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An interactive, living-history exhibit that tells the story behind the Bible is coming to Springfield. The Passages Interactive Living-History Exhibit will open to the public next month, as KSMU’s Samantha Nichols reports.
The exhibit tells the story of the Bible’s creation, translations and displays hundreds of artifacts, the vast majority of which come from The Green Collection. The collection is named after its owners, the Green family, who also own the Hobby Lobby stores, and is one of the world’s largest private collections of biblical artifacts and texts. In 2009, the family purchased their first rare artifact. The exhibit’s operations manager, Matt Patrick, explains that their intention was to start a small collection.
“They wanted to go slow with it. Acquiring over 40,000 items in for years is not quite slow, but, the whole purpose of the collection has just been to not only promote scholarship and the items, but also to let the public see the items. And that’s why Passages was created,” said Patrick.
The exhibit will lead participants through replications of important archeological sites to key moments in history, including the development of the printing press and the Protestant Reformation.
“We have a replica room of the Qumran Caves where you’re actually walking through caves. And you see some reproductions of some ancient scrolls, but right as soon as you walk out of the Qumran Cave, you see four fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, actual pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that are still in existence today,” said Patrick.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are an important collection of ancient texts that include some of the earliest manuscripts of canonical texts in the Hebrew Bible. The exhibit also includes the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, one of the oldest near-complete Bibles, an actual fragment of the Guttenberg Bible from the mid-1400s, as well as Martin Luther’s Last Will and Testament, which he wrote the night before his excommunication.
In addition to viewing the large array of artifacts, visitors will have an opportunity to interact with a variety of exhibits. Participants can help operate a printing press, identify errors that were printed in various copies of the Bible and enjoy a room specially designed for kids and families.
“We also have a station where you can try and transcribe a verse in Latin, just as scribes back in the 400s would have done,” said Patrick.
The exhibit will offer a free lecture series on selected Tuesday nights when people can reserve a spot to hear a variety of scholars speak on different subjects related to the Bible’s development. This scholarly focus is at the heart of the exhibit’s purpose.
“This exhibit’s for everybody. We don’t come from any angle other than a historical angle. All we do here is we tell the history of the creation and movement of the Bible from the earliest forms of writing, the Dead Sea Scrolls, to what you can hold in your hands and have in your homes today,” said Patrick.
The Passages Interactive-Living History Exhibit runs from April 12 to January 3 and is located at 3534 E. Sunshine Street. Ticket information can be found on their website, www.explorepassages.com.