KING JESUS IS COMING FOR US ANY TIME NOW. THE RAPTURE. BE PREPARED TO GO.
In first, museum melds two millenia of Jewish and Christian texts
Bible Lands Museum launches display of scores of rare manuscripts — from the Greek Septuagint to Gutenberg
October 23, 2013, 10:57 pm
0-The Times of Israel
Martin
Luther's translation of the Old Testament (German). Print, woodcut and
pigment on paper, leather binding, brass clasps. Wittenberg, Germany,
1525. (photo credit: Hanna Rhymes, Green Collection)
Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum
on Wednesday inaugurated a new traveling exhibition of rare Biblical
texts and artifacts spanning two millennia, from lands as disparate and
distant as Germany and Iraq, and written in at least a half a dozen
languages.The
exhibit, entitled “The Book of Books,” compiles over 200 texts with the
ambitious aim of presenting the history of the Judeo-Christian document
over the course of Western history through its textual heritage. Among
the documents on display are fragments
of the earliest Greek translation of the Bible — the Septuagint — early
New Testament scriptures, vibrant illuminated manuscripts, rare
fragments from the Cairo Geniza and pages from the Gutenberg Bible, the
first set to print.Curators said instead of sticking to
illegible, dusty, leather-bound tomes, they combined curious artifacts
and exotic documents — such as prayer amulets engraved on silver rolls,
1,500-year-old Iraqi incantation bowls and elaborately illustrated
prayer books — to animate the exhibit.Among the gems of the exhibition is the Green
Collection’s Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a 6th to 8th century CE
palimpsest whose Greek and Palestinian Aramaic Gospels were overwritten
with Syriac.The gallery also has a working reproduction of a Gutenberg-era printing press, replete with period-dress printer.The project was “unlike anything we’ve done
before,” said Bible Lands Museum Director Amanda Weiss at the gala
kickoff of the exhibition. “It’s a marriage of two cultures, two faiths”
which incorporates cutting edge technology to present ancient
manuscripts with “a courageous design concept.”
The varied assemblage of scrolls, codices,
papyri and parchment comes from several different sources — a vast
number of which are on loan from the Green Collection, the world’s
largest private collection of biblical texts and artifacts.Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby and
benefactor of the collection, said that although the 40,000 biblical
antiquities are based far from Jerusalem in Oklahoma, “we hope this
exhibit will bring us together and unite us under a book we all love,
the scriptures.”“It is exciting to be right here in Jerusalem where many of these items come from,” he said.Green, an evangelical Christian, recently revealed he would house what he calls “the world’s oldest Jewish prayer book,” said to date from 840, which he purchased a year ago, in a museum being built to house the collection in Washington D.C.The 400,000 square foot museum, situated two
blocks from the US Capitol building in Washington DC, will also house
the exhibit on display in Jerusalem. It is set to open to the public in
2017.“We’ll be able to tell three different
stories,” Green said, “the history of the Bible, the impact of the
Bible, and the Bible’s story — what does the Bible say.”The Green family was accused of anti-Semitism last month after the Hobby Lobby chain of stores said it would not stock Hanukkah-themed products. The store later agreed to put Jewish holiday bric-a-brac on its shelves.For Green, the Book of Books exhibit is only
the tip of the iceberg. He said his foundation’s long term ambition is
not only the advancement of biblical education through the museum, but
“developing a curriculum that we are looking at going into public
schools in the US as well as places all across the world.”
The Green family’s Christian bent could
potentially have caused friction in Jerusalem, and Weiss said the four
years to conceive, assemble, and curate the project were not without
difficulties.“It’s not an easy thing for a museum in
Jerusalem to take on and exhibition that is a knowingly Christian
initiative and to do it in a way that is appropriate to our entire
audience,” she said, referring to the Green Collection and Scholars
Initiative. “And so we embarked on a journey of learning to understand
each other, to respect each other, and the important issues that had to
be handled in an appropriate way.”“There’s no
other museum dedicated to the history of the Bible, which is why this
exhibition in this museum and at this time is so wonderfully important,”
Weiss said.The exhibition at the Bible Lands Museum runs
through May 2014, at which point it travels to the Vatican and then
Seoul, South Korea. 
