Two blocks south of the National
Mall in Washington, DC, a stately brick building with a recessed entrance faces
Fourth Street. On either side of the entrance, two bronze doors the height of
upended school buses stand adorned with the text of the Gutenberg Bible. They
are perhaps the largest-scale homage ever made to the printing plates that
brought Scripture into the age of mechanical reproduction, and, as with the
original plates, the text on them protrudes backward. It is as though the doors
are waiting to come unhitched and fall through a perfect 90-degree arc onto the
street, indelibly impressing the city with the Word of God in the Latin of the
Vulgate.
Each stacked line of text weighs
roughly 380 pounds and was individually affixed to the doors. They don’t close,
however; their function is purely decorative, and the recessed entrance plaza
remains open year round. Beyond these doors opens an enormous hall paved with
marble tiles.
Mr. Green Goes to Washington
In an interview with CT,
Hobby Lobby president and Museum of the Bible founder Steve Green shares about
the museum’s origins, its controversies, and his dreams for how it could impact
the world.
Looking up, a visitor might see a
sprawling digital canopy of trees, one of five possible scenes playing on a
ceiling-mounted 140-foot-long LED display. The light emitted by the false sky
intensifies in surrounding glass walls and polished floors; bystanders are
awash in illumination. At the end of the hall, a floating staircase winds up
into the air without the aid of steel supports; docents clad in Ancient Near
Eastern garb shuffle by to assume stations in the world of the distant past.
On November 17, Museum of the Bible
(MOTB) will open its doors to the public for the first time, claiming to be the
most cutting-edge museum in DC. Lavish exhibits, futuristic technology, and
hitherto-unseen artifacts await visitors on the upper floors, as do lingering
questions about the museum’s perceived association with antiquities smuggling.
But the most enduring questions surrounding the museum will undoubtedly concern
its intent. As its leadership has walked back the apologetic messaging of its
early days in favor of a more open-handed mission of “engaging” all people with
the Bible, skeptics may smell a ruse while some Christians may wonder if the
museum is holding back.
Founded as an organization by Hobby
Lobby president Steve Green in 2010, MOTB is the newest addition to DC’s
legendary and vast museum community. MOTB professes to “invite all people to
engage” with the impact, narrative, and history of the Bible “through museum
exhibits and scholarly pursuits.”
There is no precedent for an
operation quite like this one. The purchase, partial demolition, and rebuilding
of the property cost half a billion dollars. The 430,000-square-foot space has
been outfitted with technology so advanced that a staff of 100 technologists
had to develop platforms simultaneously with content. Permanent exhibit floors
contain, among other items, fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the museum’s
own replica of the Liberty Bell. On the roof, there is a biblical garden next
to a cafeteria in which one can buy biblical foods (and hot dogs).
Beyond the museum’s main location
and its traveling exhibits, which have since 2011 visited Jerusalem, the
Vatican, Cuba, and Germany, the operation comprises two other important
components. One is the Scholars Initiative, the museum’s research arm. Senior
scholars in the program mentor students and younger colleagues in the study of
artifacts and texts. They are given unique access to these items through the
museum, which houses lodging facilities for visiting scholars alongside a
lecture hall equipped to broadcast their talks around the world. Last year,
too, prestigious academic publisher Brill released Dead Sea Scrolls
Fragments in the Museum Collection, the first volume in a new series that
will carry the name of MOTB and present the Scholars Initiative’s results.
The second component is a
high-school Bible curriculum, developed by MOTB and already being used by over
100,000 Israeli public-school students as well as American private-school
students. The long-term hope is to adapt the curriculum for use in American
public schools, a complicated process with myriad legal complexities that
attests to what Director of Collections David Trobisch calls the museum’s
ever-expanding “global vision.”
I visit DC in late July to see the
museum for myself. MOTB president Cary Summers meets me, and we don hardhats
and safety vests to enter the worksite outside the building. A 40-year member
of Gideons International and a deacon in his hometown Southern Baptist church
in Springfield, Missouri, Summers has an air of genteel politeness. I find his
casual idiom and mild drawl immediately endearing.
We stop for a moment to survey the
exterior. First built in 1923 to store refrigerators, the original four-story
brick shell has been transformed. When MOTB rebuilt the property, it dug out an
extra level below an existing basement and added a two-story glass
superstructure. The upper floors of the museum extend over the office building
at its east end, like an L-shaped Tetris piece. The museum reaches DC’s legal
height limit of 130 feet, but including the basement levels, it contains eight
floors’ worth of space. The glass superstructure lights up and “can be seen at
night throughout all of Washington,” Summers tells me as we go inside.
“We’re building in about half the
time any museum this size has ever been built [in DC],” Summers adds. “During
the major construction period, we had 24-hour [shifts,] seven days a week.”
Actual construction began in early 2016, meaning the museum went from a giant
crater encircled by the historical brick façade to a finished building in about
a year and a half.
On the ground floor, a rotating
exhibit from the Vatican Museum and the Vatican Apostolic Library sits next to
a space that will contain two exhibits at the November opening: one from the
Jewish History Museum of Amsterdam and the other from the Bavarian State
Library. Jewish and Catholic contributions to MOTB give the exhibits a degree
of interfaith imprimatur; rotating exhibits will likely change on a six-month
basis. “We have a whole list for the next three years of incoming libraries
that will be showcased here,” Summers says.
The world-renowned Israel
Antiquities Authority is another partner with MOTB, agreeing in 2015 to
showcase archeological discoveries at the museum. In November, they will
display items recovered from a first-century ship discovered in the ruins of
Caesarea Maritima, including gold currency and what Summers calls “bronze heads
from Rome.”
International and interfaith
involvement is not limited to partnerships with outside organizations. Summers
will later show me a thick information packet containing the academic profiles
of more than 100 scholars from around the world who helped to develop the
content of the museum’s displays. N. T. Wright, Father James Martin, Dead Sea
Scrolls expert Emanuel Tov, and American historian of religion Mark Noll are
some of the names I recognize. Though aiming to achieve “the highest level of
academic credibility,” Summers says, “we’re not speaking from any one voice”—a
choral metaphor that echoes in conversations with other staffers during my
visit. MOTB uses its second, third, and
fourth floors to house the permanent exhibits these scholars helped develop
around three themes: an Impact of the Bible exhibit, an immersive Narrative of
the Bible experience, and a more traditional History of the Bible section.
Around us on the first floor,
columns of Jerusalem stone border the LED-lit entrance hall, its marble floor
proceeding through gradations from a dark brown to a light cream to represent
the movement from ignorance “into information dealing with the Bible—sort of a
psychological thing,” Summers says. The marble comes from Tunisia and Holland.
The amounts of money behind these
lavish building materials are huge, the aggregate of donations large and small.
MOTB took in $156 million in private donations in its 2015 fiscal year, placing
it 93rd on Forbes’s list of the largest US charities.
Museum visitors will be asked for a
$15 suggested donation upon entry, but in keeping with a time-honored
Washington tradition, admission will technically be free. Everyone who enters
will receive a digital guide—or “digital docent,” as Summers refers to them. (Traditional
costumed docents will also roam the museum.) These handheld touchscreen devices
are central to the experience of MOTB, as Jeff Schneider, vice president of
information and interactive systems, will later tell me.
Something between a traditional
audio guide and a tagalong human expert, the digital docent is meant to help
visitors create durable memories out of the raw stores of information in the
museum. At registration, guests configure variables such as level of depth of
information, time constraints, and stated interests and then receive a custom
itinerary. The digital docent keeps track of the visitor’s progress through the
museum while making real-time adjustments based on pace and can identify areas
of high traffic for visitors to avoid.
Deploying the high-tech tour guides
required developing an indoor navigation system that can locate any digital
guide within four inches of its actual location in the museum—a technology that
“didn’t really exist” when MOTB began to develop it and that opens new
possibilities for museum accessibility, Schneider says. The digital guides can
translate English-language placards on the fly and can reproduce signage text
onscreen in large fonts or even read it aloud. Augmented reality also gives
children a gamified, Pokémon-GO style experience of their parents’ itinerary
that involves robots and a quest to dispel encroaching fog.
Other novelties in the museum’s
design will go unnoticed by all but a few. Pry loose any of the magnetized
wooden panels that make up the exhibit floors and underneath you will see part
of a metal housing grid containing miles of cords and cabling for the museum’s
displays. Workers can easily open up this grid to make low-cost wiring changes,
enabling MOTB to accommodate new exhibits at speeds and scales unfathomable at
many museums. While I am in DC, I will hear rumblings of other museums holding
off on major changes to first see how these new approaches to old problems work
for MOTB.
To reach the technological
apotheosis of the museum, however, we climb into the glass superstructure of
the fifth floor, where a performing arts theater with 472 seats spreads across
three levels. Cloth shapes of varied sizes rib the ceiling and walls, creating
three-dimensional surfaces on which 17 4K projectors cast ultra-high-definition
backgrounds, static images, and footage. For opening week, the theater will run
12-minute shows involving dramatic readings of Scripture, augmented by a score
and wrap-around visuals. “It hits all the senses in an amazing way,” Schneider
says. Simply testing the theater’s capacities required the use of virtual
reality.
In the non-virtual world, I find
myself under a canopy of artificial olive branches. “This whole area acclimates
you to the time of Jesus,” Summers says. We are in Nazareth Village, an
immersive walkthrough experience on the New Testament side of the third-floor
Story exhibit. “Even on the olive trees, you can see the olives up
there—they’re all hand done, handmade, hand glued,” he says. “Every part of
Israel had distinctive rock formations, so we built 14,000 stones.” I draw my
fingers over the uneven ridges of an artificial stone wall. “Every rock is
handmade, hand painted, because we wanted the exact color and feel of the rocks
of Nazareth, which are quite different from the rocks in Tiberius, which are
quite different from the stone and rocks found in Jerusalem.”
We came here after visiting the
Impact floor, where a 254-foot woven scrim hangs like a billowy wall behind a
translucent plastic tarp. I caught glimpses of Martin Luther King Jr. and Billy
Graham in an exposed length of the tableau before nearly stumbling into the
museum’s blanket-covered Liberty Bell, a 3,200-pound replica forged at the same
foundry as the original in Philadelphia. “The whole issue of slavery we address
here,” Summers told me. “You know both sides used the same Scripture to justify
[and condemn] slavery.” Though the museum will forthrightly describe this and
other contradictions in the social history of Scripture, Summers and Executive
Director Tony Zeiss say MOTB will largely avoid contemporary cultural
flashpoints.
In Nazareth, we are far from such
issues. Every 90 minutes the sky above the ancient town changes from day to
night, and the little oil lamps that sit on windowsills and ledges flicker to
life. At one end of the town, one can look out over the Sea of Galilee, painted
on a curved wall using techniques of perspective to create an illusion of depth
and continuity with the rocky outcrop that borders the wall.
We leave the past to enter the
History floor, which Summers describes as “the heaviest artifact floor.”
Alongside exhibits dedicated to the display of the museum’s permanent
collections, one-third of which are classified as Judaica, this floor features
a working lab where visitors can watch demonstrations of highly specialized
research methods.
Around us, I envision the inventory
that Summers lists for future display in the exhibit: “manuscripts that date
back from the oldest manuscripts . . . 240 Torah scrolls, Dead Sea Scrolls,
medieval manuscripts . . . a Gutenberg press is in here . . .” A working
Israeli scribe “is moving over here for one year” to write “a Kosher Torah
scroll” for five days a week while explaining the process to visitors. He will
also train other scribes, who will become purveyors of the same tradition.
The materials and artifacts on this
floor come primarily from two sources: the museum’s own collections and the
Green Collection, which lends items to the museum. Owned by Hobby Lobby, the
Green Collection has become a lightning rod for controversy. Steve Green, Hobby
Lobby’s president, bought the first item for the collection in 2009, and today
it is one of the largest collections of privately owned biblical artifacts in
the world. The rapid, fairly recent, and large-scale acquisitions have fueled
speculation about illicit antiquities trading in violation of the UNESCO 1970
Convention and further sanctions imposed on the trade of Iraqi antiquities in
the 1990s after the Gulf War. “The antiquities trade runs on
layers of ‘plausible deniability’: not asking too many questions, leaving
things implied but not said, opaque business practices, lack of regulation,”
Donna Yates, an antiquities crime expert and Glasgow University lecturer,
blogged after the government brought a civil
forfeiture complaint against Hobby Lobby that targeted thousands of
artifacts smuggled into the US in 2011 with falsified customs forms.
Cultural property lawyer Rick St.
Hilaire described a civil forfeiture to me as “a legal action against property
that is alleged by prosecutors to have been involved in unlawful activity.”
Importantly, a forfeiture “is directed against property and not a person.”
Government lawyers have alleged criminal activity “to argue that the defendant
artifacts need to be forfeited,” and the federal prosecutors in the Hobby Lobby
case “deliberately singled out the shipper, not the importer, as the party who
violated federal criminal law.”
Most of the targeted items were clay
bullae and cuneiform-covered cylinders, and the forfeiture required them to be
returned to Iraq. When I spoke with Yates over the phone, she told me they
likely came out of Iraqi soil between 2003 and 2008, when large-scale unrest in
Iraq drove so many desperate civilians to loot archaeological sites that the
crowds were visible in satellite imagery. Hobby Lobby also paid a $3 million fine
as part of a settlement with the government over the smuggled items.
Though the forfeiture complaint made
no mention of MOTB, the Green Collection donated items to the museum
collections after MOTB was formed in 2010, and critics insinuated that illicit
items might have been among those donated. “I do think that there are looted
antiquities in the Museum of the Bible,” Yates wrote in the wake of the
government’s case. “I can’t prove it to an extent that would let some country
make a return claim, but please understand: There is no legit source of these
kinds of artifacts.”
When I asked Summers about this
accusation, he said that absolutely none of the illicit items targeted in the
forfeiture complaint were donated to MOTB. I also spoke with Trobisch, the collections
director, about the provenance of the items on display.
“We don’t collect [archaeological]
artifacts,” he told me. “We look for books; we look for copies of texts,” which
he said have a provenance and ownership history that is far easier to ascertain.
Artifacts in MOTB can “create atmosphere” for visitors, but “they don’t have to
be genuine.”
Trobisch told me MOTB has no
interest in collecting items of actual archeological value and often uses
reproductions in place of originals to generate the same visual interest.
“[Vetting] is a very straightforward process,” he said. “I came on three and a
half years ago, and there wasn’t a single item that we accepted where there
were questions. If there were questions, [the item didn’t] come through.” He
said they turn down “something between 40 and 50 percent” of items offered for
donation to MOTB or that the Green Collection is interested in acquiring.
“Everything that [goes] through the vetting process . . . has been vetted to
the highest possible standards,” and any item chosen for display in the museum
undergoes a second round of scrutiny. The process involves specialists at the
top of their fields, and Trobisch solicits multiple opinions to make sure there
is no reasonable doubt about a given item’s history.
Questions about provenance will
likely remain. In a recent twist, MOTB-funded researchers suggested that nearly
half of the museum’s Dead Sea Scrolls fragments may be forgeries. When I asked Trobisch about the
likelihood of publishing the full provenance of everything in the museum, he
told me the MOTB intends to “make the database of all items in our care
accessible in electronic form,” but that the project “will take more time.”
There is another axis of criticism
concerning MOTB. “The Greens want to influence Americans and bring them back to
the Bible,” wrote Joel Baden, a Hebrew Bible professor at
Yale, and Candida Moss, a New Testament professor at Notre Dame, in The
Atlantic. “They’re unlikely to promote their socially conservative views
openly in the museum, but its exhibits may give them a prominent, seemingly
authoritative platform from which to push back against what they see as the
secular tide in American politics.” Baden and Moss released a book in October
about the Green family’s conservative religious activism and philanthropy.
Given Summers’s past consulting work
for the Creation Museum in Kentucky, which MOTB once visited with a traveling
exhibit about “dragon slayers who appear in a medieval book of hours,” it seems
reasonable to ask whether MOTB intends to take up Ken Ham–style cultural
apologetics. Trobisch responded with an anecdote: After finishing a site tour,
a potential donor once asked where the design team was planning to put a
“decision room” where visitors might commit their lives to Christ. After
discovering that none was planned, the man withdrew his donation.
“The Bible is the center,” Trobisch
said, and by this, the liberal New Testament scholar indicates what he shares
in his approach with the more conservative Greens, who hired him. But he also
said, “We are not going to tamper with anything that is descriptive” in the museum’s
exhibits, reiterating that each exhibit received input from diverse scholarly
voices.
When I raised the prospect of
conservative evangelicals being challenged or even discomfited by what they
find in MOTB, however, Summers demurred. Zeiss, the executive director, was
more candid, saying that he had high hopes for challenged visitors “to be
enlightened” in their encounters with unfamiliar sides of the Bible.
But sprinkled throughout my
conversations with MOTB leadership are tiny tells. Summers described a virtual
“flythrough” survey of scriptural references on monuments and buildings around
the capital in a theater on the second floor as a way to convince “skeptics,”
as though there are those who think that the Bible has never played an
important role in American public life. Zeiss—reported in The Charlotte
Observer to have been under consideration for the role of secretary of
education in President Donald Trump’s cabinet before he came to MOTB at the end
of 2016—described the need to “bring the Bible back to the center of
discussion,” as he claimed it was at the time of America’s founding. “Today,
that standard isn’t on everybody’s mind, because they don’t know about it.”
In the words of its mission
statement circa 2011, MOTB’s original goal was to inspire confidence in “the
absolute authority and reliability of the Bible,” placing it firmly in the
heritage of apologetics-oriented evangelical cultural attractions. Today,
Trobisch and others refer to the museum’s currently stated purpose, which is to
invite all people, regardless of background, to “engage” with the Bible. There
will be nothing in the museum “that would offend someone who is unchurched” or
LGBT people, Trobisch said. Zeiss also avowed, “We don’t take any political or
cultural positions.” Even so, it’s hard to imagine that vestiges of the
original intention will not remain.
And what about MOTB’s prominent
location, with the dome of the Capitol visible from its upper floors? “If we
all had to wave a magic wand, we’d be in Dallas, because it’s close” to Hobby
Lobby’s headquarters in Oklahoma City, Summers told me. “I brought in a third
party . . . to find the best site in America” where the museum would see the
largest number of annual visitors. The third party determined that DC was the
best option, but even so, “we kept looking elsewhere.”
Two days before I visited MOTB, I
visited another Washington museum: the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American
History. I was curious to see its first faith-themed exhibit, titled “Religion
in Early America.”
In a single room, curators have
gathered Martha Washington’s personal Bible, George Washington’s inauguration
Bible, and two books of Thomas Jefferson’s. One is his famous The Life and
Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, a denatured version of the New Testament that
excludes virtually everything but Christ’s moral teachings. The other is an
English Bible from which Jefferson clipped passages to include in his other
book.
Its pages are so cleanly disfigured
they appear to have been die-cut. They hang open like blasted sails, texts
attesting to Christ’s miracles printed next to the excised spaces that
contained his sermons.
This is the Bible of Washington, DC.
It isn’t the Bible George Washington spontaneously kissed at his inauguration,
the vellum three-volume Gutenberg Bible housed in the Library of Congress, or
even Jefferson’s Life and Morals. Rather, it’s the tattered and
abandoned source document for Jefferson’s redaction. Politics tends to
encounter the Bible as Jefferson did, through the cut-up method, appropriating
what is useful for its purposes and leaving the rest behind.
All of which offers another way to
view MOTB. The much-documented rise of the “nones” presages an era of
widespread unbelief in American culture, a crisis of religious identification
to which some respond with calls to back away from the public square to
conserve and strengthen what remains of authentic Christian life and practice.
For those who mourn the erosion of a robust American Christianity—as well as
those who celebrate it—the great brick edifice of MOTB may appear in a certain
light as akin to a tomb.
For all its assurances of
prioritizing “engagement” with people of all backgrounds, the museum can’t
engage an audience that doesn’t cross the threshold in the first place. Zeiss
told me that 1,100 groups have already signed up for tours, and he expects the
museum will become a place of “pilgrimage” for American churches. But it’s too
soon to tell how many people of other faiths—or people for whom faith is a
matter of indifference—will join them.
Museums exist to preserve stories of
our past that we don’t want to be forgotten. They are as often engaged in the
work of reclamation and advocacy as that of preservation and display. Green,
Summers, and those presiding over this country’s newest and most
state-of-the-art museum clearly intend to tell the story of the importance of
the Bible for American society. The technology, collaborations, and scholarship
at their disposal equip them to do this better than anyone.
But what exceeds the museum’s
purview is also the root of its existence: the private relationship between
Scripture and the individual believer. The museum will almost certainly engage
the audience that shares the beliefs and values of its founder and leadership.
But in an age of disaffiliation and religious apathy, its exhibits may for many
stand as a lavish tribute to a book that once shaped the world and now sits in
a glass case. As for those nonbelievers who care to enter, could mere
“engagement” with the Bible draw them closer to its subject? God has certainly
done it before. In any case, the giant bronze doors will remain perpetually
open toward Fourth Street, waiting for people to enter and see for themselves.
From Christianity Today - October
20, 2017 by Martyn Wendell Jones is a writer and
editor based in Toronto. His most recent Christianity Today cover story was “Kingdom Come in California?”
(May 2016), exploring the Bethel Church movement.
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