Deus ex machina--God out of a Machine.

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Martin Luther's translation of the Bible is considered one of the watersheds of human intellectual history. Not only did it allow the common person to read the Bible for themselves, it helped in the evolution of the modern German language in very much the same way that the King James version did for the English language.

Now, after 474 years of history and seven months of writing day and night, a robot in Karlsruhe Germany has finished the first ever Bible, hand written in calligraphy by a machine.

The robot, dubbed "Bios (Bible)," was set to work back in June armed with a standard fountain pen and directed to produce the manuscript in cursive handwriting as a piece of performance art sponsored by the Center for Art and Media of the city of Karlsruhe and was the idea of artists Martina Haitz, Matthias Gommel and Jan Zappe.

Bios
Asked why they did this Jan Zappe said:

"More than a million robots are working in the factories of the world. We want to explore their artistic potential."

Matthias Gommel added:

"It's just a working machine, yet it's a participant in society.. The robot was thus a "mediator" in the process of social communication.

Why did they choose the Bible? Zappe said it was

"Because it is one of the most significant books of the age and contains a huge amount of data."

A page from the manuscript
Although the work was produced on a 900 foot roll of paper for the robot's convenience the group plans to cut the long scroll into pages which will be displayed at the art center along side the robot.

However the once the show is over the work will have to find a new home. Gommel said:

"We don't propose to retain this valuable product of our installation in museum fashion."

A Christian community in the US has requested that they be given the work saying that they would like to have a manuscript German-language bible to read from in church.