"Adam and Eve" from The Brick Testament website

The Brick Testament is a project created by Brendan Powell Smith 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. The popularity of the website has also spawned a Brick Testament book series. Image File history File links Adam and Eve from thebricktestament. ... Image File history File links Adam and Eve from thebricktestament. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... The Bible (sometimes The Book, Good Book, Word of God, The Word, or Scripture), from Greek (τα) βιβλια, (ta) biblia, (the) books, is the classical name for the Hebrew Bible of Judaism or the combination of the Old Testament and New Testament of Christianity (The Bible therefore actually refers to at least... A diorama is a partially three dimensional model of a landscape typically showing historical events, nature scenes, cityscapes, etc. ... Lego Group logo Lego sets feature a large variety of themed people (called “minifigures”), including the Space, Castle, and City figures above. ... The front page of the English Wikipedia Website. ... 2001: A Space Odyssey. ... Genesis (Greek: Γένεσις, having the meanings of birth, creation, cause, beginning, source and origin) is the first book of the Torah (five books of Moses) and hence the first book of the Tanakh, part of the Hebrew Bible; it is also the first book of the Christian Old Testament. ...

Aside from its ambitious scope and its use of Lego as an art medium, what also sets the project apart from other illustrated versions of the Bible is its strict adherence to scripture. All stories are retold using direct quotes of passages from the Bible, with chapter and verse numbers cited. Many religions and spiritual movements hold certain written texts (or series of spoken legends not traditionally written down) to be sacred. ...

The website and book series have become popular both among religious believers who often use its material for evangelical and instructional purposes (Sunday School classes, etc.) and among non-Christians who view The Brick Testament as pointing out the absurdities of the Bible. Sunday school, Indians and whites. ...

Purpose

Smith's stated purpose in creating The Brick Testament is to increase people's knowledge of the Bible, whether they are believers or not. A graduate of Boston University with a degree in Philosophy & Religion, Smith says he first read the Bible in its entirety in college, and came away from it amazed at how little of it most people are familiar with, regardless of their level of religious devotion. Boston University is a non-sectarian private university located in Boston, Massachusetts. ... Philosophy, (Greek: Φιλοσοφία, philo-sophia, love of wisdom) // Meaning and use of Philosophy The word once included all forms of knowledge, and all methods for attaining it. ...

Techniques

"The Last Supper" from The Brick Testament website

The dioramas seen in The Brick Testament are created at home using Smith's personal Lego collection. He generally does not alter the Lego bricks themselves, but picks and chooses pieces from hundreds of Lego sets dating from the 1960s to the present, and recombines them to create the various Biblical scenes. Image File history File links The Last Supper from thebricktestament. ... Image File history File links The Last Supper from thebricktestament. ... The 1960s in its most obvious sense refers to the decade between 1960 and 1969, but the expression has taken on a wider meaning over the past twenty years. ...

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. One notable instance of such alteration is God's hair. Since the Lego Group has never released a white hair piece for their minifigures, Smith made God's white hair by carving a white helmet piece. The only completely non-Lego part of Smith's scenes is the background sky, which is generally a piece of posterboard with blue sky printed on it. God is the term used to denote the Supreme Being believed by monotheistic religions to exist and to be the creator and ruler of the whole Universe. ... The Lego Group is a family-owned company, based in Billund, Denmark and best known for the manufacture of Lego-brand toys. ... Minifigures are the small, plastic LEGO people. ... Pith helmet of Harry S. Truman For information about the band Helmet, see Helmet (band) Pickelhaube of a Swedish Royal Guard soldier A helmet (a 15th century loan from Middle French, a diminutive of Frankish helm, from Proto-Germanic *khelmaz, PIE *kelmo- a cover) is a form of protective clothing...

All of Smith's images are digital. Smith photographed early scenes with a Nikon Coolpix 950. He currently uses a Nikon Coolpix 4500. After photographing the scenes, he adds speech balloons and sometimes makes alterations using image editing programs such as Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop. Coolpix 950 The Nikon Coolpix 950 was introduced in early 1999 to supersede the Coolpix 900 in the Nikon Coolpix series. ... Nikon redirects here; there is also a leader of the Russian Orthodox Church named Patriarch Nikon. ... Four different shapes of speech or thought balloons Speech balloons (also speech bubbles, dialogue balloons) or word balloons) are a graphic convention used in comic books, strips, and cartoons to allow words (and much less often, pictures) to be understood as representing the speech or thoughts of a given character... Paint Shop Pro (PSP) is a bitmap graphics editor and vector graphics editor for computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system that was originally published by Minneapolis-based Jasc Software. ... Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editor (with some text and vector graphics capabilities) developed and published by Adobe Systems. ...

The wording of the Bible passages used in The Brick Testament is Smith's own, and is based on a number of public domain Bible translations.

Website

The Brick Testament website began in October 2001. It originally featured six stories from the book of Genesis. The site now contains nearly 200 illustrated stories from both the Old and New Testaments. It had an Alexa traffic rank of 44,701 in August 2005. Genesis (Greek: Γένεσις, having the meanings of birth, creation, cause, beginning, source and origin) is the first book of the Torah (five books of Moses) and hence the first book of the Tanakh, part of the Hebrew Bible; it is also the first book of the Christian Old Testament. ... Note: Judaism uses the term Tanakh instead of Old Testament, because it does not recognize the New Testament as being part of the Biblical canon. ... // What is the New Testament? The New Testament, sometimes called the Greek Testament or Greek Scriptures, is the name given to the part of the Christian Bible that was written after the birth of Jesus. ... Alexa Internet is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon. ...

Each story is marked for the following content:

• nudity
• sexual content
• violence
• cursing

The website features official Brick Testament merchandise, including the "Moses & the Ten Commandments" and "The Holy Trinity" custom sets.

Books

Currently, five hardcover Brick Testament books have been published. A hardcover (or hardback or hardbound) book is bound with rigid protective covers (typically of cardboard covered with cloth or heavy paper) and a stitched spine. ...

Stories from the Book of Genesis

The Brick Testament: Stories from the Book of Genesis (ISBN 1931686459) was the first Brick Testament book in print. It features more than 175 photographs and was published by Quirk Books in 2003. It contains the following stories:

1. The Garden of Eden
2. Cain and Abel
3. The Flood
4. Noah's Insobriety
5. The Tower of Babel
6. Sodom and Gomorrah
7. God Tests Abraham
8. Jacob and His Cousins
9. Jacob Wrestles God
10. Joseph Is Ambushed

The Story of Christmas

The Brick Testament: The Story of Christmas (ISBN 1594740127). It is 175 pages and contains quotations from Matthew and Luke. It was published by Quirk Books in 2004. The Gospel of Matthew (literally: according to Matthew, Greek: Κατα Μαθθαιον ) is one of the four Gospel accounts of the New Testament. ... The Gospel of Luke is the third of the four canonical Gospels of the New Testament, which tell the story of Jesus life, death, and resurrection. ...

The Ten Commandments

The Brick Testament: The Ten Commandments (ISBN 1594740445). It was published by Quirk Books in 2005. It contains the following stories:

1. Moses Is Born
2. Moses Commits Murder
3. Moses Marries a Midianite
4. The Burning Bush
5. The Staff of Aaron
6. The Ten Plagues
7. The Parting of the Red Sea
8. The Ten Commandments
9. The Golden Calf
10. The Ark of the Covenant

Das 1. Buch L.

Das 1. Buch L. (ISBN 3725413363) is the German language version of The Brick Testament: Stories from the Book of Genesis. It was published by Sanssouci in 2004. German (called Deutsch in German; in German the term germanisch is equivalent to English Germanic), is a member of the western group of Germanic languages and is one of the worlds major languages. ...

レゴで遊ぶ天地創造ものがたり

レゴで遊ぶ天地創造ものがたり (ISBN 4576042351) is the Japanese language version of The Brick Testament: Stories from the Book of Genesis. It was published by Futami (二見書房) in 2004. Japanese (Japanese: 日本語; â–¶(?)) is a language spoken by over 127 million people, mainly in Japan, but also by Japanese emigrant communities around the world. ...

External links

General

• The Brick Testament
• The Rev. Brendan Powell Smith
• Alexa.com statistics

News articles

• Challender, Mary (Mar. 24, 2005) Lego toys convert to Bible stories. Des Moines Register.
• Lualo, Magnus (Summer, 2005) Builder of The Brick Testament. Brick Journal, pp. 17-18.
• Vo, Kim (Nov. 22, 2003). "The Bible, brick by brick: Genesis stories illustrated in Legos". San Jose Mercury News.