Wed., Sept. 11, 2024, marks the 23rd anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers and Pentagon.
While many stories of courage and grace have been shared about those events, a story emerged that most people probably haven’t heard before, and it involves the Bible.
Photographer Joel Meyerowitz spent nine months inside Ground Zero after 9/11.
While taking pictures of the wreckage in New York City, a fireman came running to him with an incredible find: a page from the Bible melted into a piece of heart-shaped steel.
It wasn’t just any page of the Bible, it was part of the Sermon on the Mount.
And while most of the page was marred, right in the middle, one of the only parts still clearly readable was Christ’s radical teaching on retaliation.
“Ye have heard that it hath been said,” the page said in the King James Version. “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”
This really touched Meyerowitz.
"It was an astonishing gift out of the blue," Meyerowitz says in this interview. "Of all the pages of the Bible that it could be open to, that was remarkable."
In 2010, Meyerowitz donated the incredible artifact to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York City.
"I don't know what people are going to feel when they see this Bible, but I hope they have a sense of wonder and awe," he adds. "It's like a story of survival."