Available in | English |
---|---|
Created by | Elbe Spurling |
URL | www |
Commercial | No |
Current status | Inactive |
The Brick Bible (originally published as The Brick Testament) is a project created by Elbe Spurling [1] in which Bible stories are illustrated using still photographs of dioramas constructed entirely out of Lego bricks.
The project began as a website in October 2001 that featured six stories from the Book of Genesis, and is completely unaffiliated with the Lego company. [2] There is also a Brick Bible book series. [3]
Throughout stories are retold using passages from the Bible, with chapter and verse cited, the wording being a free adaptation that Spurling says is based on a number of public domain Bible translations. [4] Occasionally, mostly when images are being used to contrast with the underlying scripture, Spurling dramatizes the images with additional text. Such text is displayed in gray instead of the usual black.
Spurling's own commentary occasionally appears in illustrations and is displayed in gray text, and also as original titles for the stories themselves. A Rolling Stone article that is included as a link in the original Brick Testament web site suggests that Spurling is an atheist. [5] In 2015 Spurling announced on Facebook that she was an atheist, a transgender woman, and a lesbian, and had legally changed her name to Elbe Spurling but would likely retain her birth name, Brendan Powell Smith, for her books. [1] Her author page at Amazon.com is listed under "Brendan Powell Smith." [6]
The dioramas seen in The Brick Bible are created from Spurling's personal Lego collection. The pieces come from hundreds of Lego sets dating from the 1960s to the present.
In the few instances where alterations are made to Lego elements, they are generally simple changes made with a hobby knife or permanent ink marker. An example alteration is God's hair: Spurling made God's white hair by carving a white helmet piece. The only completely non-Lego part of Spurling's scenes is the background sky. [7]
All of Spurling's images are digital. Spurling photographed early scenes with a Nikon Coolpix 950. She now uses a Nikon Coolpix 4500. After photographing the scenes, she adds speech balloons and sometimes makes alterations using image editing software.
The Brick Testament website [8] began in October 2001. It originally featured six stories from the Book of Genesis. The site now contains over 400 illustrated stories, from both the Old and New Testaments, and over 4,500 images. [9] [10] It had an Alexa traffic rank of 53,191 in April 2007.[ citation needed ] Each story is tagged if it contains nudity, sexual content, violence and/or cursing. [10] As of 2009 [update] , the website had had over two million visitors. [11]
Several hardcover Brick Testament books have been published, The Brick Testament: Stories from the Book of Genesis, [12] [13] The Brick Testament: The Story of Christmas, [14] [15] The Brick Testament: The Ten Commandments, [16] and The Brick Bible: A New Spin on the Old Testament. [17] The US retailer Sam's Club withdrew The Brick Bible from sale in November 2011, "due to the complaints of a handful of people that it is vulgar and violent". [18]
In a Facebook post made on April 3, 2015, Spurling announced a new project entitled the Brick Book of Mormon. The stated goal of the project is "to make these teachings better known to the world. It is designed to capture the interest of non-Mormons curious to know what the LDS Church teaches, as well as believing Mormons looking for a fun new way to learn and share the history and teachings of their church." [19] The project was officially launched on February 6, 2017. [20]
The Standard Works of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are the four books that currently constitute its open scriptural canon. The four books of the standard works are:
The Book of Genesis is the first book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. Its Hebrew name is the same as its first word, Bereshit. Genesis purports to be an account of the creation of the world, the early history of humanity, and the origins of the Jewish people.
Noah appears as the last of the Antediluvian patriarchs in the traditions of Abrahamic religions. His story appears in the Hebrew Bible, the Quran and Baha'i writings, and extracanonically.
The Old Testament (OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by the Israelites. The second division of Christian Bibles is the New Testament, written in Koine Greek.
The Tower of Babel is an origin myth and parable in the Book of Genesis meant to explain the existence of different languages and cultures.
Cain is a biblical figure in the Book of Genesis within Abrahamic religions. He is the elder brother of Abel, and the firstborn son of Adam and Eve, the first couple within the Bible. He was a farmer who gave an offering of his crops to God. However, God was not pleased and favored Abel's offering over Cain's. Out of jealousy, Cain killed his brother, for which he was punished by God with the curse and mark of Cain. He had several children, starting with Enoch and including Lamech.
Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts (mss) or of printed books. Such texts may range in dates from the earliest writing in cuneiform, impressed on clay, for example, to multiple unpublished versions of a 21st-century author's work. Historically, scribes who were paid to copy documents may have been literate, but many were simply copyists, mimicking the shapes of letters without necessarily understanding what they meant. This means that unintentional alterations were common when copying manuscripts by hand. Intentional alterations may have been made as well, for example, the censoring of printed work for political, religious or cultural reasons.
The oldest surviving Hebrew Bible manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, date to c. the 2nd century BCE. Some of these scrolls are presently stored at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. The oldest text of the entire Christian Bible, including the New Testament, is the Codex Sinaiticus dating from the 4th century CE, with its Old Testament a copy of a Greek translation known as the Septuagint. The oldest extant manuscripts of the vocalized Masoretic Text date to the 9th century CE. With the exception of a few biblical sections in the Nevi'im, virtually no biblical text is contemporaneous with the events it describes.
Elohim, the plural of אֱלוֹהַּ, is a Hebrew word meaning "gods" or "godhood". Although the word is grammatically plural, in the Hebrew Bible it most often takes singular verbal or pronominal agreement and refers to a single deity, particularly the God of Israel. In other verses it refers to the singular gods of other nations or to deities in the plural.
The Joseph Smith Translation (JST), also called the Inspired Version of the Holy Scriptures (IV), is a revision of the Bible by Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, who said that the JST/IV was intended to restore what he described as "many important points touching the salvation of men, [that] had been taken from the Bible, or lost before it was compiled". Smith was killed before he deemed it complete, though most of his work on it was performed about a decade beforehand. The work is the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) with some significant additions and revisions. It is considered a sacred text and is part of the canon of Community of Christ (CoC), formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and other Latter Day Saint churches. Selections from the Joseph Smith Translation are also included in the footnotes and the appendix of the Latter-day Saint edition of the LDS-published King James Version of the Bible. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' edition of the Bible includes selections from the JST in its footnotes and appendix. It has officially canonized only certain excerpts that appear in the Pearl of Great Price. These excerpts are the Book of Moses and Smith's revision of part of the Gospel of Matthew.
The Book of Moses, dictated by Joseph Smith, is part of the scriptural canon for some denominations in the Latter Day Saint movement. The book begins with the "Visions of Moses", a prologue to the story of the creation and the fall of man, and continues with material corresponding to the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible's (JST) first six chapters of the Book of Genesis, interrupted by two chapters of "extracts from the prophecy of Enoch".
Chiastic structure, or chiastic pattern, is a literary technique in narrative motifs and other textual passages. An example of chiastic structure would be two ideas, A and B, together with variants A' and B', being presented as A,B,B',A'. Chiastic structures that involve more components are sometimes called "ring structures" or "ring compositions". These may be regarded as chiasmus scaled up from words and clauses to larger segments of text.
Typology in Christian theology and biblical exegesis is a doctrine or theory concerning the relationship of the Old Testament to the New Testament. Events, persons or statements in the Old Testament are seen as types prefiguring or superseded by antitypes, events or aspects of Christ or his revelation described in the New Testament. For example, Jonah may be seen as the type of Christ in that he emerged from the fish's belly and thus appeared to rise from death.
Captain Victory is a comic book originally created, written and drawn by Jack Kirby. It was first published by American comic book publisher Pacific Comics in 1981. Kirby agreed to create a comic for the fledgling publisher because Pacific promised him full creative control, and ownership of the characters.
The Old Testament is the first section of the two-part Christian biblical canon; the second section is the New Testament. The Old Testament includes the books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) or protocanon, and in various Christian denominations also includes deuterocanonical books. Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Protestants use different canons, which differ with respect to the texts that are included in the Old Testament.
The Manga Bible: From Genesis to Revelation is an original English-language manga adaptation of the Bible created by British artist Ajinbayo "Siku" Akinsiku, who was responsible for the concept and the art and the scripter Akin Akinsiku. It was released in July 2007 by Galilee Trade. They summarize the narrative of the Bible in a 200-page graphic novel including the Old Testament and the New Testament. With their work, they combine the Western and the Japanese culture to tell the Bible in a new way. The book is especially aimed at readers between the ages of 15 and 25. Church representatives were praising the graphic novel, as opening up the ideas of the Bible to a new target group. Ajinbayo Akinsiku was born in England and grew up in Nigeria; he now lives again in England. He thus represents different cultures in his artistic work, which becomes also apparent in The Manga Bible. He became known for his work on 2000 AD and Judge Dredd.
The acknowledgement of Lego in popular culture is demonstrated by the toy's wide representation in publication, television and film, and its common usage in artistic and cultural works.
Ransom Riggs is an American writer and filmmaker best known for the book Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Bible:
2 Chronicles 10 is the tenth chapter of the Second Book of Chronicles the Old Testament in the Christian Bible or of the second part of the Books of Chronicles in the Hebrew Bible. The book is compiled from older sources by an unknown person or group, designated by modern scholars as "the Chronicler", and had the final shape established in late fifth or fourth century BCE. This chapter belongs to the section focusing on the kingdom of Judah until its destruction by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar and the beginning of restoration under Cyrus the Great of Persia. The focus of this chapter is the kingdom of Israel's division in the beginning of Rehoboam's reign.