My colleague David Scott and I drove down to D.C. last Thursday and snuck into the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery just before the men in uniform shut the doors on the exhibit In the Beginning: Bibles before the Year 1000. I wish I had gone earlier, so that I could urge you, too, to go. There were far more items — and far more important items — than I had expected.

There were samples from most major finds and important collections — the Nag Hammadi library, the Dead Sea Scrolls, St. Catherine’s at Mount Sinai, Oxyrynchus, and the Cairo Geniza. These are the manuscripts you read about in the footnotes and the critical editions. Some of the earliest examples were just scrawled verses on papyrus that had been sifted from 2,000-year-old trash. My favorite display featured a chunk of wood on which someone had carved a seemingly random series of Bible verses in Coptic, perhaps as a handwriting exercise. There were manuscripts in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian, and other languages, some of them lavishly illustrated with icons or decorative script.

What most impressed me was how the early Christians treated the sacred text. To them it was clearly a sacred object, often a liturgical object, so the Bible was richly decorated with gems and precious metals, and the inks themselves sometimes cost a small fortune. I could have camped in those rooms for days just soaking in the fine artistry.

The good news is that the Smithsonian has preserved a permanent record of the exhibit in a gorgeous (and relatively inexpensive) coffee-table volume with useful commentary by several scholars — and heaping helpings of the Church Fathers. (I must raise a complaint about the binding, however, as it came unstuck in delivery.) The book is worth having. After a few pages, you’ll see why this exhibit set new attendance records for the Smithsonian.

The exhibit was remarkably sensitive to the eucharistic milieu of the early Church. Some of the books on display were not Bibles per se, but lectionaries and sacramentaries. And here’s a line worth keeping from the catalog: “the Christian Bible as a whole was the cumulative result of the reading habits of Christian communities in their liturgical gatherings.” We find that idea in Justin and Irenaeus and ever afterward. Sacrament and Scriptures are mutually illuminating. That’s why the Mass has always comprised two liturgies: Word and Eucharist.

Thanks to the Smithsonian for showing us the beauty of the Word inspired, as rendered by the Church at prayer.