David Tresilian reviews the exhibition Livres de Parole: Torah, Bible, Coran (Books of Speech: the Torah, the Bible and the Qur'an) at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris Torah, Bible and Qur'an : "In the long history of l'homo religiosus," writes the curator in the catalogue to the exhibition Livres de Parole: Torah, Bible, Coran (Books of Speech: the Torah, the Bible and the Qur'an) currently at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, "monotheism is a recent development, bringing about a veritable revolution in the relationship between the gods and man." This new relationship is common to the three monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, copies of whose sacred books are on display in this exhibition. Involving the substitution of "a single God who is beyond any form of representation, residing instead in a text, [...for] the thousand and one, largely anthropomorphic deities of polytheism," each of these religions is characterised by the establishment of a special covenant between God and his people. According to this exhibition, it is the fact and nature of this covenant that best marks out the special character of the three monotheistic religions, setting it down in writing in the shape of livres de parole, such as the Torah, the Bible and the Qur'an. The record of God in a text, whether setting out his law or his words, calls for special interpretative techniques on the part of the reader and special attitudes to the text, as this exhibition reveals. Getting to know God becomes a matter of correctly interpreting the texts he has inspired, generating centuries of textual commentary as a result. Just as important as correctly understanding the texts is correctly establishing them and placing them in the right order. Spurious and apocryphal writings are excluded in a process of textual stabilisation, leading, in the Christian case, to the canonical books of the Bible, and to the order and arrangement of the suras of the Qur'an in the case of Islam. Christianity, and to a lesser extent, Judaism, has had a relaxed attitude to translation, as the presence in this exhibition of copies of the Vulgate, St. Jerome's 5th century Latin version of the scriptures, confirms. This was made while the saint was in residence at Bethlehem in Palestine, and it was just the first of a series of translations of the Christian scriptures into vernacular languages, a series that became an avalanche during the western European Reformation. This exhibition contains a handsome 9th-century example of St. Jerome's Latin version of the Bible, as revised by Alcuin upon the order of Charlemagne, as well as a beautifully illustrated 13th-century version of the gospels in Ethiopian. Syrian monks made the first translations of this material from Greek into Geez (ancient Ethiopian) in the 5th century, a century after the conversion of Ethiopia to Christianity. There are also fragments of the Old Testament Book of Exodus in Coptic. Dating from the 3rd or 4th century, these were discovered in Egypt at the end of the 19th century by French archaeologist Gaston Maspéro, and a further discovery at Nag Hammadi in 1945 rounded out Maspéro's find by bringing to light a hoard of early Christian writings in Coptic, including versions of the apocryphal gospels of Thomas and Philip and various Gnostic texts. By contrast, Islam has tended always to identify the word of God with the Arabic language as used in the Qur'an, and for this reason few translations for Muslim use were produced before the 19th century. Earlier generations of non- Arabic speaking Muslims would have read the Arabic text, while relying on interlinear translation and glosses to explain the meaning of recondite vocabulary, as demonstrated in copies of the Qur'an produced in Persia and India on display here. While these translations would have been used by believers for religious purposes, early European translations of the Qur'an were not authorised and would have been chiefly used for polemic, as was the case for the copy of the Qur'an translated into Latin in the 12th century included in this exhibition, made on the order of Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny. However, later printed Latin versions of the Qur'an produced in Europe, such as that done in Hamburg in 1694 and included here, seem to have been made to further European study of Arabic, later vernacular translations often being of high quality and showing a good command of the language. Beyond this focus on textual dissemination and translation, the exhibition also examines the ways in which these religious texts have been copied, illuminated, commented upon and used, whether as part of formal religious study or ceremony or in the form of scraps and fragments used for amulets and charms. The exhibition contains pages from the earliest known copy of the Qur'an, copied onto parchment and believed to date from the second half of the 7th century. A later copy, made in Egypt and dating from the end of the 14th century, beautifully shows off the ideals of calligraphic excellence associated with Mamluk rule. Copies of the Qur'an made in India, Iran, Central Asia, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, especially from Senegal, illustrate the various devotional uses to which the text has been put. The vast majority of the items in this exhibition has been taken from the holdings of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which has put the religious texts of the three monotheisms on show together, allowing intriguing comparisons to be made. An accompanying catalogue, beautifully designed and illustrated, brings the whole together, adding useful essays and contextual material. For those not able to make it to Paris to take in this valuable exhibition, the Library has also arranged a virtual exhibition accessible on the Web at the Bibliothèque nationale site. This, it might be thought, is yet a further step in the practices of reproduction and dissemination of the religious texts already recorded in the physical exhibition. Livres de Parole: Torah, Bible, Coran, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. 9 November 2005 -- 30 April 2006 Virtual exhibition at http://expositions.bnf.fr/parole/ index.htm
