Biblical Theme Park on the Potomac: How the Museum of the Bible Went Global (and Dodged a Smuggling Rap)

A Stone’s Throw from the Capitol, the Good Book Gets a Theme Park
Washington D.C. –– The Museum of the Bible rises eight stories of caramel-colored limestone a block from the National Mall, looking for all the world like a cruise ship that took a wrong turn and ran aground on Independence Avenue. The $500-million ark—sorry, building—opened in 2017, courtesy of the Green family, evangelical billionaires whose Hobby Lobby empire once fought the U.S. government all the way to the Supreme Court for the sacred right not to pay for employee contraception. Divine coincidence? Perhaps. Divine comedy? Most certainly.

Inside, visitors can wander through a first-century Nazareth village where animatronic rabbis mutter Aramaic, or stand beneath a 40-foot-high LED ceiling scrolling verses in 27 languages—an experience akin to being trapped inside a particularly aggressive PowerPoint. There’s even a motion-simulator ride called “Washington Revelations,” which swoops you over the capital’s monuments while a baritone voice intones that Scripture is carved into every cornice. Thomas Jefferson, who famously took scissors to his own Bible, is presumably too dead to sue.

Yet the international subplot is where the plot thickens. The Greens, flush with craft-store cash, spent the aughts vacuuming up antiquities from Egypt, Iraq, and Israel with the enthusiasm of Black Friday shoppers. The result was a series of investigations that found thousands of looted cuneiform tablets and forged provenance documents. In 2020, the museum shipped 11,500 artifacts back to Iraq—one of the largest repatriations in modern history—while quietly updating its “We bought them in good faith” signage. The moral: even the Ten Commandments look negotiable when you append “or best offer.”

Still, the museum’s curators have learned the PR value of scholarly respectability. They now host visiting rabbis from Jerusalem, Coptic monks from Cairo, and agnostic papyrologists from Oxford who examine scraps of the Dead Sea Scrolls under laboratory lighting so bright it could make a Pharisee sweat. The strategy works; UNESCO, which once muttered about “tainted artifacts,” now sends observers to conference panels titled “Global Heritage in Dialogue.” Translation: if you can’t beat them, put them on a panel.

Across the Atlantic, the Vatican has responded with characteristic understatement: a new €50-million underground gallery beneath St. Peter’s Basilica that quietly reclaims the title of “largest collection of biblical bric-a-brac.” Meanwhile, the British Museum—still holding the contested Elgin Marbles—has announced a forthcoming exhibit on “the Bible as World Literature,” which curators insist is purely coincidental timing. Nothing says “soft power” like passive-aggressive curation.

The broader significance, though, lies less in parchment scraps than in digital reach. The museum’s app, downloaded in 140 countries, offers virtual tours narrated by Morgan Freeman—because who better to voice God than the man who played Him twice? In Nigeria, megachurch pastors project the app onto 40-foot screens; in South Korea, seminaries use its augmented-reality feature to overlay Greek lemmas onto subway advertisements. The message travels at fiber-optic speed, though the bandwidth in Gaza or Tehran remains, shall we say, throttled.

Critics argue that the museum sands away millennia of bloodshed—the Crusades, pogroms, colonial missions—leaving only inspirational glow. Fair point, but so does every national museum, gift shop, and Instagram filter. The difference here is scale: 430,000 square feet of marble and marketing, all devoted to a text that has underpinned both hospitals and heresy trials. If that isn’t peak 21st-century cognitive dissonance, nothing is.

By closing time, the gift shop hums with pilgrims buying camel-leather Bibles in 37 translations and, for the kids, plush Moses dolls that part bathwater when squeezed. Outside, the city’s homeless shuffle past security barriers, clutching cardboard signs quoting verses less marketable than John 3:16. Somewhere between the two, the Word becomes flesh—then promptly goes on sale, three for the price of two.

And thus the world spins on its well-worn axis: faith commodified, history laundered, and cynicism sold by the pound at the checkout counter. All under one roof, a stone’s throw from the capital of the free world. Amen—and swipe to tip your guide.