Museum of the Bible, Part 2

This is the second of three posts on my trip to the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., which I visited with my friend Jenny back in July. During the first post, I talked about several high-tech interactives and a few historic Bibles. In this section, I show more of the same, along with impressive reproductions, in sections known as “Bible in America” and “The History of the Bible”. Since this fits nowhere else, I want to note the creative names giving to the three different dining experiences at the museum: Milk+Honey Cafe, Manna Restaurant, and Creations Cafe; Jenny and I packed our lunch.

Picking up where I left off in “Bible in America”, I found a reproduction of the Liberty Bell, having just visited the real thing a few weeks before. The museum had an excellent exhibit on how the Bible was used in the early 19^th century during arguments for and against slavery. A wall featured favorite abolitionists, including Angelina Grimke, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, and Frederick Douglass, but not Abby Kelley Foster. Also in this section was a Bible reinterpreted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and many other women, which aimed to combat sexist translations, although I don’t think their own work was particularly accurate. The final section of “Bible in America” included kiosks with a survey. Visitors could decide their stance on a range of political issues and see how they compared to other visitors based on age, gender, race, and denomination. I love an interactive data viz!

Next, we went up to “The History of the Bible”, which is on the entire fourth floor. This incredible collection was by far my favorite part of the museum, but this is also where less invested museum-goers will get bored and begin wandering among the Bibles instead of looking at them. The exhibit began with a comprehensive overview of ancient writing systems and laws. I was incredibly excited by the reproductions of famous stone artifacts, including the Cyrus Cylinder, the Mesha Stele, and the Rosetta Stone. As an added bonus, a virtual expert was located in this section. She called in via Zoom on a big screen and could answer visitor questions from the comfort of her office. More museums need to adopt this practice!

Once writing systems had been established, people wasted no time writing down the oral histories of their religion. Reproductions of the Dead Sea Scrolls showed how the Hebrew writing system changed over time, while reproductions of codices (thoroughly explained in this essay) appeared in Greek, Latin, and the Ethiopian language Ge'ez. Some books focused the lives of saints and contained morbid illustrations. Since books were expensive, and literacy was lower than in the present, icons were another way to teach people the stories of the Bible. It was a reminder that I haven’t been to The Icon Museum and Study Center (formerly the Museum of Russian Icons) in a long time, and I need to return.

Not all stories and artifacts filled me with cheer. One exhibit talked about the book Peri Pascha by Melito of Sardis, which was published around AD 170. Melito wanted to be sure that Christianity was viewed as a different religion from Judaism, so he repeatedly blamed Jews for the death of Jesus, despite being Jewish himself, and effectively invented antisemitism. Later in history, Christian leaders fought over translations of the Bible with controversy over whether it should be written in the vernacular or the language most commonly spoken by everyday people. This was one of the issues that led to the schism between the Protestant and Catholic churches in 1517. The exhibit soon turned back to cheerier topics. Before the printing press, illuminators created beautiful designs inside their handwritten Bibles. Among the most famous is the Book of Kells, a set of the Gospels from Ireland. An impressive reproduction is on display.

As the exhibit drew closer to the modern era, Bibles were printed on presses similar to the Gutenberg replica mentioned in Part 1. Besides allowing many pages to be printed in a fairly short amount of time, these Bibles contained woodcut illustrations. One lavishly illustrated Bible had alternating lines of Latin and Arabic, neither of these being the original language of the text. Another interesting book described the lives of saints and included a woodcut of Bible translator William Tyndale being strangled and burned at the stake. Throughout this gallery space were short videos of reenactors portraying Bible translators and explaining their motivation behind their work. I appreciated the juxtaposition of the contemporary text with a modern actor’s interpretation. This concludes Part 2 of my trip to Museum of the Bible. Part 3 will come this Friday and wrap up the miniseries on this amazing museum.