KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
has teamed up with the Kansas City business community to promote a greater
awareness of one of the nation’s premier biblical artifact collections.
The Green Collection encompasses more than 40,000 biblical antiquities
currently featured in the worldwide traveling exhibition “Passages.” The items
eventually will form the core of a permanent international, non-sectarian
museum of the Bible, according to its website. The collection’s first artifact
was purchased by Steve Green, president of the Hobby Lobby arts and crafts
retail chain, in 2009.
More than 200 of Kansas City’s business, educational and religious leaders
listened to Green as the featured speaker at a mid-July luncheon at Kansas City’s
historic Union Station. Also participating were Scott Carroll, director of the
Green Collection and an ancient and medieval manuscript scholar, and Cary
Summers, CEO of the Nehemiah Group and designer of the Passages’ traveling exhibit.
“Our primary purpose in co-sponsoring this event with J.E. Dunn Construction
and Union Station was to introduce the Kansas City community to this phenomenal
collection,” said R. Philip Roberts, Midwestern’s president.
“I was amazed at the quality and richness of it when I saw the opening exhibit
in Washington, D.C.,” Roberts said, “and I wanted to draw the attention of as
many people as possible to it. The collection’s richness and variety, in terms
of time and width of impact and resources, as well as the enormous quality
historically of all that is involved, is amazing. It is also our hope to see
some of it, if not all of it, here in Kansas City in the near future.”
Steve Green (right), president of Hobby Lobby, and Phil Roberts, Midwestern Seminary president, view replicas of ancient Bibles from Midwestern’s collection displayed at a luncheon in Kansas City’s Union Station to inform the community of one of the nation’s largest biblical artifact compendiums, the Green Collection, and a national Bible museum on the horizon. |
Green noted that the collection was started because a survey on interest in a Bible
museum yielded some surprising results. More than 90 percent of the respondents
affirmed two of the survey’s questions – “Do you believe the Bible still
applies to today’s problems or was it only practical years ago?” and “Is
America more in need of the Bible today than ever before?”
“This just goes against what we would hear in the popular culture,” Green said
of the survey’s findings, “and this gave us great confidence that what we’d be
doing, there’d be a market for. The acceptance and interest level for having a museum
dedicated to the Bible – the most incredible book ever written and that has had
the greatest impact on our society of any other book – there needs to be a
museum that tells that story in a very solid academic way.”
The Hobby Lobby president said he felt a need to get the word out about the
collection while it awaited a permanent home. He enlisted Summers’ help to
design the traveling exhibit, a 14,000-square-foot interactive multimedia
exhibition featuring rare biblical manuscripts, printed Bibles and historical
items including a Dead Sea scroll text, ancient biblical papyri, portions of
the Gutenberg Bible and multiple first editions of the English Bible through
the King James Version.
According to the Passages website, more than 300 of the world’s rarest
artifacts are presented in thematic settings that depict significant historical
periods of time and are brought to life with animatronic historical figures,
creative films and interactive elements.
A companion program, the Green Scholars Initiative, allows undergraduate,
graduate and doctoral students hands-on access to the artifacts. The initiative
has assembled a team of world-renowned scholars who direct research projects at
70 universities and seminaries throughout North America and is designed to
foster collaboration between established and young scholars to pioneer new
biblical discoveries.
“The Green Scholars Initiative flips the traditional paradigm, which is leading
institutions controlling ancient documents and doling them out to whomever they
want, or you come to them and work by their terms,” Carroll said. “We thought, ‘What
if these things were entrusted in the hands of excellent scholars and mentors
and democratized, distributed around the country?’ When the entire thing is up
and running, then hundreds of students will be involved and impacted by this
process.
“The different research initiatives are overseen by the leading scholars in the
world via the Internet, and items are entrusted predominantly to traditional undergraduate
institutions,” Carroll continued. “So there are sophomores and juniors working
on the earliest texts in the New Testament and involved in the publication of
those things. This will raise up a generation of capable young scholars who are
invigorated and excited about studying these things.”
Carroll will return to the Kansas City area on Oct. 25-27 to lecture at
Midwestern Seminary about the Green Collection and about the importance of
historical biblical research.
Green said the intended results of the collection are threefold: to present the
history of the Bible; to depict the impact of the Bible; and to tell the story
of the Bible.
“We have probably the most ignorant population we’ve ever had in our society (about the Bible) because it’s been taken out of our schools,” Green said. “We
want to be able to, in a simple way, explain to them, ‘Here’s what the Bible
is.’ Ultimately, it’s about the fact that we are sinners; we need a Savior; and
Christ was that, and He came to die for us that we might have life.”
The collection’s leadership currently is researching the best location for a
permanent museum, with Washington, New York and Dallas being strongly
considered, Green said. The Passages traveling exhibit is currently on display
at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art until Oct. 16.
(EDITOR’S NOTE – Patrick Hudson is director of communications at Midwestern
Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Mo.)