Next weekend, Tacoma Art Museum will display the first handwritten Bible since the invention of the printing press 500 years ago. The Saint John’s Bible, commissioned by a Benedictine university in Minnesota, isn’t just a Bible – it’s more than 1,000 2-feet-by-3-feet pages of calligraphy and illuminations, thousands of hours of scribe work, hundreds of cow skins for the pages. It’s a huge medieval labor.

Yet in many ways, it’s far from medieval. The script has just been invented. The illuminations refer to non-Christian holy texts, to feminism, to NASA images, to the events of 9/11. Scribes, illuminators and theologians communicate by e-mail, phone and FedEx. This is a Bible that intends to be both theology and art, ecumenical and Christian, modern yet traditionalist. In both process and outcome, it’s a fascinating study in contrasts.

The Saint John’s Bible was begun on Ash Wednesday 2000. Originally an idea by eminent calligrapher Donald Jackson as a book of Gospels for the new millennium, the project fleshed out to include the entire Christian Bible, a nine-year-project that’s still under way. (Only the Pentateuch, Gospels and Acts, and Psalms will be displayed in the traveling show that’s coming to TAM.) It has involved six full-time scribes for the text, six illuminators for the images, a barrage of support staff, and a committee from St. John’s University in Minnesota to advise on theological issues.

The committee is American. The scribes are British, four working together in Jackson’s scriptorium near Monmouth, Wales, in the United Kingdom. Jackson, former scribe to Queen Elizabeth II, has done many illuminations himself. The guest illuminators, however, were selected by Jackson for their book-arts skills. One of them is Suzanne Moore, a Vashon Island artist.

“I’m currently working on Kings, chapters 21 and 22,” says Moore, leading the way into her basement studio. The outer room is neat, with plastic-rolled completed Bible pages awaiting FedExing to Jackson. A back room is paint-spattered, where Moore works on other book projects requiring messy painting techniques. Between them is the work room: a southern-lit table surrounded by paint pots, brushes, stamps and pencils, and lying on it a folio-size piece of vellum covered in calligraphy and fresh paint. It’s part of The Saint John’s Bible – and it’s pierced with dozens of tiny holes.

“Vellum needs a lot of stretching,” explains Moore. “I put it in a room with a hot shower, and it absorbs water. Then I staple it to the board to make it taut.”

It’s all part of the medieval process: Vellum, which Donald Jackson chose instead of paper because it lasts longer and is more forgiving, is a breathing material, made traditionally of calf skins (here cows, due to the sheer size of the Bible). Difficult even to find, the vellum then needs to be scraped with sandpaper before it can accept ink. And it consistently changes shape, a challenge for writing straight lines.

Moore at least isn’t working with medieval-style paints and brushes, though several other illuminators are. The scribes are even making their own goose-quill pens and grinding their own ink. The most Moore has to deal with is the 24-karat gold leaf (traditionally used to illustrate the presence of God) that is so thin a sheet of it can be crumpled by a single breath.

With all the labor involved, why use medieval techniques?

For Moore, it’s aesthetic.

“When you scrape the vellum you raise a fuzzy surface, and the quill or brush makes a channel, like in velveteen, that the ink sits down into. It’s not like paper, where the ink sits on top like a pillow. It’s very clear. … That’s one of the reasons vellum looks so extraordinary.”

And indeed, the black text seems to jump out of the pearly translucent surface, so much more alive-looking than paper.

For the folks at St. John’s, though, the reason’s practical. “(We’re) not trying to recreate history by using these materials; the simple fact is that if you want something to last, then these traditional tools and materials have proven themselves over time,” explains Tim Ternes, director of programming and exhibitions at the St. John’s museum and manuscript library. “The Bible will have a shelf life of between 1,500 and 2,000 years.”

If your Bible is to last thousands of years, you need to consider it as a historical record, and this is precisely one of the issues the St. John’s Benedictines have considered thoroughly. Illuminations splice the text every few pages, and the instructions that the St. John’s Committee on Illuminations and Text gave to artists was to create an image no one had yet seen, as well as incorporate aspects of world culture and history into the theology behind the relevant text.

The results are various. For “Adam and Eve” in Genesis, Jackson has painted two African faces bordered by Middle Eastern textile patterns. In her illustration for Kings 22, Moore is including lettering from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Quran and the Diamond Sutra. Repeated motifs like mandalas and Islamic arabesques make their way into many illustrations – Jackson provided each artist with rubber stamps of these geometric forms, to be used along with paint and lettering.

Moore’s own work, like her 25-year career in art books, is a mixture of letters and color, highly abstracted. Her image for Deuteronomy 30, which will be in the TAM exhibit, sets the anti-abortion slogan “Choose Life” into its original context as a “special treatment” (where an entire text is replicated in an illumination). The words are overlaid on a blanket of other letters, which Moore explains are translations of “Choose Life” into various world languages, the gray/red/white palette strong like the choice between right and wrong God is asking his people to make.

It’s clear that a strict Catholic theology is informing this illustrated Bible: controversial artists like Turner winner (and Catholic) Chris Ofili, who uses elephant dung in his religious paintings, haven’t been asked to participate, despite their stature. Yet one wonders whether the world view of the artist does come into play.

Absolutely, says Moore. One sticking point for her was an image for the book of Sirach, on the subject of wisdom. Moore had already decided to include pagan goddess figures and the moon, but the committee asked her to include an image of the communion table. A nonpracticing Christian for decades, Moore “was stuck” and had to call up a minister friend to explain the belief of God appearing in bread and wine.

“I feel so blind in some ways about the theology of it that I want a little more information,” says Moore.

And despite the intention of the committee to be ecumenical, many interreligious references are deeply hidden in the illustrations’ layers. “These are not images you merely glance at and view only from the surface. … They are visual spiritual meditations,” says Ternes.

Aside from the theology, there are other questions the Bible raises. Kriszta Kotsis, who teaches ancient and medieval art at the University of Puget Sound, points out that when medieval Bibles were produced like this, it was seen as an act of piety, which in turn produced a book of devotion either private or public. Yet, The Saint John’s Bible, despite its future use in services at St. John’s, is now touring the country as a work of art and reproduced as what Kotsis calls a “high-profile gift” – an edition of 360 full-size reproductions each costing $115,000, one of which has been presented already to the Pope and the Catholic archbishop of Minneapolis (though to no other major religious figures).

Is this Bible, then, devotion or art?

“The goal of The Saint John’s Bible is to ignite the spiritual imagination of all peoples throughout the world by commissioning a work of art that illuminates the word of God for a new millennium,” says Ternes, echoing the core values of the project: to ignite imagination, glorify God’s word, revive tradition, discover history, foster the arts and give voice to the unprivileged.

For Moore, the answer is on the visual level: “Hopefully the viewer will have a different insight – if not about the text, then about a visual interpretation of something. You don’t have to be a religious person or a Christian to appreciate … the combination of text and imagery. That has offered people something that they haven’t seen before.”

Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568

The Saint John’s Bible Glossary of Terms

Calligraphy: A technique of writing with a nibbed pen, producing thick and thin strokes

Script: The style of calligraphy used, like a font in printing

Scribe: The person who does the calligraphy

Scriptorium: A room where several scribes work together

Illumination: The picture illustrating a piece of biblical text

Special treatment: When an entire text is part of an illumination

Vellum: Calfskin, soaked and dried and used like paper What: “

Illuminating the Word: The Saint John’s Bible”

When: Saturday through Sept. 7; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursdays, noon-5 p.m. Sundays

Where: Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma

Related Events: Tudor Choir performs Renaissance works, 7:30 p.m. Saturday ($12 general, $5 members); “Typography through World History” talk, 7 p.m. July 17 (free); Theological Conversation with local clergy, 3 p.m. July 20 (free with museum admission); A Painter’s Perspective talk with artist Suzanne Moore, 10:30 a.m. Aug. 12 (free with admission) and 7 p.m. Aug. 21 (free); Calligraphy in the Open Arts Studio, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturdays through Sept. 7 (free with admission), noon-8 p.m. July 17 and Aug. 21.

Admission: $7.50 general, $6.50 seniors, students and military, free 5 and younger and third Thursdays

Information: 253-272-4258, www.tacomaartmuseum.org