During a recent vacation, my wife and I visited “Passages,” a traveling history of the Bible exhibit. After engagements in several cities across the country, the exhibit is currently in its last engagement in Santa Clarita, CA, where my wife and I experienced it. Housed in a future Hobby Lobby building (the Hobby Lobby owner is the developer of the Passages exhibit), the 30,000 square foot exhibit contains ancient Bibles, replicas of ancients texts, scrolls, and numerous other biblically related artifacts. The displays are contained in various period sets ranging from caves to Jewish Ghettos of the Holocaust (some replete with animatronics) and walks the visitor through the history of the Bible from its earliest manuscripts, to its translation processes, and dissemination. I recall standing before an animatronic of John Wycliffe behind prison bars. “John” would “come to life” every so many minutes and give a speech about translating the Bible into the common language of the people so that the Bible would be available to all, not just a select few. As I pondered the sacrifice of so many individuals to make the Bible available to the laity, some of them suffering martyrdom for the cause, I was struck by the thought that I didn’t even know how many versions of the Bible I owned. Not only printed copies, but electronic copies on my computer as well. In fact, as I stood before Wycliffe staring out through his prison bars, I had the entire Bible on the phone in my pocket. I was hit by a sobering thought: many individuals had suffered greatly, some ultimately, to make the Bible available to the common person—and yet here I stood with a greater availability to the Bible than these godly persons could have ever imagined, and yet so easily take it for granted. www.explorepassages.com
Working replica of Gutenburg’s press.
18
FULFILLED MAGAZINE • FALL 2015
