There was much eager anticipation as took delivery of the Saint John’s Bible in October 2025. To give you some idea, the image above was us taking delivery of just one part of the display case for it!
A Glorious Gift
If you’re visiting Norfolk from out of town and you’d like to take a look at our edition of The Saint John’s Bible, please email our Director of Parish Life, Rachel Welch.
You may remember that in 2025 we hosted two volumes of The Saint John’s Bible here at Christ & St. Luke’s. These wonderful works of devotional art enlivened our worship and ignited our spiritual imaginations with the beauty of the script and the powerful images.
Over the months they were here, 15 volunteer docents from our parish guided more than 200 people in experiencing these incredible volumes up close. One of the most fascinating aspects of this work is the way it mixes old styles and new forms. In these volumes our sacred stories were rendered using ancient artistic techniques—the text is all hand-produced calligraphy, written using traditional materials like quills and hand-ground inks. At the same time, these ancient stories and practices were enlivened by a series of stunning, modern artistic illuminations which bring new insights and vitality to these familiar words:
The original manuscript of The Saint John’s Bible is on permanent display at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. In June 2025 a team from our parish got to go and experience it in person, an incredible trip which they wrote about here. The volumes we had previously on loan were part of The Saint John’s Bible Heritage Edition which is the only full-size fine art edition of the original manuscript that will ever be produced. In all, only 299 Heritage Editions have been created, and because many of the major illuminations were hand-finished, each Heritage Edition is unique.
Thanks to a generous donor who was also deeply moved by this monumental work of devotional art, Christ & St. Luke’s now serves as a home for one of these rare and exquisite Heritage Editions of The Saint John’s Bible. As stewards of one of these valuable full sets which encompass the entirety of the Bible across seven magnificent volumes, we join other prestigious churches, cathedrals, schools, libraries, and religious institutions around the world as a permanent home for these inspirational works.
We use these volumes on occasion in our worship, and you will see the images appear in formation classes and on our bulletins, but they live permanently in the Parlor in our Parish House so that you can come and see them up close. A team of dedicated docents from the parish is available to help lead you into the wonders of these works, and will develop ways for us to share them with the wider community.
This gift of a full set of the The Saint John’s Bible Heritage Edition is an incredible way to honor that history while also showing our excitement for the future of this marvelous parish, which has long promoted art as a powerful avenue to the Divine. We look forward to the ways in which these volumes will help inspire the spiritual imagination of generations to come in this place. What a gift!
