The word of God has appeared in many forms over the centuries, as scribes and printers have transmitted holy writings by hand and machine.
Now two Southern California universities are preserving some of this history with separate sets of rare religious texts that originated 1,500 years apart but share a common biblical thread.
Azusa Pacific University has acquired five fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest known versions of the Hebrew Bible.
The 2,000-year-old shards, featuring passages from the books of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, will be exhibited in May at the evangelical Christian university in the San Gabriel Valley.
At Loyola Marymount University, a leaf from one of the first Gutenberg Bibles is now available for public viewing at the Westchester campus.
The double-sided page, including chapters from the Book of Isaiah in black gothic script, was printed in the 1450s by Johannes Gutenberg, who is credited with inventing the movable-type printing press.
Biblical scholars say the artifacts offer tantalizing new research possibilities and provide the public with rare glimpses of history.
"You get a tingle from this stuff that you don't get from looking at an image on the Web," said Stephen Tabor, curator of early printed books at the Huntington Library in San Marino, which owns a nearly complete Gutenberg Bible and has exhibited photos of the Dead Sea Scrolls. "It's the opportunity to re-verify for yourself that history is real."
The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 by a Bedouin shepherd in a cave near the ruins of Qumran, east of Jerusalem. In all, more than 950 worn and incomplete scrolls were eventually recovered from 11 caves, setting off decades of sometimes turbulent jockeying by scholars eager to study manuscripts that date from about the time of Jesus.
The five fragments in the Azusa Pacific collection, each about the size of an adult's palm, are stored in a campus safe until they can be readied for the May exhibition that will use artifacts to tell the history of the Bible.
The university bought four of the fragments from a private rare-manuscript dealer in Venice. The fifth came from a Christian ministry in Phoenix that collects biblical artifacts.
University officials would not say how much they paid for the pieces, which include a fragment from the Book of Daniel.
