NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- For all its stated good intentions, when the Museum of the Bible in Washington was envisioned a decade ago, skeptics worried that it would favor religious proselytizing over neutral scholarship and buttoned-down collecting practices.

Part of that caution grew from the fact that the museum’s guiding spirit was 78-year-old David Green, an evangelical Christian who founded the multibillion-dollar Hobby Lobby chain in 1972 and who had written of the Bible: “This isn’t just some book that someone made up. It’s God, it’s history, and we want to show that.”

So it was beyond not good news for the museum last month when it disclosed, just days apart, that thousands of its Middle Eastern antiquities had tainted provenances and that its vaunted collection of Dead Sea Scrolls was fake.

But in a dozen interviews in recent days, some of the institution’s toughest critics said the transparency with which the museum has handled the disclosures was a positive step toward converting those who had questioned its methods and principles.

“The museum did come clean here,” said Christopher A. Rollston, an associate professor of Near Eastern languages and civilizations at George Washington University who reviewed the findings about the scrolls. “But the museum will need to continue to engage in this sort of openness if they are to demonstrate that they are fair brokers of the public trust.”

The Museum of the Bible’s mission statement says its goal is to give visitors “an immersive and personalized experience with the Bible and its ongoing impact on the world around us.” To that end, Green and his son, Steve, 56, dedicated more than a decade and an estimated $50 million to amassing 50,000 artifacts related to the Old and New testaments.

As newcomers to the museum and antiquities fields, the Greens’ initial efforts at building a lavish and theologically significant repository gave some experts pause.

Gary Vikan, a longtime museum director and provenance expert, spoke to the Green family and their initial museum staff in 2013 and said he saw trouble coming. “Broadly speaking, the Green folks had too much money and too little experience,” he said. “They seemed like evangelical history-of-religion types from an academic parallel universe that I had never before encountered.”

Many of the objects they collected were printed Bibles, biblical artifacts, illuminated manuscripts, artworks and ephemera, most of which date from the 1500s to the present. Exhibits today include Elvis Presley’s Bible and letters on theology signed by Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther. They are housed in a $450 million, eight-story, 430,000-square-foot building, a soaring, arklike structure that features 14-foot-tall bronze panels inscribed with Hebrew verses from the Book of Genesis and a “biblical roof garden” with expansive views of the U.S. Capitol and the National Mall.

But most of the museum’s items that stretched back to ancient times quickly led to problems. They included 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets, slivers of papyrus, cylinder seals and clay bullae — all relics from ancient Mesopotamia that showcased some of the earliest forms of written communication. One of the items was inscribed in Sumerian with passages from the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of mankind’s earliest sagas of gods, floods, beasts and prophecies.

In July 2017, just four months before the museum was set to open, federal prosecutors in New York announced that Hobby Lobby and the Greens had acquired, in 2010, at least 5,500 artifacts “fraught with red flags” from a dubious dealer in the United Arab Emirates. They had also allowed the objects to be shipped to the company’s headquarters in Oklahoma City “misleadingly described as ceramic tile samples,” according to prosecutors.

Hobby Lobby relinquished those items and paid a $3 million fine. In a statement, Steve Green, who is president of Hobby Lobby and chairman of the Bible Museum, said: “The company was new to the world of acquiring these items and did not fully appreciate the complexities of the acquisitions process. This resulted in some regrettable mistakes.”

When the museum later opened on Nov. 17, 2017, the Greens seemed confident their troubles were behind them. Steve Green spoke of the museum as “nonsectarian” and said of the Bible, “Let it have an impact in your life as it has my life or our family’s life and so many people all over the world.”

“We don’t have any concerns about our collection,” Steven Bickley, the museum’s vice president of marketing, told The Atlantic just before the museum opened. Indeed, a year earlier, in 2016, the museum had even put out a scholarly ebook, now discredited, that touted the so-called Dead Sea Scroll fragments as “an especially important addition to known material.”

Since then, the museum has been a hit with visitors, and attendance last year reached 1 million, despite an adult admission fee of $20 to $25. (It is closed during the coronavirus outbreak.)

But the legacy of its original collecting practices remained and became the focus of an inquiry by a team of investigators hired by the museum to analyze its 16 scroll fragments.

The scrolls were seen as a centerpiece of the museum’s permanent exhibition; enlisting the team from Art Fraud Insights, led by its founder, Colette Loll, was an effort to demonstrate the museum’s good faith and its adherence to reputable scholarship.

Hired under the proviso that it could act with full independence and present its findings free of interference, the team published its results on March 13. It found, as first reported by National Geographic, that not only were the fragments fake, they were “deliberate forgeries created in the 20th century.”

Two weeks later, Steve Green announced another embarrassing gaffe. The museum, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal, would be sending another 11,500 artifacts — 5,000 papyri fragments and 6,500 clay objects — back to Iraq and Egypt because of “insufficient provenance.”

In a long statement, Green admitted that he had “trusted the wrong people to guide me, and unwittingly dealt with unscrupulous dealers” when buying the items.

“These early mistakes resulted in Museum of the Bible receiving a great deal of criticism over the years,” he added. “The criticism resulting from my mistakes was justified.”

Of the scroll fragments, Loll said they struck her team as dubious from the moment they got them under a 3D microscope. “We concluded that the forgers had added lines of ‘Scripture’ to scraps of archaeological leather rather than to parchment,” she said. “In a nutshell, ‘old leather, new ink.’ ”

But Loll is among several experts who say the museum’s failings are as much a learning opportunity as they are a sign that irresponsibility persists in the antiquities trade. “I have been incredibly impressed with the museum staff,” she said. “They understand and accept that transparency, although painful in the short term, is necessary for establishing credibility in the long term.”

Jeffrey Kloha, the museum’s chief curatorial officer since 2017, has been leading efforts to purge the museum of tainted objects and put it on credible footing.

“In the early days of collecting,” said Kloha, who hired Loll’s team, “there really were not qualified individuals involved, and in some ways we knew these results were coming 2 1/2 years ago, because the documentation was, well, I’ll just say it was meager.”

Experts who often disagree on the rules, ethics and effect of antiquities collecting were united in their irritation and dismay over the museum’s lax practices, but also saw an opportunity for the Green family to take the lead in setting a higher bar for acquisition standards.

“Mr. Green is doing the right thing by repatriating these thousands of artifacts, but this gesture must be the start of the story, not the end,” said Tess Davis, executive director of the Antiquities Coalition, which argues for strict regulation of the trade. “The global black market for Middle Eastern antiquities is increasingly driven by biblical scholars, seminaries and the faithful seeking to own a piece of the Holy Land. Given Mr. Green’s platform and other resources, he is in an unparalleled position to stop this demand.”

Kate Fitz Gibbon of the Committee for Cultural Property, which represents the interests of dealers, collectors and museums engaged in the lawful sale and collection of archaeological objects, said Green “failed to do the due diligence that has become routine for American art dealers and collectors and bought in the Middle East instead.”

“While it’s currently an embarrassment to the museum,” she added, “the Museum of the Bible should be commended for researching the flaws in its collections and returning objects that should never have been bought in the first place.”

Kloha, the chief curator, said he hoped the recent experiences would help the museum build confidence in its efforts. He plans to create an exhibit showcasing how Loll and her team used science to debunk the scroll fragments.

“All we can do is operate in the most responsible and ethical way going forward,” he said, “and help the public understand how these things can happen.”


© 2020 The New York Times Company