The Museum of the Bible, Washington DC

[MrMacSon]

In November 2017, the Museum of the Bible will open in Washington, D.C. ... it will be vast—eight stories tall, and covering 430,000 square feet ... it will house artifacts from the [Green] family’s stunning collection of biblical manuscripts, Torah scrolls, Dead Sea Scrolls, and cuneiform texts. The Greens’ collection is one of the largest private collections of such artifacts in the world, comprising some 40,000 objects—many of which, remarkably, were unknown to scholars and the general public before the Greens acquired them...

Almost from the beginning, the Greens made it a priority to acquire ancient biblical manuscripts: fragments of papyrus and parchment, in Greek or Syriac or Coptic, that constitute the oldest surviving evidence of the transmission—the copying and recopying and translating—of the Bible. Most of their other artifacts—biblically inspired artwork, ritual items of Judaism and Christianity, even Elvis Presley’s personal Bible—testify to the Bible’s use and influence and popularity. But the Greens recognized that ancient biblical manuscripts do more than that. These manuscripts provide the best evidence we have for the early wording of the Bible, and the family now owns more than 1,000 of them...

For most of the time that their field has existed, text critics of the Bible have aimed to peel back the layers of accumulated variants and uncover a pristine, original version of the text—which may explain why the field has held such appeal for evangelical-Christian scholars. But in the 1960s, the Harvard scholar Eldon Jay Epp highlighted the idea that the “original text” of the New Testament was simply out of our reach, because the random and fragmentary nature of the manuscripts that survive makes it impossible to reconstruct the authors’ actual words with any certainty. Epp’s ideas opened the door to a new kind of textual criticism—one that emphasizes, rather than attempts to eliminate, the diversity and complexity of the manuscript evidence. It’s an approach that has grown in popularity since Epp’s day—and has been propounded, to the chagrin of many evangelicals, in mass-market form by the best-selling writer Bart D. Ehrman. The existence of thousands of fragments of contradictory material is, according to this perspective, a faith killer. How can Scripture be inerrant when we can’t even know what it originally said?

Most evangelical text critics, however, continue to see early manuscript fragments as deposits of faith. Each discovery of ancient New Testament papyri, they feel, allows us to inch ever closer to the earliest proclamations of Jesus and his followers. The earlier a fragment can be dated, the argument goes, the more likely it is to preserve the original words of the divinely inspired biblical authors, and the more significant it therefore becomes to lay Christians: from God’s lips to their ears, skipping the 2,000 years of history and human error in between. “The more we learn about this book, the better off we are,” Steve Green told us. “If this book is not what it is, I want to know about it. But what we keep finding is that, boy, it validates what the book says. So the more we study, the more we know, the better off I think the world is, the faith community is.”

That belief—that the more we learn about the Bible, the more we can investigate how accurately it has been transmitted over the millennia—may account for a program launched in the summer of 2010: the Green Scholars Initiative. Designed to facilitate the academic study of the artifacts in the Green Collection, the program has focused on early biblical manuscripts. For the past five years, a growing group of scholars has taken part in this project.

For papyrologists on the lookout for unpublished texts to work with, it’s an exciting opportunity. The initiative doesn’t just provide scholars with access to rare and previously unknown materials that wouldn’t otherwise be available for study. It also provides them with access to the most-advanced technologies for pursuing that study, funds their travel to conferences and colloquia, and all but guarantees an eventual outlet for publication. But rather than make its holdings available to any scholar who might want to use the collection for legitimate research, as is the usual procedure, the Green Scholars Initiative carefully selects individual scholars to work on its material, seemingly without regard for traditional scholarly standards. Highly qualified scholars seeking publication rights to precious, never-before-seen papyri have been denied permission unless they agreed to join the Green Scholars Initiative, while scholars who had never before touched an ancient manuscript have been recruited to participate. In 2013, the then-director of the initiative, Jerry Pattengale, stated that “no religious requirement for involvement” was in place. But it’s worth noting that almost all the institutions with which the initiative’s scholars are affiliated are explicitly Christian, and most are evangelical.

...Researchers who are selected to work on Green manuscripts almost always do so in collaboration with undergraduate and graduate students—many of whom have had little training in the languages of the papyri they are asked to study. One scholar told us that her students turned to Wikipedia in researching their texts. Whatever range of skills they may have brought to their projects, it was striking how similarly the students described the lessons they took away. “It’s impressive how well the biblical message has been preserved,” one told us. Another said, “The consistency of biblical writings is incredible.”

We believe that this is the story the Greens want to tell the world, and that they have established the Green Scholars Initiative—in effect, a privately funded parallel academic universe—to help themselves tell it. “We needed to have scholarly credibility with what we have, with what we were saying,” Steve Green told us, explaining the aims of the initiative. “We wanted to pretty much undergird all that we did.”

...there’s no denying that the Greens’ burgeoning collection of biblical antiquities—vetted by handpicked scholars and displayed in a huge museum just blocks from the National Mall—will allow them to tell a very specific story, should they so choose....

...the Greens have potentially figured out a way to make one story of the Bible seem like the story of the Bible...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... le/419088/

[Secret Alias]

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/un ... s-imported

[Blood]

The Iraq invasion worked out pretty good for these rascals. But quite frankly I'd rather have cuneiform in the hands of corrupt American evangelists than Muslim Iraqis who want to smash to bits all remnants of their "pagan" ancestry.

[Secret Alias]

The Shi'i are relatively more advanced. Some even accept the idea of Syriac embedded in the Qur'an

[Secret Alias]

https://facesandvoices.wordpress.com/20 ... s-of-mess/

[Secret Alias]

http://www.salon.com/2017/07/09/museum- ... practices/

[JoeWallack]

JW:
Actually the whole thing was an excuse to say that first century fragment of GMark had to be returned without being published because even though it was really first century it contained a previously unknown ending of Simon being last in line at Jesus' Grateful Dead concert in Galilee opened by Black Sabbath.


Joseph

Why Must You Be Such An Angry Young Man? GMark 1:41 - Was Jesus Angry?

[MrMacSon]

I get the impression the museum is a way of channelling doctrine.

[Secret Alias]

The doctrine is the sacredness of the Bible. I might half seriously suggest that we should put together a Museum of Mythicism somewhere. The core "holy of holies" of the museum would be a series of empty rooms- one for evidence of his birth another for his ministry his death and resurrection. Then around it you'd have later images of Jesus flying, with a magic wand etc. How much would that cost? Empty rooms must be cheap to maintain ...

[spin]

The Iraq invasion worked out pretty good for these rascals. But quite frankly I'd rather have cuneiform in the hands of corrupt American evangelists than Muslim Iraqis who want to smash to bits all remnants of their "pagan" ancestry.

I must admit quite frankly I'd rather not have seen Pentagon or CIA money used to kick the hornet's nest time and time again against Mosaddeg (plus cash even to the ayatollahs), the Egyptian coup, the Iraq coup, using Saddam's Iraq against Iran, supporting Bin Laden, the Clinton blockade of Iraq, the Shrub's misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the gifting of weapons to Israel to crush Palestine, etc. Generations of stupid young people watching western military intervention and getting armed to oppose such evil. You can understand why ignorant radicalized farmers might find destroying things valued by the great Satan stimulating.