Lines of Thought: Communicating Faith

Some of the world's most important religious texts are currently on display in Cambridge as part of Cambridge University Library's 600th anniversary exhibition - Lines of Thought: Discoveries that Changed the World. For his pains, Tyndale was strangled and burnt as a heretic two years after this translation was published. Will Hale As part of its 600th celebrations, the University Library has made a series of six films - one for each of the six themes explored in Lines of Thought - with the latest film: Communicating Faith taking a close look at some iconic religious treasures across all the major faiths including Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The oldest item in Communicating Faith is a text for prayer, the so-called Nash Papyrus. Dating from the second century before Christ, the fragments on display in Cambridge contain the Ten Commandments and until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was the oldest surviving manuscript of any part of the Hebrew Bible. However, one of the oldest and perhaps the most valuable items in the Library's collections - and perhaps one of the stars of Lines of Thought - is a recovered text called the Codex Zacynthius. Codex Zacynthius is a parchment book where the leaves have been scraped and rewritten (a palimpsest).