Ye olde Bible

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

It’s not the prettiest Bible - bound with black hockey tape, missing its covers and with a particular, well - old - smell.

Stuart Johnstone, though, thinks his antique shop find years ago is pretty special. “I went into an antique shop, at the time it was here in Cambridge - only there a few months,” the Waterville man recalls. He used to snoop around these shops in his spare time as a painter, always interested in odd finds and the buying and selling that went with them. “They had all kinds of things, but nothing that interested me - except this old Bible.”

He asked what the store owners wanted for it, and they didn’t know - did he have any old postcards to trade?

He did, and they did and the book dated 1708 went home with him.

Johnstone thought the book “might be nice to have,” and his interest in it was reignited earlier this spring with the story of the return of a “vinegar” Bible to a Lunenburg church.

A handset Bible from 1717, the “vinegar” Bibles contain a common error: in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 20: Jesus sent his disciples into the “vinegar” instead of the “vineyard.” “This isn’t one of those Bibles, and I don’t know if it has any value - someone may want it, I don’t know,” Johnstone says. “It’s 300 years old - I don’t know where it come from, and how they got it - I don’t know.”

The book is in hard shape, but Johnstone says “I done what I done to it to keep it together.”

Still, inside the three-inch thick book, there is a two-page sketch of the “map of paradise” and a plate of Moses and Aaron. The dedication is “to the most high and mightie prince” James, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France and ireland, Defender of the Faith and Christianity.

A quick internet search of old Bibles for sale found a 1707 King James Bible appraised at $5,000, but there is nothing In Johnstone’s Bible to suggest it is of the same period - and certainly not in the same condition. “I haven’t read it through - I’m a believer, and always carry a Bible in the car and read it now and then,” Johnstone says. “Maybe this was a pulpit Bible, and a church had it. I suppose someone could restore it.”