the
four-year-long copying project has had on him, the father-of-one
said: “Every day as I write, I discover something new and it expands my
mind more and more. “Not so I can become more of a religious person, but
so that I can become more of a whole person.”
Philip Patterson wrote the last few lines of his
copy of the King James Bible during a ceremony at his church, St. Peter’s
Presbyterian, on May 11. He will spend another year binding the book and making
the covers, after which he plans to donate it to the church. He added that he
will use any opportunity he can find to do it all again…
Source: News One
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