Jesus Christ taught his followers to have patience to forgive, not up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.
Immanuel Henry wanted to put this virtue to practice. He was patient with himself not seven or seventy times, but 1,177 times.
His desire to follow Christ’s teachings, led him to complete the marathon task of copying the Malayalam Bible from cover to cover in his own handwriting. From Contents page to Index pages, this handwritten copy runs to 1,177 pages.
With a handwriting that beats the printed copy, it took five years for Henry to complete the feat with a .5 mm needle tip pen. He dedicated the hours between 6 pm and 11 pm daily for his writing, copying nearly 110 lines on to two or three pages. Henry says that he found that his handwriting was improving as the Bible neared completion.
“In 1995, I completed reading the Holy Bible. I read it another 10 times more. Copying the Bible in my own writing helped me to better understand the Scriptures. It also helped me to practice the virtue of prolonged patience in my life,” says Henry.
Previously, Henry had made news , when he completed a handwritten copy of the New Testament of Malayalam Bible. And holding true to a promise made then, he has now completed copying the Old Testament too. He has also completed a handwritten copy of the Tamil Bible, which has 1,462 pages.
He says that the inspiration for this work was a newspaper report about a handwritten copy of the Bible, completed as a joint venture of 348 people. This book, which was written in slightly bigger letters than Henry’s is kept at the St. Joseph’s Cathedral at Palayam, Thiruvananthapuram. Seeing this copy prompted Henry to start off his work.
Interestingly, Henry, a retired Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited employee, does not have a formal education in Malayalam. The native of Nagercoil studied the language on his own after he got married to Kamala from Thiruvananthapuram. His wife Kamala is an engineer at Doordarshan. He has a daughter Sherly and a son Nathaniel.