museum of the bible

On my way to the Annual Conference of the Society of Biblical Literature in Boston, I stopped in Baltimore. Today’s Washington Post carries stories about tomorrow’s opening of the new Museum of the Bible located not far from the Washington Mall. Its location alone near the heart of political and military power is enough to justify a dismissal of its claim to biblical inerrancy. What museum would Jesus have advised the Green family to build with their Hobby Lobby money? Would he have said something like: “Invite politicians and wealthy people at 2,500$ a pop and have a party tonight, do this in my memory?” The inerrancy the museum claims for the Bible is code for the exercise of power over minds and bodies, a nostalgic, rearguard action that actually reinforces the view that the modern American world has of Christianity as one of its cultures. By making a claim on US minds at the center of its political world, its effort to repeat and entrench a master narrative becomes a sorry demonstration of scientific and modern impotence. The reasoning behind the museum is entirely based on the notion of origin and priority of a certain kind of “antiquity” instead of on principle in its logical, critical, scientific sense. By dint of location and timing, it is trapped into a modern version of the Exodus story. In this story, it is not Moses who leads the people into a risky acceptance of a covenant without kings. On the contrary, it is the self-promoting Trump who acts like a pharaoh and calls for a return to the mythic golden age of divinized kingship. Do the supporters of this new museum realize what they are doing? Don’t they see that they are parting the Red Sea on their way back to the country of flesh pots and its gilded pharaohs?