Thursday, March 15, 2012

The Green Collection

SOME BACKGROUND ON THE GREEN COLLECTION:
Archeologist Assembling World's Largest Biblical Artifacts Museum

By Stoyan Zaimov , Christian Post Reporter
March 14, 2012|2:28 pm
A collector deemed "the Indiana Jones of biblical archaeology" has helped amass the world's biggest private collection of biblical texts and artifacts, which are on a worldwide traveling tour and will be on display one day at a nonsectarian Bible museum.

Dr. Scott Carroll has personally inspected, studied and bought nearly 50,000 ancient biblical papyri, texts, and artifacts since Nov. 2009, when he was hired by the Green Collection, named after the Green family, founders and leaders of Hobby Lobby, the world's largest privately owned arts and crafts retailer, the ToledoBlade.com reported.

Among the highlights of the Green Collection are one of the largest private collections of Dead Sea Scrolls; 4,000 Jewish Torahs; rare illuminated manuscripts; early tracts and Bibles belonging to Martin Luther; and the Western Hemisphere's largest collection of cuneiform tablets, an early form of writing.

This month, the Green Collection is showing off its exhibit to the Vatican, featuring 152 artifacts displayed contextually in settings ranging from re-creations of the Qumran caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered to a monastic scriptorium and an excavation of a Roman garbage city in Egypt.

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Read it all. So far the Green Collection does seem to be doing a good job of making the artifacts available for scholars to study.

More on that Vatican exhibition here. More on the 2009 auction mentioned in the article here and links. The Green Collection has also been associated with the reports of some very early New Testament manuscripts, although I don't think the connection has been officially confirmed.