Museum of the Bible

One of the major reasons that we wanted to come to the Washington, DC area was so we could see the Museum of the Bible (MotB). We had first heard of it when we visited the Ark Encounter last summer, and then we've known other friends who have visited the MotB in the past year. It opened in November, 2017. When I was looking for a campground near DC, I found a county park near Reston, VA, checked to see if they could accommodate big rigs (they could) and made reservations.

A change since I lived in Northern Virginia, the Metro has expanded so now there is a "Silver Line" that goes out to Reston. Just a couple of miles to drive from the campground, park in a parking garage, and then head for the Metro train. The one that we caught to take us in to the city on Monday morning was a newer train that showed us exactly what the next stops would be and how far away our stop (Fed Center SW) was (18th stop at the point when I took the picture). We found that all of the trains did not have this functionality, but it was nice that the first one that we used did as it helped our trip.

We happened to get to the parking garage at about 10am, which was fortuitous, as there are a number of parking places that are marked as "Reserved Parking from 2am to 10am". They were places right near the elevators on level G4. I had checked beforehand, and determined that the parking fee was $4.95/day, and the fare to the stop we needed in DC was $6 peak fare (5-9:30am, 3-7pm) and $3.85 off peak. We could have gotten a Senior card for Dwayne, but we had to go to a specific Metro stop in DC to get that and it seemed more trouble than it was worth to do that (I think Senior might get him off-peak fares all the time). We also had to pay $2 per card for the SmarTrip cards that we put value on for our journey. These can be re-used over and over... unfortunately, not very useful for folks who will only be here infrequently. It was pouring rain when we went in on Monday, and for much of the trip we could see the heavy traffic on the roadways as we zipped along on the train, so we were VERY glad not to have to drive into the city!

We got to the Metro stop in DC, came up to the surface, got our bearings before we left the protection of the overhang (from the rain), and just had a short block to walk from the Metro station to the entrance of the Museum of the Bible. We got into the museum and purchased a membership for a year, planning to come back at least a couple of times during the week.

The Museum of the Bible has 7 floors of information about the Bible.

We started on the 2nd floor, "Impact of the Bible." The first area was "Bible in America" and...

... included this quote from the Mayflower Compact.

There was SO much to see and do... I have just picked out a few items that particularly impressed me...

Have you thought about how often the Bible is quoted in advertising, news, everyday conversations?

I thought this was an interesting take off on cell phone advertising done by the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn!

Do you think that folks who use these phrases know that they are quoting from the Bible?

Do these universities remember their beginnings?

One of the new exhibits is on Billy Graham... a few pictures from it:

I love the part that they highlighted, "Graham simply assumed the Bible's authority and, as a preacher, focused on its real-life application."

I thought it was also interesting that he used different Bible translations... more on this later...

My brother mentioned to me a few months ago (I think at the time that Billy Graham died, and they were showing some clips of his past crusades) that he didn't vary his message - he just wanted to bring people into relationship with Jesus.

This reminded me of our participation in the crusade that he held in Texas Stadium - with our friends Bud and Celesta. What precious memories!

We went for lunch at the Manna Restaurant on the top floor. It felt good to sit down and relax for a few minutes! And the food was good too!

Then we headed to the 4th floor and "History of the Bible"...

I thought this fragment was interesting due to the description associated with it (see below) - that they could tell that it was written by two different scribes because the second scribe's handwriting is slightly larger than that of the first!

Can you see the difference in text size? also, the way that they made the "E" (epsilon) is different, with the top scribe having a more squared off letter and the bottom one more circular.

Why did I find that interesting? I don't know... but I did!!!

Finally, the part of the museum where I found a call to action... it was called "Illuminations" (actually, "illumiNations") - I thought it was going to be Illuminated Manuscripts, but instead I found....

...lots of books with covers that said "Not Yet Started" and a language name...

... shelves and shelves of books...

...with this explanation...

There were 4 racks + one additional shelf of Bibles in languages that have the whole Bible available in their language - this includes English that has not only the whole Bible in English, but many many translations (as was noted in the exhibit on Billy Graham's use of different translations).

Serbian also has the full Bible in their language.

But over half the room were yellow - "Not Started Yet" or darker yellow - "In Progress" (but not indicating at least 25 chapters completed yet).

For more information, go to https://illuminations.bible/

Here's one I know something about - Russian Sign Language - I have friends who have worked on that - it is showing "In Progress".

There were some that have the New Testament in their language.

New Testaments

Some others have at least 25 "chapters" in their language.

It just reminded me again how richly blessed we are, and how God blesses us in order to be a blessing!

The museum had a digital guide that we could use for free. I thought it would provide an audio tour that would take us through the museum, and it kind of did that, but it seemed to provide information beyond what was provided in the museum displays... so, for me, became a bit of an information overload. The best part about it though, was, since our two units were programmed together, I could find out where Dwayne was when we got separated - which proved very helpful a couple of times! Yes, we have cell phones, but my phone's battery doesn't last very long, so I was trying to use other devices when I could!

Note: the Reston station is the last one on the Silver Line, which was a good thing since we were tired on our trip out... and everyone had to get off at our stop, so we didn't miss it!

We were at the museum for about 5 hours on Monday, and returned for a few more hours on Wednesday. We might have done more time there but... I'm fighting off a cold and trying to get better before seeing family later this week!