Jill Hicks-Keeton
jhk@ou.edu
Abstract
“The Bible” does not exist as material reality, and yet as a cultural icon “the Bible” animates institutions and enterprises devoted to it. This article assesses the short history of scholarship on one such institution, the controversial Museum of the Bible (MOTB) in Washington, D.C., in order to highlight and critique the fantasy of “the Bible” in academic biblical studies. I argue that while the MOTB provides a productive site for public scholarship on the Bible, it further functions as a mirror of the historic preoccupations of the guild of professional biblical scholars that reflects back to us the problems associated with our own fabrications of an iconic yet immaterial Bible.
Keywords
Metacriticism; Museums; Museum of the Bible; Evangelicalism; Green family; Hobby Lobby; Scripturalisation
“We simply want to advance scholarship and raise a new generation of biblical scholars.” Steve Green, founder and chair of the board of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., made this comment in an interview published in Christianity Today in 2017, the year of the museum’s grand opening.[2] When it comes to the Museum of the Bible and biblical scholarship, though, things are far from simple.
The Museum of the Bible (MOTB) is a private museum situated among the U.S. capital’s institutions of national public memory. It is headquartered in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the home of its self-avowed “founding family,” the Greens.[3] The Green family, owners of the craft store chain Hobby Lobby, have received a great deal of attention for Bible-boosterism[4] and for being politically active in the U.S. on behalf of traditionally conservative causes. The 430,000-square foot museum, reportedly with a price tag of about a billion dollars, boasts five permanent exhibit floors with Bible-themed installations, a stage for live events, a rooftop restaurant and garden, and an indoor thrill ride. Guests are invited to immerse themselves in exhibits organised under the rubrics Impact of the Bible, Stories of the Bible, and History of the Bible. Some visitors will be impressed by the available spectacles, including a working replica of a Gutenberg Press, a virtual reality tour of lands related to the Bible, and a reproduction of Israel’s Nazareth Village, where museum-goers encounter living history interpreters dressed as ancient Jewish inhabitants.
Yet, the MOTB functions as more than a museum. It serves also as a research institute and something of a public relations firm broadcasting a positive reputation for “the Bible.”[5] The MOTB has also been a lightning rod for controversy in the field of biblical studies, even as some scholars have demurred, wondering why they should care about what wealthy White evangelicals are doing.
It was at a bar in Denver that I fully articulated to myself that I needed to interrogate further why the biblical scholar in me cared so much about the MOTB. After a particularly spirited conference panel assessing this newly opened institution at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, I met anthropologist James Bielo for a beer. Having recently published Ark Encounter, a fascinating book about another Bible-themed museum,[6] he was now doing some research on the MOTB. I was eager to connect with a scholar from a different discipline with similar interests. Partway through the convivial conversation, though, I found myself asking, “Are you studying me right now?” He wasn’t—but he could have been. That is the moment I somewhat reluctantly accepted that the biblical scholars furiously analysing the MOTB, including myself, needed to be interrogating further why we were so exercised about it.
I here tell a story of the short history of scholarship treating the MOTB in order to reflect meta-critically on the pushback from professional biblical scholars around this institution. I suggest that while the MOTB provides a useful site for public scholarship on the Bible, it further functions as a mirror of the historic preoccupations of the guild of professional biblical scholars—particularly when it comes to the fantasy that “the Bible” is a stable object of study. A close look at some trajectories of scholarship treating the MOTB, perhaps especially my own, reveals that the involvement and investment of MOTB in the field of biblical studies exposes problems that attend the predominant approach that professional biblical scholars have historically taken toward the Bible, that of historical criticism. Revolving around attempts to locate in time and space the literature that now makes up the Bible, historical critical work claims to reconstruct circumstances of biblical texts’ origins, “meaning,” and reception from antiquity to today. Practitioners of historical criticism, and related subdisciplines such as text criticism, frequently present the discipline as more scientific than interpretive and presume a set of controls that anyone with expert training can dispassionately apply, regardless of their own positionality in time and space. I have become convinced that the MOTB became a site of conflict in biblical studies in part because of a historic (but not yet antiquated) confidence in the possibility of “objectivity” in the field.
The MOTB was founded as an evangelical Christian institution, but the organisation subsequently shifted its mission statement to sound objective, presenting itself as conveying “just the facts.”[7] Candida Moss and Joel Baden did a service to the field of biblical studies and beyond as they investigated, interviewed, and interrogated the claims of the Green family and other players involved in envisioning and implementing the MOTB. In Bible Nation and related publications, Moss and Baden exposed and chronicled Hobby Lobby’s oft-illicit collecting of antiquities, the evolution of the MOTB parent organisation’s self-presentation in tax filings, and the Greens’ educational and research-related initiatives. Bible Nation is indispensable for contextualising the MOTB’s origins. Published just prior to the opening of the museum, Moss and Baden’s work was also in many ways prophetic. Exemplary for its combination of investigative journalism and scholarly critique, Bible Nation set a particular stage for analyses of the MOTB that ensued. In a subsequent reflection on the writing of Bible Nation, Moss and Baden commented that they had written the book “not primarily to condemn, but to raise awareness, and to try and effect change.”[8] Bible Nation was intended, they wrote, “to garner broad public engagement with the ethical and ideological questions that surrounded the Museum” and to start “a conversation about the Museum’s role, practices, funding, and ambitions.”[9]
A lively, multi-faceted conversation indeed took place. Would the MOTB be able to conform to international standards of collection and display of artefacts? Would the institution, despite its leaders’ protests to the contrary, remain entangled with the evangelical Christian theology and political sympathies of its founders? The former of these two questions is perhaps obvious in importance for many beyond the traditional field of biblical studies, including especially for classicists, papyrologists, and archaeologists (some of whom, of course, also study materials related to the Bible). We are here dealing with a vast collection of antiquities, after all, many examples of which were illegally acquired or imported, or had murky or non-existent provenance records. Readers interested in the collection of and collection practices of the Greens and the MOTB will learn much from the work of Morag Kersel, Roberta Mazza, Brent Nongbri, and Michael Press.[10] In a recent article, Kersel has wondered at the faults of the MOTB in a time when mistakes could have been avoided: “How is it possible in this moment of museum decolonization, critical examination of museum ethics and practice, calls for repatriations and reparations, and restorative justice, that a brand new museum is embroiled in controversy over the acquisition, study, and display of archaeological artifacts?.”[11]
The primary reason the latter question—that of whether the MOTB would functionally evangelise—was on the minds of scholars is likely precisely the insistence of Steve Green and other high-profile executives and representatives of the MOTB that the museum coheres with biblical scholarship and thus does not promote a particular understanding of the Bible.[12] This was certainly the reason I became initially interested in analysing the MOTB, particularly since the institution originated in and remains headquartered in the state whose public research university is my institutional home. In many ways, a widespread naturalisation of the Greens’ views on the Bible would create challenges for my teaching endeavours, which include helping Oklahoma students historicise biblical literature and also, in many cases, their own biblicism. My curiosity about the MOTB turned to worry when I observed a public event sponsored by MOTB, held at a Baptist church in Oklahoma City, only months after the museum’s grand opening. The event, as I interpreted it, belied the claim that the MOTB was not enmeshed in evangelical Christian concerns about promoting biblicism.[13]
The question of whether the MOTB could conform to the stated goals of its founders and leaders was on the minds of both scholars and non-specialists. Indeed, since the MOTB opened, headlines in national and international journalistic outlets have wondered whether the scandal-plagued museum could reform, whether it could placate its critics. “Probably not” is the answer suggested by the collected essays in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction, a book I organised and edited with Cavan Concannon.[14] Intended as a general introduction to the institution once it had opened to the public, this collection brought together scholars of Bible, Judaism, American history, and religion in the public square to assess the MOTB’s collecting practices, exhibits, and political and financial ties. In a foreword to the volume penned by Moss and Baden, the authors reflect on the questions that surrounded the museum as the scholarly community and members of a broader public curiously watched the institution’s early days: “Public scandals about the illicit acquisition of artifacts, initiated and reported about by trained scholars, had haunted the institution for several years, but the content of the Museum and the manner in which it would seek to shape its audience were impossible to know for certain.”[15]
Contributors concluded that the MOTB sanitises church history and whitewashes biblical contents;[16] authorises Christian supersessionism and Christian nationalism;[17] perpetuates colonialist collection practices and archaeological endeavours;[18] centres White Protestantism in the U.S. at the expense of other religious traditions;[19] and has failed to be clear-eyed about its political, institutional, and financial liaisons.[20] The institution capitalises on and reinforces popular conceptions of the Bible as “the good book”as its leaders deny that any particular perspective has shaped its presentation of material (as predicted by Moss and Baden). “Taken together,” we wrote in the volume introduction, “the chapters’ collective findings paint a picture of an institution deeply intertwined with the evangelical beliefs and politics of its founding family.”[21] Our framing revolved principally around terms of accuracy-assessment, as Concannon and I concluded that scholarly “methods, questions, priorities, sensitivities, ethics, and—sometimes—just plain information differ from what one finds in the MOTB today.”[22]
To take one illustrative example: While the immersive Hebrew Bible walk-through exhibit was receiving design awards and provided fodder for ethnographical studies of its design firm,[23] it was also the object of heated critique from many biblical scholars who viewed it as undermining very basic points of instruction in their classrooms. I challenged in print, for example, the feasibility of the stated goal of this installation with respect to the diversity of bibles that exist, to represent “the Bible” when such a construct in the singular is imaginary.[24] Mark Leuchter wrote that “what is most problematic about the Hebrew Bible exhibit is that the Museum presents the exhibit as consistent with how biblical scholars view the material within the Hebrew Bible.”[25] Leuchter specifically critiqued, among other elements, the exhibit’s erasure of the social world behind the texts of the Hebrew Bible, the narration’s flirtation with the Christian concept of the “fall” in representing the creation from Genesis, and the focus on the fictional book of Ruth at the expense of the more historical books like 1 Kings 12-2 Kings 25. I subsequently offered, with Concannon, a close reading of the Hebrew Bible exhibit in its context on the Stories of the Bible Floor, demonstrating how it functions in the MOTB as a precursor to “The World of Jesus of Nazareth” and “The New Testament,” the other two immersive installations on this floor of the museum.[26] Marc Brettler published an essay reflecting on how a “Jewish Museum of the Bible” would look fundamentally different from the MOTB, suggesting that “maybe the Museum of the Bible should rename itself, honestly, as the Museum of the Evangelical Bible.”[27]
My suspicion is that it was the marrying of the MOTB’s particular positions, evident to so many experts of biblical literature, with the claim to objectivity that was (is) most concerning of all to members of the guild of biblical studies. Public scholarship requires a degree of expert commentary that not only contextualises but critiques. “Did they get it right?,” many of us wondered. Are they doing history or just heritage? Whose views do they prioritise? Whose do they eclipse? How can the museum’s failings be used to teach the content and questions of our discipline? In this spirit, Concannon and I offered this reflection on the intent of our volume: “Yet this volume is intended not only as an assessment of the MOTB but also as an invitation for all of us to think hard and to think well about the Bible, the interpretation of the Bible, and the ways that people mobilize the Bible in our world.”[28] Such issues are important, saturated as the U.S. national public discourse is with the Bible.
What was only beginning to become obvious to me was that the guild of biblical studies had itself contributed to the conditions of possibility for the MOTB’s claim of neutrality inasmuch as the mode of inquiry that has dominated the field since its inception—that of historical criticism—often pretends that it is possible for scholars to approach their objects of study without positionality. That is, we have frequently presented the discipline as “just doing history” when such rhetoric actually works to hide the interests, stated or otherwise, of the interpreter. Jennifer Wright Knust, significantly, sowed seeds of a larger critique of the responsibility of the field of biblical scholarship for what happened with MOTB. In her contribution to the volume, Knust turns a critical eye toward the MOTB’s involvement in and presentation of the sub-discipline of textual criticism: “Modern New Testament textual criticism has always been designed to certify particular (largely Protestant) presents. The attempt to claim that present, while also donning a mantle of nonsectarianism, is not new with the MOTB, nor is it foreign to the universities, seminaries, and institutes that constructed the discipline as currently practiced.”[29] Interrogating problems with the MOTB can also be an exercise in examining the problems in the academic field of biblical studies, long a field shaped by the interests of (usually White, male) Protestant Christians.[30]
Meanwhile, scholars in other academic disciplines, including anthropology, theatre studies, and literature reached (further) outside of the frame established in part by the MOTB’s own self-representation, treating the MOTB more as a curiosity than a potential threat, an object of analysis rather than potential collaborator or competitor. A forum in the journal Material Religion included short pieces addressing the rhetoric of aesthetic evaluations of the institution;[31] the MOTB as teleological performative space;[32] the use of replicas and facsimiles in the production of a master narrative.[33] Bielo also published on the use of Instagram by patrons engaged in religious tourism.[34] Further, Bielo successfully complicated the notion of “intention” behind the MOTB’s execution with his ethnographic work with four (non-religious) experiential design firms who implemented the MOTB’s exhibits.[35]
Unlike in these academic disciplines, though, the MOTB was haunting the field of biblical studies. This is key information for contextualising why many scholars, including the present author, approached the MOTB with suspicion. Moss and Baden showed in Bible Nation the degree to which the Green family’s endeavours had intervened in the guild. They were able and apparently willing to purchase thousands of artefacts, control access to them, and limit the academic freedom of scholars who worked on them through non-disclosure agreements, atypical in the humanities.[36] The MOTB, further, conscripted a host of prominent biblical scholars as academic advisors or consultants. One established scholar declined an invitation to contribute an essay on a topic of their expertise in New Testament studies to The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction on the grounds that it might result in legal action, apparently due to an existing non-disparagement agreement.
Moreover, representatives of the MOTB attended and participated in academic conferences in biblical studies, including annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature. Heated discussions ensued about whether MOTB representatives should have been asked to participate in the conversation, that is, whether the MOTB should get a say.[37] At one regional meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in March 2019, New Testament scholar and Director of the Scholars Initiative at MOTB Michael Holmes responded to such critique with this assessment of the past, present, and potential future of the museum.[38] Since the paper remains unpublished, it is worth quoting at length (with permission):
The Museum of the Bible (MOTB) was conceived, designed, built, and opened in a remarkably short period of time. One constant throughout this process was its mission statement: “to invite all people to engage with the Bible.” But while the mission statement declared the raison d’etre for the project, it did not provide guidance regarding how to accomplish that mission. Eventually the leadership team settled on the idea of a “non-sectarian” approach to the Bible, one that would be more or less neutral and agenda-free. They also decided that the means by which this specific goal would be achieved would be the involvement of a wide range of scholars representing the multiple branches of both Judaism and Christianity.
The quality input from a strong and diverse group of Jewish and Christian scholars, however, came along too late in the overall process to affect the final product in any more than a modest way at best. By the time scholars weighed in, multiple design teams were already hard at work designing and fabricating the displays that would fill the building being built concurrently. The design work was largely based upon input from a relatively small group that had been involved with the Museum from the beginning…
Holmes stated that “the result is a Museum whose overall narrative is largely univocal and profoundly Protestant Christian in character. The reality is incongruent with what was promised.” He concluded the talk by suggesting that change in response to critics was on the horizon but that it would “sometimes be slow (due to the inertia arising from already-existing exhibits) and not without challenges.” The context here is interesting to observe: the existence of the MOTB was affecting the proceedings of a conference. Biblical scholars unaffiliated with the institution were presenting critiques of the museum while a biblical scholar employed by the museum responded and speculated about how the institution might respond to critiques. Indeed, the presence of MOTB representatives and the involvement of many scholars in advising the MOTB turned the MOTB into a conversation partner as much as an object of analysis.
And the conversation, at its most basic, was whether or not the MOTB’s presentation was compatible with academic biblical scholarship. Indeed, it has been easy for those of us primarily trained in the discipline of historical critical study of the Bible (and familiar with White Christianity in the U.S.) to approach MOTB content from the point of view of accuracy-assessment, that is, to examine its exhibits as experts on the history of biblical literature and to render judgement on whether and how the exhibits cohere with the methods of our discipline.
But many of the perceived problems that attend the MOTB’s presentation of material, I have come to appreciate increasingly, also attend the academic field of historical critical biblical studies. Professional biblical scholars (and here I include myself) would do well to reflect further on the responsibility of our field as an academic discipline for creating circumstances that made the MOTB’s “mistakes” possible. Historical critical normativity in biblical studies, and its historic imbrication with White male Christian interests, has paved the way for what is possible for and at the MOTB. More often than not, historical critical inquiry in biblical studies hides ethical work by asserting the possibility of objectivity, with the result that White and/or male and/or Christian perspectives are (inaccurately) deemed normative, neutral, or non-political.[39]
Further, our field in many ways hinges on anachronism. By its very name, “biblical studies” inheres a notion of working backwards from a modern concept of “the Bible.” As much as the question of “which Bible” or “whose Bible” is being represented (by the MOTB or anyone else) is rhetorically useful for teaching or for public scholarship, the question presumes the existence and stability of immaterial Bibles. This is a figment that the guild of professional biblical scholars has sustained (in part for our own survival!). With our focus on antiquity and concern with origins, we frequently fail to distinguish between the cultural icon of “the Bible,”[40] which is immaterial and fluid, and material bibles. Disguising that the objects of its study are frequently intangible or even imaginary, our field has further propelled imperialist thought and action toward collecting commodities that make its objects of study appear less elusive.[41] The Green family’s collecting is in some ways a contemporary extension of impulses in “biblical archaeology” as historically practised as a search for things that we can touch that will make our imaginary texts more real to us, or that will help us imagine more robustly, or that will even convince us that they are not imaginary at all.
One way that the fantasy of “the Bible” has organised the concerns of our professional study is that the quests for its original texts, or even more modestly, the perceived earliest attainable texts, has led to a wide practice of scholars producing scholarship about antiquity that is based only on modern hypothetical reconstructions that do not actually exist in any ancient material form. That is, we routinely write scholarship on imaginary works as though they are not imaginary. Even scholars who are not interested in the starting questions around origins or historical critical study are frequently trained into practices that are in service of them. And thus, we make our make-believe real.
I want to highlight three directions of scholarship that I view as holding promise for remedying our historic dependence on the fantasy of “the Bible.” Several possibilities exist as ways forward for biblical studies to direct our attention away from the study of the imaginary as though it were material. We could, for example, embrace trends in New Philology, that is, refuse composite reconstructions in favour of studying material texts, treating manuscripts not as “witnesses” to an elusive Urtext but as cultural artefacts worth examination in and of themselves. As Liv Ingeborg Lied has so helpfully illustrated in her recent book Imaginary Manuscripts, a major benefit of this approach is that we must confront ethical considerations around whose manuscripts we are employing to make our arguments.[42]
Alternatively, we could take our penchant for historicising texts and analyse our critical editions themselves as cultural artefacts, as in the work J. Gregory Given, who illustrates how our inherited Ignatian corpus is the product of a larger historiographical story that hinges on ecclesial power struggles in the post-Reformation period and is inseparable from both colonial capture of cultural heritage and infighting in the burgeoning discipline of biblical studies in the nineteenth century.[43] That is, we could consistently treat our critical editions not as study aids that give us access to a(n imaginary) text upon which we then build arguments but rather as primary texts about which we make arguments. We should be historicising their creators, rendering visible the hands who made them, identifying the socio-cultural circumstances that influenced their very production as well as their historically contingent contours. Rather than eschewing composites, then, this method invites meta-critical examination of the composites and the scholars who produced our inherited hypothetical reconstructions (and under what circumstances and constraints). Historicising our critical editions is another way to ensure that we are studying material realities.
A third possibility is to shift our study toward articulating the ways in which composites become scriptural in various communities, that is to eschew study of “the (imaginary) Bible” for study of particularised biblicisms. Which brings me back to the MOTB. I have become convinced that if we are to take seriously that “the Bible” is imaginary, accuracy-assessment is not the most interesting, or ethical, mode of analysis when it comes to the MOTB. The questions that I now find most productive do not query whether the MOTB “gets the Bible right” but instead seek to read the MOTB as a bible-producer, a scripturalisation machine. By using Vincent Wimbush’s term “scripturalization,” I here intend to heed his call to attend to how people make certain texts scriptural, to interrogate “the psychology, the phenomenology, the sociology, the anthropology, the invention and uses, and the political consequences of the uses of the texts.”[44] Whereas much of my previous writing on the MOTB asked “is the MOTB ‘evangelical’?” and concluded in varying degrees in the affirmative, I have become convinced that a shift is in order to overcome what could be fairly, if hyperbolically, called intra-Protestant intellectual warfare about “the Bible.” Better is to assume that, as an institution founded, funded, and led by White U.S. evangelicals, the MOTB is principally a robust data set for how White evangelicals in the U.S. make their Bible scriptural.[45]
Unlike the cultural icon of “the Bible,” the bible the MOTB constructs and markets is material and of-the-moment, able to be read and contextualised historically. The MOTB’s bible is also trans-medial, able to be felt and heard. A focus on scripturalisation helps us resist the Protestant-inflected tyranny of the textual that reigns in traditional biblical studies and leads us to these questions as starting points of analysis: What does the particular bible produced by the MOTB say and do? What does it feel like? What affections does it spark? What rhetorical purposes does it serve? What usable pasts does it construct (and to whose benefit)? How does it recruit material objects to attempt to naturalise the answers to these questions? Such a methodological stance is less concerned about demonstrating (whether to MOTB representatives or to a wider public) the evangelical Christian nature of the institution and interested more in investigating the MOTB as a bible-producer and marketer imbricated in White evangelical political, theological, and economic practices and ideologies in the U.S.[46]
When Steve Green commented in 2017 that he wanted the MOTB to “advance scholarship and raise a new generation of biblical scholars,” he likely did not have in mind a challenge to the guild to reflect on our own mistakes, potential scandals, and centring of (White) Protestant Christianity. He likely did not have in mind a shift from studying “Bible” to studying biblicism and scripturalisation. He likely did not have in mind heeding the calls of feminist scholars and those from historically marginalised population groups who have challenged that rhetoric of “objectivity” serves the interests of the hegemonic. Yet perhaps the best response to the MOTB, for those of us for whom the institution is problematic, is to look into the mirror as we deconstruct the White Protestant-inflected field of biblical studies itself and reckon with the continued effects of our fantasies about “the Bible.”
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Moss, Candida R. and Joel S. Baden. Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.
________. “Foreword.” Pages xi–xiv in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction. Edited by Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon.Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019.
Parks, Sara. “Historical-Critical Ministry?: The Biblical Studies Classroom as Restorative Secular Space.” New Blackfriars 100 (2018): 229–44. doi:10.1111/nbfr.12446
________. “‘The Brooten Phenomenon’: Moving Women from the Margins in Second-Temple and New Testament Scholarship.” The Bible and Critical Theory 15.1 (2019): 46–64. tinyurl.com/36auwvh3.
Porter, Sarah F. “The Land of Israel and Bodily Pedagogy at the Museum of the Bible.” Pages 121–142 in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction. Edited by Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan. ConcannonLanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019.
Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999.
Stevenson, Jill. “Narrative Space: Performing Progress at the Museum of the Bible.” Material Religion 15.1 (2019): 136–40. doi:10.1080/17432200.2018.1535018
Wimbush, Vincent. White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Young, Stephen L. “The Museum of the Bible: Promoting Biblical Exceptionalism to Naturalize an Evangelical America.” Pages 25–42 in Christian Tourist Attractions, Mythmaking, and Identity Formation. Edited by Erin Roberts and Jennifer Eyl. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
________. “Religious Freedom for a Christian America: ‘Don’t You Agree?’” Pages 235–254 in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction. Edited by Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan.Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019.
[1] I wish to thank Cavan Concannon, Stephen Young, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their helpful feedback.
[2] Martyn Wendell Jones, “Steve Green Leaves His Mark on Washington,” Christianity Today, 20 October 2017, tinyurl.com/yc6rp9xy.
[3] On the Greens’ cultivation of the self-descriptor “founding family,” see Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon, “On Good Government and Good Girls: How the Museum of the Bible’s Founding Family Turned Themselves into Bible Experts,” The Revealer, 20 March 2019, tinyurl.com/2p9eprc4.
[4] By “Bible-boosterism” I mean public efforts to commend the Bible as a good, authoritative text. I re-appropriate the term from Margaret M. Mitchell, “‘It’s Complicated.’ ‘No, It’s Not.’: The Museum of the Bible, Problems and Solutions,” in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction, eds. Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019), 3-36.
[5] Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden, Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Mitchell, “‘It’s Complicated.’ ‘No, It’s Not.’,” 3-36; Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon, Does Scripture Speak for Itself? The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 47-75.
[6] James S. Bielo, Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (New York: New York University Press, 2018).
[7] Moss and Baden, Bible Nation.
[8] Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden, “Foreword,” in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction ed. Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon, (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019), xi.
[9] Moss and Baden, “Foreword,” xi.
[10] See, for example, Roberta Mazza, “Faces & Voices: People, Artefacts, Ancient History” (tinyurl.com/2p8bj7mt); Brent Nongbri, “Variant Readings” (tinyurl.com/yp4kvaw5); Michael Press’s Twitter feed (@MichaelDPress) and blog “Textual Cultures, Material Cultures” (tinyurl.com/mry8d8fz); Morag Kersel’s presentation “Untold Stories at the Museum of the Bible”, Everyday Orientalism, (tinyurl.com/ysewr5k6). Many of these scholars were watching and writing about the Green Collection for years prior to the MOTB’s opening.
[11] Morag M. Kersel, “Redemption for the Museum of the Bible? Artifacts, provenance, the display of Dead Sea Scrolls, and bias in the contact zone,” Museum Management and Curatorship, 36.3 (2021): 209, doi:10.1080/09647775.2021.1914144.
[12] As Moss and Baden point out in Bible Nation, the language of “non-sectarian” is already a Protestant framing.
[13] Jill Hicks-Keeton, “What the Museum of the Bible Conveys about Biblical Scholarship Behind Closed Doors,” Religion & Politics (March 13, 2018), tinyurl.com/mr37mh9b.
[14] Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon, eds., The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019).
[15] Moss and Baden, “Foreword,” xi.
[16] Mitchell, “‘It’s Complicated.’ ‘No, It’s Not.’,” 3-36; Mark Leuchter, “Smoke and Mirrors: The Hebrew Bible Exhibit at the Museum of the Bible,” in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction ed. Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019), 89-98.; see also Jill Hicks-Keeton, “The ‘Slave Bible’ is Not What You Think,” The Revealer (3 June 2020), tinyurl.com/2p8kb4hx.
[17] Jill Hicks-Keeton, “Christian Supersessionism and the Problem of Diversity at the Museum of the Bible,” in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction ed. Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019), 49-70; Stephen L. Young, “Religious Freedom for a Christian America: ‘Don’t You Agree?’,” in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction, ed. Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019), 235-254; see also Stephen L. Young, “The Museum of the Bible: Promoting Biblical Exceptionalism to Naturalize an Evangelical America,” in Christian Tourist Attractions, Mythmaking, and Identity Formation, ed. Erin Roberts and Jennifer Eyl, (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 25-42.
[18] Cavan Concannon, “Theopolitics, Archaeology, and the Ideology of the Museum of the Bible,” in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction, ed. Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019); Sarah F. Porter, “The Land of Israel and Bodily Pedagogy at the Museum of the Bible,” in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction, ed. Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019), 121-142; Roberta Mazza, “The Green Papyri and the Museum of the Bible,” in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction, ed. Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019), 171-206; Jennifer Wright Knust, “Editing Without Interpreting: The Museum of the Bible and New Testament Textual Criticism,” in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction ed. Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019), 145-170. See also Cavan Concannon, “Remembering the Destruction[s] of the Temple at the Museum of the Bible,” Near Eastern Archaeology 82.3 (2019): 172-178, doi:10.1086/705401.
[19] Marc Zvi Brettler, “Looking at the Bible Sideways: One Jewish Scholar’s Perspective,” in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction, ed. Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019), 71-88; Terrence L. Johnson, “Exploring Race, Religion, and Slavery at the Museum of the Bible,” in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction, ed. Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019), 37-46; Ludvik A. Kjeldsberg, “Christian Dead Sea Scrolls? The Post-2002 Fragments as Modern Protestant Relics,” in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction, ed. Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019), 207-218.
[20] John Fea, “Letting the Bible Do Its Work on Behalf of a Christian America: The Founding Era at the Museum of the Bible,” in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction, ed. Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019), 221-234; Mark A. Chancey, “Museum of the Bible’s Politicized Holy Land Trip,” in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction, ed. Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019), 275-294; James R. Linville, “The Creationist Museum of the Bible,” in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction, ed. Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019), 257-274.
[21] Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon, “Introduction,” in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction, ed. Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019), xviii.
[22] Hicks-Keeton and Concannon, “Introduction,” xv-xvi.
[23] James S. Bielo, “Experiential Design and Religious Publicity at D.C.’s Museum of the Bible,” The Senses and Society15.1 (2020): 98-113, doi:10.1080/17458927.2019.1709303.
[24] Hicks-Keeton, “Christian Supersessionism,” 49-70.
[25] Leuchter, “Smoke and Mirrors,” 90.
[26] Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon, “‘Squint against the grandeur!’ Waiting for Jesus at the Museum of the Bible,” The Bible & Critical Theory 15.1 (2019): 114-29, tinyurl.com/ncys5jn3.
[27] Brettler, “Looking at the Bible Sideways,” 83.
[28] Hicks-Keeton and Concannon, “Introduction,” xviii.
[29] Knust, “Editing Without Interpreting,” 148.
[30] See the critiques in A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible: Approaches, Methods and Strategies, Athalya Brenner-Idan and Carole Fontaine, eds., (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999); Randall C. Bailey, Tat-Siong Benny Liew, and Fernando F. Segovia, eds., They Were All Together in One Place? Toward Minority Biblical Criticism (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2009); Nyasha Junior, An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015).
[31] James S. Bielo, “Quality: D.C.’s Museum of the Bible and Aesthetic Evaluation,” Material Religion 15.1 (2019): 131–132, doi:10.1080/17432200.2018.1535015.
[32] Jill Stevenson, “Narrative space: performing progress at the Museum of the Bible,” Material Religion 15.1 (2019):136-40, doi:10.1080/17432200.2018.1535018.
[33] Jana Mathews, “The Museum of the Bible’s ‘Fake’ History of the Bible,” Material Religion 15.1 (2019): 133-36, doi:10.1080/17432200.2018.1535017.
[34] James S. Bielo, “Like-able Me, Like-able There,” American Religion (December 2019), tinyurl.com/juv5z6pp.
[35] James S. Bielo, “Experiential Design and Religious Publicity at D.C.’s Museum of the Bible,” The Senses and Society15.1 (2020): 98-113, doi:10.1080/17458927.2019.1709303.
[36] Moss and Baden, Bible Nation, 22-98.
[37] See, for example, Cavan Concannon’s archiving and analysis of a Twitter debate from November 2018: “Museum of the Bible and Biblical Studies: A Twitter Story,” tinyurl.com/35ff53kv.
[38] Michael Holmes, “Response to [Mark] Chancey, [Jill] Hicks-Keaton [sic.], and [Cavan] Concannon,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southwest Commission on Religious Studies, Dallas, Texas, March 2019.
[39] The evidence for this is overwhelming for those paying attention. See, for example, the recent articles of Sara Parks (“Historical-Critical Ministry?: The Biblical Studies Classroom as Restorative Secular Space,” New Blackfriars 100 (2018): 229–44, doi:10.1111/nbfr.12446 and “‘The Brooten Phenomenon’: Moving Women from the Margins in Second-Temple and New Testament Scholarship,” The Bible and Critical Theory 15 (2019): 46–64, tinyurl.com/ytrxpce5, and Stephen L. Young (“‘Let’s Take the Text Seriously’: The Protectionist Doxa of Mainstream New Testament Studies,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 32.4 (2020): 328-63, doi:10.1163/15700682-12341469). See further the works cited in footnote 29 above.
[40] On “Bible” as cultural icon, see Timothy Beal, The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 1-28.
[41] Knust, “Editing Without Interpreting.” On biblical studies and the imperialist origins and practices of the British Museum, see Gregory L. Cuéllar, Empire, the British Museum, and the Making of the Biblical Scholar in the Nineteenth Century (London: Palgrave Press, 2019).
[42] Liv Ingeborg Lied, Invisible Manuscripts: Textual Scholarship and the Survival of 2 Baruch (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021). Lied pushes past the field’s historic tendency to attend to manuscripts “primarily if [the manuscripts] managed to make themselves transparent, efficiently guiding the scholarly gaze to a text behind and beyond them” (1). Using a method she terms “provenance-aware, material philology,” Lied takes seriously “the life cycle of a writing” which opens up the possibility “that its origin is just one point in time in a long row of interconnected points” (17). The result is a rich exploration of Syriac Christian engagement with the book of 2 Baruch, which has historically been hidden from view because of the scholarly quest for the book’s origins in ancient Judaism.
[43] J. Gregory Given, “Ignatius of Antioch and the Historiography of Early Christianity,” an unpublished dissertation for Harvard University (2019) which is being adapted into a monograph entitled Open Letters: Ignatius of Antioch and the Reconstruction of Early Christianity. I am grateful to Given for sharing with me both the dissertation and the book proposal. Given’s work provides an example of how to deal with complex textual histories and demonstrates why we need to exercise caution with our canons and archives that might seem natural but are in fact constructed. “Ignatius” has been produced for us and we must attend to the identities, motives, and material and structural circumstances of the producers.
[44] Vincent Wimbush, White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12.
[45] Such is the methodological stance adopted in my more recent work on the MOTB, coauthored with Cavan Concannon and to be published as Does Scripture Speak for Itself? The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation by Cambridge University Press (forthcoming). Stephen L. Young’s work on the MOTB also treats the museum as data for understanding U.S. evangelicalism (see especially “The Museum of the Bible: Promoting Biblical Exceptionalism to Naturalize an Evangelical America.”)
[46] One benefit of such work is that its contribution stands to endure as the MOTB’s stated mission continues to evolve, with the most recent iteration more evangelistic in tone and aim: “to invite all people to engage with the transformative power of the Bible” (emphasis added), tinyurl.com/bdfbs2p6 [Retrieved 24 January 2021].