Amarilloan assembles historic Bible collection
(The newspaper headline refers to Alan Arvello as an "Amarilloan." He actually lives in Canyon.)
By Mike Haynes
By Mike Haynes
Alan
Arvello had an idea for Vacation Bible School two years ago. Because 2011 was
the 400th anniversary of the King James version of the Bible, he
thought it would be cool to buy some facsimiles, or modern reproductions, of
the 1611 KJV and of other key versions of God’s Word.
He could use those to teach the
kids at Bible Believers Baptist Church how the sacred book came to us from the
ancient Hebrews to modern Christianity.
When the music director and Bible
teacher looked into assembling such a display, though, he was pleasantly
surprised to find that buying an original page from that famous 1611 edition
wasn’t out of his price range, and neither were single leaves from other
noteworthy Bibles, such as Martin Luther’s 1529 German New Testament and a
Latin Bible handwritten in Europe in the 1260s.
Arvello’s VBS project turned into a
collection of Bibles and Bible pages that illustrates the
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| Alan Arvello gives a presentation about his Bible collection. |
“The collection is not that
expensive,” he said. “I’ve spent about as much as a really nice used car. Of
course, you could get into thousands of dollars. A page from the Gutenberg
Bible runs over $100,000.”
The Square House Museum in
Panhandle will be the next stop for Arvello, whose day job is working as a
physician’s assistant. From the first week of June through July, the museum
will host “The History of the Bible in America.” (Call the museum for exact
dates, which aren’t definite yet.)
Visitors will see a page from the
first printing of English scripture in America, a rendering of Psalm 19 with
one column in English and the other in the Algonquin language. It was printed
in Boston in 1709, 73 years before the first complete English Bible was
published in America. A page from that 1782 Aitken Bible, authorized by
Congress and distributed to Revolutionary War soldiers, also will be on
display.
Apart from the American exhibit,
Arvello’s collection – which he has donated to his church –
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| Above is the title page of a 1611 Geneva Bible in Alan Arvello's collection. It was published the same year as the first edition of the more famous King James Bible. |
Arvello and his church focus on the
KJV because they believe it is the “absolute, final and sole authority” for
living the Christian life. They are convinced that the primary sources of the
KJV – the Hebrew Masoretic text of the Old Testament and the Textus Receptus
Greek document of the New Testament – are superior to the texts used by most
modern translations – the Greek Septuagint for the OT and the Alexandrian Greek
for the NT.
You don’t
have to be “King James Only,” however, to appreciate this collection, which
recently has expanded to include a book of sermons by Lancelot Andrews, one of
the main translators of the KJV; the first American edition of “Foxe’s Book of
Martyrs”; and the first authorized American edition of John Wesley’s biography.
Arvello has
the enthusiasm of a collector but also the passion of a believer.
“The main
purpose is for people to understand the history of how we got the Bible in
general, especially the King James Bible, and for people to appreciate the
sacrifice made through the centuries for us to have the Word of God,” he said.
“And also to understand the validity of the King James Bible. The lineage of
the new Bibles is not the same as that of the King James.”
For a look
at the collection or to order a DVD presentation by Arvello, go to
www.hiswordpreserved.com.
In our era
of digital information and throw-away values, we need all the history we can
get to give context to our lives.
