Michael Zank

Last week, between lunch with Vicki Barnett of the USHMM Mandel Center and a guest lecture in Michael Brenner’s Jerusalem class at AU, I had an hour to dip into the notorious new Museum of the Bible. The MoB is a recently completed, private addition to the nation’s capital’s array of stately institutions of memorialization. It was built on an entire city block, that was purchased and cleared for the purpose of bringing something so fundamental to D.C. that one might be surprised it wasn’t already there. Of course the reason why there wasn’t a MoB in Washington already is precisely the reason why this one has quickly divided the minds of its visitors. While there’s no question that the Bible is an important foundation of American civilization – a text woven into the fibers of American cultural memory and contemporary belief – there is no agreement on whose Bible, or how the Bible, ought to be represented. The MoB fails to do justice to this complexity, but this is not to say that it ought to be disowned by anyone but the most devout Christian fundamentalists.

I walked into the museum with certain assumptions. I had heard of billionaire funder David Green and his Hobby Lobby chain of arts and crafts stores. I was aware of the role that company had played in the Supreme Court decision to allow companies to opt out of health coverage of contraceptives for religious reasons, and I remembered that there had been charges against the MoB of questionable practices of acquisition of ancient Mesopotamian artifacts from modern Iraq. The day I visited, an article had appeared in Religion News, commenting on the recent hire of a Jewish museum specialist as the new director of exhibitions. One of the most persistent charges against the MoB was that it largely represented an Evangelical Protestant view on the Bible, with little attention paid to the Bible as understood in the Jewish tradition. The Religion News website noted that the name of the new director of exhibitions had as yet to be noted on the museum’s website.

My first impression was of the extraordinary façade. As best I could tell, flanking the entrance were two supersized bronze replicas of the movable print of the Gutenberg Bible. To me these gaudy gates seemed more forbidding than inviting. The glass window set back between these walls was screened by what looked like an enlarged Greek manuscript.

As became clear to me later, in a central hall devoted to the history of Bible translations, the design highlights the very mission of the MoB as understood by its makers: the Bible must be translated into every language, disseminated to the four corners of the earth, and the gospel preached to every nation before “the end shall come,” when Christ returns to judge the living and the dead. (Cf. Matthew 24:14) Clearly, the MoB is a museum with a mission. It is a museum whose makers are committed to a certain vision of the place of the Bible in God’s plan for humanity. Yet, clearly, the MoB wants to do more and better in the pursuit of its mission than merely cater to the convinced or preaching to the choir. (More on this in a moment.) Nevertheless, the majority of visitors I saw, at least, seemed to be ready to be both confirmed in their belief in the Bible as the most awesome book ever and obediently dazzled by the multimedia shows they lined up to see. Since I had checked in on FB, the social media’s algorithm later steered me to a site where I could rate my visit and view what others had written. Gushing would be an understatement. People, at least those whose comments I was able to see, LOVED the experience and could have stayed for many more hours than they had. For those who love it, the MoB offers an immersive experience in what they believe is as close as they will ever come to the world of the Bible. The MoB is poised to become a major “shrine” to the Bible, a pilgrimage site for believers who arrive with family or church groups from across the country to pay homage to the holy scriptures. (An employee I asked where I could purchase tickets asked me whether I was with the group of pastors. I asked, did I look like a pastor? She looked at me again and said, Yes, you do.)

My overall impression of the MoB is one of confusion. As I mentioned, the museum wants to be many things to many people without losing site of its central vision, but that vision tends to dwarf and overwhelm the well-meaning attempts at giving scholarship and history their due. There are awkward attempts to highlight the continuity between the Israelite past of the Bible and contemporary Judaism, but the post-biblical history of the Jews is not part of the story told by the museum, while its Christian afterlife is everywhere. And then there is the awful kitsch that centers on the story of Jesus of Nazareth. Structurally, the self-guided exhibitions are relative islands of sanity in between screenings of history-channel and worse types of dramatizations of biblical history. I am saying “relative sanity” because the viewer is never left to contemplate anything without being bombarded by an overload of audio/visual impressions. Less would be much more here, as in fact it is in the current exhibition on “Jerusalem and Rome,” which is calmingly sparse and offers, in fact, tantalizingly little, but the material objects on display (on loan from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, I believe) are genuine and telling. The museum guide I heard give an explanation of Roman and Jewish coins was moderately competent, though somewhat unexcited. Perhaps because the subject was actual history.

It would be easy to dismiss the MoB as lowbrow and single-mindedly Evangelical. My former teacher Marc Brettler recently argued that there should be many MoBs rather than one, reflecting the many points of view and afterlives of this oddly tenacious body of text. I am not convinced. Surely, as is the MoB fails to do justice to the complexities of the production, contexts, and reception of those scriptures. But we wouldn’t want a plurality of Holocaust museums with different viewpoints or a plurality of Vietnam memorials. Even natural history gets only one museum. Why, then, not the Bible? To be sure, if the MoB wants to be that space, it has a long way to go.