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The Dead Sea Scroll and the Ancient World (Part 2)
Part 1
"Special Blessing Draw Box"
Mixing God and Mammon. Tsk.
In the third chamber, another talk was beginning, and this was the best of the lot.
The Boo Boo Man. Who had no Ph.D (I didn't manage to glimpse or snap his nametag).
The Boo Boo Man was very proud of the exhibition having a page of the Gutenberg Bible, and claimed that no less than Bill Gates had offered $100 million for a copy - but no one was willing to share it with him. This is nonsense, since sources indicate that he does have one in his possession (and estimate he paid *only* $23 million for it).
Boo Boo Man then claimed that before the invention of movable type by Gutenberg, it had taken 6 months to inscribe the Bible. This was misleading, as Gutenberg did not invent *Printing* - wood block printing had already been around for more than a millennium.
Then came the best howler of all - he claimed that Elizabeth I of England had beheaded "her sister" "Bloody Mary" to take the throne. I hope he gets his Ph.D soon! But besides avoiding Biology he should also steer clear of History...
The first Bible printed in Spanish (1569), by Cassiodoro de Reina. It's also called the Bear Bible because its cover shows a bear reaching into a tree for honey.
Polyglot Bible, 1599, in Syriac, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, English and Danish.
Miniature Bible chained to the pulpit, 1890.
Their Gutenberg Bible page, c. 1455.
Bible in Algonquin Indian
The best part of this panel is the claim that the Codex Alexandrinus was "transferred to Constantinople in 1621 and finally to the British Museum in 1627". Given that there was no such city in 1621 and no such museum in 1627, it makes you wonder if the person who wrote this was high on smoking Dead Sea Scroll fragments (Hans Sloane's collection formed the core of the Museum in 1758, but in 1627 he hadn't even been born yet).
This panel claims that the Codex Sinaiticus used to contain the whole Bible, and that it is a "complete Bible". In the sense that all the books were represented, this is true, yet this is a mischievous and misleading claim since the exhibition's agenda is to convince people that the Bible arrived by fax from Heaven.
Aside: there's a fascinating relationship between the Codex Sinaiticus and the rubbish bin.
More pottery
The gifts section was hilarious:
"How We Got the Bible
*Quote from 2 Timothy 3:16-17 on the Bible being perfect*"
Someone was flipping through it, and I read "The Bible is inspired by God" (I didn't take pictures as it was not polite). This would be a good exhibit for a lesson on logical fallacies.
A book by Craig Lampe, the father of the curator (who wrote the foreword for his father?!), with pages from the 1560 Geneva Bible and 1611 KJV.
The Roman coins had sold out already, but there were still Jewish coins.
I then went back to looking at the exhibition.
1649 Hybrid Bible - KJV with the Geneva notes
1560 Geneva Bible. Feel the waves of adulation.
The Pigrim's Progress. They didn't mention it here, but it's a religious allegory so no, it's not really a secular item.
Martin Luther's Sermons on The Letters of Peter and Jude, 1581
The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms, Isaac Newton. 1728.
"It is often claimed that William Shakespeare's phraseology influenced the making of the King James Bible. This is actually quite erroneous, for it was Tyndale who influenced Shakespeare. Scholars have counted over 5,000 instances in which William Shakespeare used the language of William Tyndale!"
I found some sources which claim Shakespeare based his language on Tyndale, but they were all evangelical Christian ones. The others talked about the latter having an influence on the former (many didn't even mention this, though that is unfair).
Greek NT, 1550
Counter-Reformation Bible, 1556
1519 Erasmus Bible
I overheard a conversation between one curator and someone - on usual weekdays they got 800 people, but the day I went there were 1,200.
There was also an activity room, where visitors (mainly kids) could do various things. Tellingly, virtually the activities had nothing to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls, even peripherally:
"Print Your Own Bible Lead Here!" (notice it's not "Print Your Own Dead Sea Scroll Here!")
Buy extracts from the KJV
Printing John 3:16 (not in the Dead Sea Scrolls) in Greek
Printing 1 John 4:8 (not in the Dead Sea Scrolls) in Greek
13th Century Bible
I was toying with telling them, at the end of the exhibition, that I was impressed by the Bible's integrity over the centuries, and the faith of all the people involved in preserving these religious texts, and that I wanted to know more about Christ. That would've been like a Wet Dream for them, but then Onanism is a Sin, so I decided not to lead them down the Path to Destruction.
"Free Will Gift For Guides. $2.00"
I think they meant "GOOD Will Gift"
Dead Sea product placement outside the exhibition rooms
Surprisingly, I didn't see anyone using their Camera Flashes during the exhibition - the crowd was remarkably well-behaved.