Some 50,000 students in 233 schools throughout Portugal are involved in a gruelling marathon that will lead them to copy by hand the whole Bible in Portuguese by the end of the year. The project called “The Bible handwritten by the young” is being coordinated by the Portuguese Ministry of Education. “The idea is to bring the Bible into schools, and that ought not to seem odd. It’s a pretext to give a cultural dimension”, said the project coordinator Alfredo Abreu. “In various schools the scriptorium of the medieval monasteries has been recreated, and students and teachers have joined together to mount exhibitions dedicated to the products used by monks in the manufacture of the inks they needed to copy the various works”. The Bible Society will, at the end of the first phase, give a CD-Rom to every school that participated in the project together with a printed reproduction of the 35,000 verses so far copied. The Bible Marathon will continue till November 2004, with the participation of 100,000 people of all ages, regions and religious confessions.
