Hobby Lobby is a huge, rich corporation “person” that wants to control more than the place you buy your craft supplies and birth control. They seem to have their fingers in lots of different evangelical pies. It is actually pretty confusing to try and follow everything they are into; but it is certain that they want to implement a hardline evangelical agenda on many fronts and these include a mammoth collection of ancient biblical manuscripts, a National Bible Museum, public school textbooks, and a whole lot more.
Hobby Lobby owns and promotes what is referred to as the “Green Collection” (after its founder David Green), which they claim is the largest private collection of more than 40,000 ancient artifacts. Among this enormous collection is found a sub-set of supposedly rare and important papyri (material used to write original Gospels and other religious works on). Not everyone agrees that the works they collect are necessarily authentic and they seem especially drawn to works of questionable provenance.
Why? Well they seem to want to establish themselves as some kind of authority on all things ancient and biblical. For instance they are building a museum in Washington D.C. called the National Bible Museum, near the National Mall (originally slated for Dallas) in order to showcase much of the Green Collection.
There is much to wonder about their big and recent push to collect so much of this ancient material. Brice Jones, a scholar who has been quietly tracking the activities of the Green Collection for several years, for instance, states:
The big questions that we are all interested in are: Where are these thousands upon thousands of antiquities coming from, all of a sudden? Who is involved in these transactions? What is the provenance of these cultural artifacts? Will the religious motivations behind the procuration and use of these items restrict academic study of them? I look forward to learning answers to these and similar questions over the coming months.” – Brice Jones
Dr. Scott Carol, who has been referred to as the “Indiana Jones of biblical archeology,” seems to have been the prime instigator and agent for establishing the collection, running the collection until 2012. A colorful guy with so much snake charm and tonic salesman about him, here is a video of him in action if you have more than an hour and a half to kill.
The purpose behind their collecting isn’t fully clear, but does seem to suggest that they want to control scholarship about the Bible to make sure that their version of “faith” is established as stone cold fact. They claim to have the oldest surviving piece of biblical papyrus fragment, for instance. Faces & Voices is an interesting blog that outlined, back in February of this year, the formation of the Green Collection and raised many good concerns about public and scholarly access to the collection; the ability to verify manuscripts that will be used to make claims about early Christianity, etc.
Though inactive for the last couple of years Scott Carol’s Twitter feed offers up some interesting material about his activities with the Green Collection. Disturbing, for instance, is the suggestion that they removed papyri from ancient sarcophagi “mummy” masks, supposedly liberating them but in fact, simply removing them from their original pagan context. Many scholars believe that early Christians were influenced by the Hellenistic world and engaged in lots of pagan practices,
All of this is a bit disturbing especially when one considers that Hobby Lobby are pushing their agenda on public school boards and trying to panhandle textbooks and curriculum on the cheap. Here are some obvious problems with the Hobby Lobby Bible curriculum:
The textbook is full of leading questions that assume portions of the Bible are historically true. For example, instead of asking “is the bible historically accurate?” and giving a fair pro and con investigation into the question, Hobby Lobby asks, “how do we know that the bible’s historical narratives are reliable?” They assume the answer in the question and stifle all scholarly discussion. Another example, “How did the encounter at Mount Sinai become a turning point in history?
Good to see that this is getting media attention beyond academic blogs, having appeared in the Salon and Politico.
So yeah. They are collecting a shit load of questionable manuscripts. Controlling ancient history or even the whiff or aura of it, however skewed their views might be, gives them a certain amount of power that they will try to wield in order to manipulate the public and further shove their evangelical agenda down the public esophagus.
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Images CC-2.0 BY-NC-SA: via Flickr users sukisuki and microwaved barbie doll
