The King James Bible Tour

Sorry for the late posting today - 'tis the season -

Last night I was able to participate in a tour of the history of the King James Bible. Did you know the King James Bible is 400 years old this year? Clearly the Bible itself is much much older than that but the King James version is now 400 years old. The tour took place at Mayfair Church of Christ and was conducted by Ron Wicks who guided the tour which was of his personal collection of Bibles, cuneiform stones, Dead Sea Scroll fragments and the like. This man has an amazing collection.

His tour of the King James version of the Bible is sponsored by Thomas Nelson publishers and was quite interesting and fascinating. The history of how the bible came from stone tablets to the form we have today is explained in the tour. He gives an in depth insight into each era of the Bible's transformation and the people who helped to translate it from Greek and Hebrew to Latin, French, German and eventually English.
The books and articles in the cases were facimilies of the real thing, but Mr. Wicks had his personal collection there last night and we were able to see the actual stones from 4,000 years ago and an original "He" King James version of the Bible from 1611. It's called a "He" version because these first copies had misprints in various places, including in the book of Ruth, particularly Ruth 3:15 where it refers to Ruth as "he".

Mr. Wicks explained how the Bible came to be in the hands of the common people and how it came to be in the form people could carry around rather than just in a large format, more commonly known as a pulpit Bible. He also explained the difficulties various writers had in translating the Bible into English, many of whom lost their lives as a result. It definitely gives you a greater sense of appreciation for how we came to have the Bible we now use.

My dad organized the tour for a group of us (he has seen it previously and found it to be quite informative) and Erika and her mom also attended. I think they enjoyed it as much as I did. I'm not sure how much longer the display will be at Mayfair or how much longer Mr. Wicks will be giving tours, but you can probably call the Mayfair church office for more information. A link to their web site is here and you can get the phone number off the bottom of the page if you are interested in learning more.