Peter Costello
Steve Green, the owner of Hobby Lobby and a founder and major backer of the Museum of the Bible.
AP Photo Mainly About Books
by the Books Editor
Back in January, Steve Green, the billionaire founder with his family of the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC, issued a book he had co-authored. It is called This Beautiful Book (Zondervan, £18.99), one of a series he is devoting to his main interest in life (outside of his business), the Bible.
“The Bible’s collection of history, poetry, genealogy lists, and mystifying prophecies often prove puzzling to readers,” he remarks. “And when this text is read in pieces, we’re left with only a half-impression of the vibrant mosaic.”
His book highlights the thematic threads woven throughout the ancient writings and shows his readers a new way to engage with Scripture as a whole.
He invites his readers to step back from the individual stories of the Bible and consider the Bible as a whole.
He claims that the insights were gained from first-hand experiences in leading and developing the first world-class Bible museum.
How embarrassing, then, that the Museum of the Bible has been hit by another criminal scandal. Last year the board revealed that some of the items that the museum had bought had in fact been inappropriately removed and sold from the collection of Oxyrhynchus papyri discovered back in the 1890s in Oxford (see The Irish Catholic, November 7, 2019).
The new scandal involves the much more famous ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’. This has become a vague term to refer to items not from the site at Qumran or the caves nearby, but merely picked up in the district.
Mere fragments
Unlike the original Dead Sea Scrolls these are mere fragments, with no provenance at all; they were useless for scientific research in any case. Sixteen were bought – all are fakes.
And not good fakes either, an analytic science lab engaged to review them has now found. The forger used a scholarly edition of the Bible from the 1930s – on one fragment copying as part of the fake inscription was an ‘a’ which indicated a footnote in the printed text!
Why were these faults not noted at the time? Steve Green, it seems, like many evangelicals, distrusts academics and scientists, seeing them as “adversarial”; that is to say, they don’t always agree with his firm held ideas.
In his book, Steven Green says that we know the Bible can be accurate about history because in the days of the patriarchs people live so long. Methuselah lived for 960 years (Genesis 5:27). And his memory alone would have supported an exact knowledge of the 1656 years since Adam. This notion leaves one a little stunned, but then the book is not aimed at carping literary critics.
On the value of his own book, Steven Green concludes: “A truly captivating experience, this book will instil in you a deep appreciation for Scripture and its profound connection to your own life story.”
Whatever Steve Green’s book is, it is no substitute for the Bible as a whole, it is not even a sort of Reader’s Digest book version”
And all of this in a mere 224 pages, from Genesis to the Apocalypse. My copy of the Douay version of the Bible takes some 1631 pages.
What is provided by the enthusiastic Steve Green is not any kind of version of the Bible, but an essay in evangelical enthusiasm that skates over all difficulties with untroubled faith in human judgement.
He recalls that he went to see the musical Les Misérables. He found it very confusing. To get a better idea of it he went home to watch the film version. Then he saw it as a story. It never struck him he should turn to the 1,900-odd pages in French that it took Victor Hugo to tell his tale.
Steve Green wanted to grasp Hugo’s plot, or what he calls “the story”. But it is not the mere story, but how it is told that makes a book. It is the manner of telling that is essential, whether for Agatha Christie or the authors of Genesis.
So whatever Steve Green’s book is, it is no substitute for the Bible as a whole, it is not even a sort of Reader’s Digest book version. To read the Bible you have to read the Bible book by book, all 73 of them, if need be.
I imagine, though, that the Bible Steve Green uses every day as a good evangelical, has only 66. But that is another story.