Glenn
http://www.tulsaworld.com/opinion/noah-charney-the-revised-mission-of-the-green-family-s/article_d046ed1e-6825-5417-a0c7-aeac1706a300.html
Noah Charney: The revised mission of the Green family's Museum of the Bible is raising eyebrows, questions.
An artist rendering shows the Museum of the Bible under construction in Washington, D.C.
The Museum of the Bible will feature ancient artifacts. Under a new deal with the Israel Antiquities Authority such artifacts as this Philistine cult stand from the Holy Land, will be on public display. Associated Press
Customers visit a Hobby Lobby store in Tulsa, Okla. on Thursday, March 20, 2014. MATT BARNARD/Tulsa World
Green
Posted: Sunday, September 13, 2015 12:00 am
In Washington, separation of church and state isn’t just a principle of governance, it’s an architectural and geographic rule as well. Pierre L’Enfant envisioned a national church on Eighth Street. A patent office was built on the site instead. More than 100 years later, the city finally got its National Cathedral — far from Capitol Hill, in the upper northwest corner of town.
The
downtown skyline is dominated by monuments to men; the Holocaust Museum
and altarpieces in the National Gallery of Art are the closest things
to religion you’ll find on the Mall. Washington, of course, has its
believers, but they practice too many faiths to fit under one roof.
Now,
though, the Good Book is coming to town in a big way. The Museum of the
Bible — backed by the Oklahoma evangelical owners of the craft store
Hobby Lobby, who famously took their objections to contraception and
“Obamacare” to the Supreme Court — is set to open in 2017, just off the
Mall.
The proximity of the museum to the world-class Smithsonian and the Capitol has raised eyebrows.
How will it fit in among the venerable institutions lining the Mall? How will it function in a multicultural city?
And what version of the Bible will we get?
To
many in the scholarly community, the museum seems like an oversize
piece of evangelical claptrap. Some academics and curators also worry
about the origins of its collection — the more than 40,000 biblical
artifacts were amassed in a remarkably short time by Hobby Lobby
President Steve Green. But the museum is trying to pitch itself as
deserving of its spot. Last month, it inked a deal to display a
selection of objects from the Israeli government’s eminent Antiquities
Authority.
And
it has hired David Trobisch, a prominent liberal academic, to head its
collection. It will be up to Trobisch to win over skeptics and transform
this intriguing assembly of artifacts into an institution that brings a
bit of church to a secular state.
At
the heart of the Museum of the Bible is the Green Collection, a huge,
disjointed assemblage that includes pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a
Gilgamesh tablet, Elvis Presley’s Bible and about 850 manuscripts, 12 of
which are in Hebrew and come from China’s Jewish population. A third of
the material may be considered Judaica, related to Judaism and the Old
Testament, including torahs that survived the Spanish inquisition and
the Nazis. Many of the objects are more important than beautiful, more
interesting than spectacular.
Why
did Green want to turn his private collection into a museum? A number
of academics have questioned his family’s motives. “I don’t expect the
Bible Museum to be anything other than a tax-deductible kitsch attempt
at spreading Christian fundamentalist propaganda,” archaeologist Dorothy
King said.
Right site?
In
an interview with NPR, Jacques Berlinerblau, a professor of Jewish
civilization at Georgetown University, questioned the location of the
museum, two blocks south of the Mall, where it might overlook periodic
rallies opposing abortion or same-sex marriage, offering
brick-and-mortar moral support to conservative causes.
Sarah
Posner concurred, writing in Talking Points Memo: “The museum will be a
living, breathing testament to how American evangelicalism can at once
claim it is under siege from secularists, the LGBT rights movement, or
feminism — yet also boast of acquiring a prime private perch,
strategically located at the nation’s epicenter of law and politics.”
There
also have been questions about what approach to the Bible the museum
will take. Green has promoted a public school curriculum based on the
Bible as a factual historical text. Another ideological red flag: Museum
President Cary Summers consulted for the Creation Museum in Kentucky,
which teaches creationism as fact, with didactic material showing
dinosaurs and humans living side by side on a 6,000-year-old planet
Earth.
Unflattering comparisons
The Summers link has prompted unflattering comparisons of the two museums.
The
Green family’s initial public line on the Museum of the Bible seemed to
confirm some of the concerns. The museum’s 501(c)(3) filing in 2011
declared that its mission would be “to bring to life the living Word of
God, to tell its compelling story of preservation, and to inspire
confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the Bible.”
But
the museum’s mission statement has shifted. In 2012, references to the
Bible’s authority and reliability disappeared from the 501(c)(3) filing,
and by 2013, it had transformed to the benign: “We exist to invite all
people to engage with the Bible(.) We invite Biblical exploration
through museum exhibits and scholarly pursuits.”
Green
has described a personal “evolution” on how the museum will balance
faith and scholarship and more recently has emphasized its nonpartisan,
non-evangelical goals. “It’s more of a high-level discussion of, ‘Here’s
this book, what is its history and impact, and what is its story?” he
said in February.
The
latest artist renderings of the museum, designed by architectural firm
SmithGroup JJR — the same firm designing a proposed LGBT museum in the
city — show a trapezoid of red brick and glass, topped with an
observatory floor that resembles a glass pillow. The design is a huge
departure from initial heavy-handed concepts, which imagined the museum
shaped like an ark or a crown, or even modeled on Versailles.
Beyond
the possible motives for the Museum of the Bible, some scholars
question the collection itself. Green began spending heavily on it in
2009. He had amassed more than 30,000 items by June 2010 and has added
10,000 more since. “They purchased what I know were A-plus collections,”
said Sharon Liberman Mintz, a senior consultant for Judaica at
Sotheby’s who has met with the Green Collection team.
That
40,000 number, however, is suspicious to Roberta Mazza, a leading
scholar and professor at University of Manchester in Britain. The UNESCO
convention controls the export of antiquities and makes it difficult to
legally sell abroad objects that were excavated after 1970.
Mazza
wonders how Green managed to collect so much “in such a brief period of
time and in the context, in theory, of a strictly regulated antiquities
market?”
Heightening
their skepticism, Mazza and other scholars identified an item in the
Green Collection — a Coptic papyrus fragment with lines from Galatians 2
— that was once advertised on eBay by a seller who was later banned
from the site for allegedly selling looted antiquities.
Dissolved mummy
And
then there was the handling of objects by the collection’s original
director, Scott Carroll. In one online video, Carroll dissolves an
ancient Egyptian mummy mask with Palmolive soap, in search of textual
fragments that may have been recycled into the wrapping — actions that
are not illegal but are understandably distressing to the museum
community.
In
the video, Carroll says: “You might say, ‘What a destructive process.’
But I would remind you that all archaeology is a destructive process.”
(Reached by phone, Carroll defended the technique, saying it’s not
unique to his work and has yielded some important texts.)
The
Greens and Carroll parted ways in 2012, and last year, the museum hired
Trobisch, a non-evangelical, liberal European intellectual whose
background makes him a surprising match for the family.
Trobisch
once shared the cover of Free Inquiry, a secular humanist magazine,
with atheist Christopher Hitchens and wrote about his scholarly and
unorthodox theory that Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, not Saint Luke, was
responsible for the biblical Book of Acts and that this 2nd-century
bishop “edited” the New Testament, deciding which books should be
included.
Trobisch’s
views of Scripture differ dramatically from those of the museum’s
patrons. “Like many evangelicals, the Greens may feel that wherever the
Bible goes, only good things happen,” he says. “But the European
experience is quite different. When we think of Protestantism, we may
think of the Thirty Years’ War or the Ireland conflict. Bloodshed and
Christianity is really about the Bible. In the U.S., slavery is a
controversial topic, as the Bible was used to argue for and against.
We’ll have a Holocaust room in the museum.
“These
messages are probably difficult to learn, for those of an evangelical
background, but we try to show and not tell,” he says. “Then let the
visitor decide. If we pick only one ‘true’ story, we’d lose our
credibility.”
Trobisch
describes his contact with the Greens as only occasional and says the
family has no hands-on influence on how the museum will be curated.
Money for the museum is placed into a charitable 501(c)(3) organization,
which Trobisch and his team manage. He admits he had been concerned
that there might be interference, but so far, so good.
“Steve
Green does not take any active role in the day-to-day business,” he
says. “The decisions about the collection are made by me and my team.”
Trobisch
describes what he sees as a shift in how the Greens made decisions
about the museum. “When they started to collect, like most collectors,
it was a personal, emotional thing,” he says. “It was clearly also
because they are evangelical Christians, so to do something good with
the Bible was important to them. And it attracted other people, who used
it for apologetic purposes. But I was just asked to make sure
acquisitions were done right.”
Provenance of collection
As
for the provenance of the collection, Trobisch is attempting to satisfy
critics. His first task when he arrived was to examine the objects —
their history, their authenticity and how they were acquired — a process
that’s ongoing and includes a team of a dozen researchers. Trobisch
says he has yet to find a questionable piece.
As
for the Galatians fragment that appeared on eBay, he says that the
piece was part of a collection at the University of Mississippi before
going on sale at Christie’s in 2011. “We purchased this papyrus in 2013
from a trusted dealer,” Trobisch says. “Who owned it between 2011 and
2013, we do not know. It caught us by surprise that it was on eBay in
2012 briefly.
Its
provenance at the University of Mississippi satisfied our concern, as
it proved that it was not recently removed from Egypt.” Trobisch says
that he is regularly offered items as donations, and that if they are
undocumented or of suspicious provenance, they are not accepted.
“Under
my directorship, we will also not display any items found in the
collection where we have no provenance records,” he says. “Luckily, we
have an abundance of material to choose from.”
Transparency
Without
fanfare or invitation, Trobisch flew to Italy in June 2014 to attend
the conference of the Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art,
at which Mazza expressed her strong concerns. The two spoke afterward,
and Mazza says she left impressed with Trobisch, although still
withholding judgment. Most of all, she and other papyrologists would
like “full public access to information and documents concerning the
acquisition circumstances of the holdings,” which would allow anyone to
examine the provenance of each item.
Such
transparency has become fairly standard in major art museums but not as
much in artifact-based museums, such as those dealing with natural
history — or Bibles. By making the provenance of all the objects
publicly available, Trobisch can do much to demonstrate his good faith
and the collection’s clean conscience.
The
museum’s recent deal with the Israel Antiquities Authority, that
country’s pre-eminent archaeological organization, is a major coup. Per
the agreement, the Museum of the Bible will include permanent and
rotating exhibits of objects from the agency’s collection of 2 million
artifacts. Jacob Fisch, executive director of the Friends of the Israel
Antiquities Authority, explained the partnership to the New York Times,
saying: “We share one mission, and that’s telling the story that is
based on the archaeological material. We’re very scientifically based,
research based.”
At one point, Green reportedly wanted to hand out Bible tracts to visitors, who would exit the museum singing “Amazing Grace.”
But
while he may have built his collection and conceived of displaying it
to encourage personal devotion, the museum’s mission seems to be
commendably expanding. “When you walk into the museum,” Trobisch says,
“the first thing you’ll see is a big collection of Bibles that you can
buy in bookstores today. They all have different numbers of books (in
them), and there are myriad differences. The idea that there’s one Bible
and a canon that everyone agreed on is just wrong.” Visitors also will
be able to choose from audio guides loaded with five religious belief
systems.
When
the doors open in 2017, the Museum of the Bible may surprise the Greens
as much as the general public — freeing visitors to choose their own
interpretation of the Word.
Noah Charney is an art historian and author of “The Art of Forgery.”
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