Steve Green announces 11,500 more items will be returned to the Middle East.
Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby and chairman of the Museum of the Bible, is returning 11,500 antiquities to the Iraqi and Egyptian governments. The ancient clay seals and fragments of papyrus do not have complete documentation and may have been looted or stolen.
Green said he acquired the antiquities before the Washington, DC, museum opened in November 2017, when he didn’t understand the importance of proper provenance and trusted the word of unscrupulous dealers.
“These early mistakes resulted in Museum of the Bible receiving a great deal of criticism over the years,” Green said last week in an official statement. “The criticism resulting from my mistakes was justified.”
The announcement comes on the heels of a museum-funded investigation that found the 16 fragments of the Dead Sea Scroll on display at the Museum of the Bible are all forgeries, the latest in a string of controversies that cast a shadow on its collection.
A year ago, the museum agreed to return 13 Egyptian papyrus fragments that were stolen from the University of Oxford. And in 2017, the federal government fined Hobby Lobby and ordered it to return thousands of cuneiform tablets and other objects, which were illegally taken from war-torn Iraq and brought into the US by a United Arab Emirates-based dealer who falsely labeled the shipments as ceramic tiles.
Museum officials hope this closes the book on its collection’s controversial beginnings.
“We understand that there’s been questions all along,” said chief curatorial officer Jeffrey Kloha. “We’d like to make the point that we’ve been involved in these conversations for two and a half years, three years. It simply takes time to work ...
from Christianity Today Magazine https://ift.tt/2Jy6ZgI
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