THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Immanuel Henry, the retired BSNL engineer noted for his painstaking pastime of copying the Tamil Holy Bible by hand, has entered the Limca Book of Records. He received the Limca intimation on Saturday, but he said only part of his stupendous effort has been acknowledged - for the moment. ‘’The Limca recognition is for copying down the New Testament alone. I had applied to the Limca Book in 2009 and at the time, I had not started on the Old Testament, which I completed only recently,” Immanuel said. He plans to apply afresh soon to get the Old Testament copy also included in the record book. At his Jawahar Nagar home, Immanuel has on display the Old and New Testaments written using black gel pens. They run to a total of 1,462 pages. After completing the New Testament in September 2009, Immanuel took up the Old. Originally, he had started with the Old Testament but switched books after confidence flagged. The curious thing about the copying job is that each page is ditto the Bible Society of India (BSI) Bible, down to the punctuations. Statistics help to put Immanuel’s efforts in a clearer perspective. The New Testament took three years to copy, and the Old, two. Each page is 18 cm long and 11.5 cm broad. Each of the 1,462 pages contain 110 lines, each line contains 20 letters. That makes 1,59,500 lines and 31,90,000 letters. Place each line back-to-back and you have a Bible that is a mindboggling 31.9 km long! But if you thought Immanuel has had enough writing for a lifetime, think again. He has already started work on copying the Malayalam Bible. “I have covered 30 pages of the New Testament. The work began in the middle of November but I can’t say when I would be able to finish it,” he said.
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