"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; regular additions by Smith have now brought the site to nearly 200 illustrated stories from both the Old Testament and the New Testament. The popularity of the website has also spawned a Brick Testament book series published by Quirk Books. 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 holy jewish scripture: The Torah. ... 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 is a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 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. ... The Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures (also called the Hebrew Bible) constitutes the first major part of the Bible according to Christianity. ... 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. ...

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-believers who view The Brick Testament as pointing out the absurdities of the Bible. Sunday School is the generic name for many different types of religious education pursued on Sundays (traditionally, though not exclusively, in the morning) by various Christian denominations, especially in the United States. ...

Purpose

Smith's stated purpose in creating the 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. ... The term philosophy derives from a combination of the Greek words philos meaning love and sophia meaning wisdom. ...

Technique

"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. ...

In the few instances where alterations are made to LEGO elements, it is generally simple changes made with a hobby knife or permanent ink marker. One notable instance of such alteration is God's hair. Because the LEGO Group's 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. The term God is used to designate a Supreme Being; however, there are other definitions of God. ... 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 A helmet is a form of protective clothing worn on the head and usually made of metal or some other hard substance, typically for protection from falling objects or high-speed collisions. ...

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 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 in the... Paint Shop Pro (PSP) is a bitmap 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.

Books

These hardcover Brick Testament books that have been published by Quirk Books in the United States and Sanssouci in Germany. 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. ...

• The Brick Testament: Stories from the Book of Genesis (ISBN 1931686459)
• The Brick Testament: The Story of Christmas (ISBN 1594740127)
• The Brick Testament: The Ten Commandments (ISBN 1594740445)
• Das 1. Buch L. (ISBN 3725413363, German language version of Genesis)

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. ...

References

• 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.

External Links

• The Brick Testament
• The Rev. Brendan Powell Smith