There is something to be said about holding a piece of living history in your hands.
Last Friday, the members of Dr. Matthew Holbreich’s Bible in America class were able to do just that. We assembled under the grand McGraw Rotunda in the New York Public Library for our private tour of the Library and a viewing of documents that are as old as America herself. The impetus for this class trip was inspired after many weeks of delving deep into the texts that helped form the basis of American democracy and society.
The class itself traced the development of Constitutional law from its origins both in the Torah as well as the Christian Bible. The class charted the various ideas found in these ancient yet still shockingly relevant texts and how they were both different and similar to the law that we are all so familiar with today. In order to concretize the ideas discussed, Dr. Holbreich wanted his students to not only understand the history, but to see it for themselves.
The tour began with a viewing of a very rare Gutenberg Bible in the Rotunda itself, one of the very first to be printed in the Western World, and later moved into a private room where the students were actually able to handle certain texts. We began with a draft for the Constitution of South Carolina, one of the first constitutions established in America written by philosopher and physician John Locke. The students sat around the table in awe as the pamphlet-sized book was passed around the table. One student described the feeling of being able to turn the pages of the constitution as “electrifying”. The curator explained the history and significance of the constitution, as well as how the museum came to acquire such a piece.
The exhibition really came alive for the class when the curator passed around a document entitled “Translations of the Psalms from the Hebrew” which is a 1750 Boston translation by Cotton Mather (whose first name actually comes from the Hebrew word Katan, meaning small). Mather retranslated Psalms because he felt that the original King James version was not true to the original Hebrew text. One student opened a Hebrew version of Tehillim on her phone and the class as a whole attempted to compare how accurate Mather’s translation was to their understanding of the text. Dr. Holbreich explained that translations are particularly pertinent to the development of law because the mistranslation of a word can lead to a totally different meaning then later attributed to the text. The ability to check the accuracy of a text allowed for the students to not only to hold history, but also interact with a two and a half century old text in a distinctly modern way.
One of the later texts examined was an 1850 copy of the Book of Mormon. Alt-hough Mormonism does not have as significant an impact on the development of American law because of its status as a later religion, it was still relevant to see how both Judaism and Christianity are intertwined into Mormon law and theology. The students were allowed to flip through the book and were encouraged to discuss the differences that they saw between the Mormon text and the early
Christian and Judaic texts that they had explored in class.
What really concretized the experience, though, was when the students got to hold and pass around Thomas Jefferson’s pen. Elana Gelman (‘16) said “It was really an amazing opportunity to come so class to these historical documents. Seeing the pen of Jefferson up close left a profound effect upon all of us and really cemented the authenticity of all the documents we read in class.”
It is one thing to learn that the documents we study every day are part of a larger historical mosaic that made our society into what it is today, it is quite another to experience it for yourself. Just steps away from the blue awning of Brookdale Hall lies a library filled with the ideas that were turned into writing, the writing that was turned into action, and the action that transformed all of human thought forever. And a few weeks ago, we got to hold those actions in our own hands.