The Bible Before the Year 1000
After a remarkably long day of travel, I arrived in Washington, DC, last night after midnight. Our plane had been delayed for the last leg of the flight, so it was 1:00 am before I got to sleep. My mother and her husband met me at the airport and are spending the day with me in DC before heading back to Tennessee on Friday morning.
This morning we headed to the Smithsonian to see the biblical exhibit that has been set up in conjunction with the SBL meeting. Located in the Sackler Gallery, it is entitled In the Beginning: The Bible Before the Year 1000. The center piece of the exhibit is the Freer Codices, a collection of several manuscripts from Egypt that were discovered in the early 20th century. These codices contain the four gospels, some of the letters of Paul, and part of the Old Greek translation of the minor prophets. These codices are owned by the Smithsonian, and the SBL had published a study of these manuscripts to coincide with the exhibit. There will also be special sessions on the Freer Codices at the conference this weekend.
There were some other manuscripts there that interested me just as much. They had one of the Isaiah scrolls (1QIsab) from the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as a very small fragment of Matthew from the 2nd century CE. The Edgerton Gospel (a fragment of a non-canonical gospel) is also on display. Several manuscripts from Papyrus Chester Beatty are there too. For me, the highlight was seeing a page from Codex Sinaiticus, a manuscript I had never seen in person before.
One of the manuscripts that I found fascinating is a 9th century Armenian manuscript containing a copy of the gospels. At the end of the Gospel of Mark, the scribe left out Mark 16:9-20 and expanded 16:7-8 to take up the space. This was done because the Armenian church had the tradition that said 16:9-20 were not written by Mark but were added by someone else. Modern textual critics would agree with this conclusion.
The exhibition is well done. The numerous old manuscripts of biblical texts are arranged in such a way that you not only get a sense of the preservation of the text, but also see how the technology of manuscript production changed through the years. The rise of the codex as opposed to scrolls is an interesting sub-theme of the exhibit. For any of the scholars who are visiting the SBL, I would encourage you to see this exhibit. It is worth the Metro ride, and the Sackler Gallery is only one block from the Smithsonian Metro station.
After that, we headed off for some dinner. There is a wonderful Ethiopian restaurant called Zed’s in Georgetown. I had taken my parents there once before when they visited. I had decided on the plane trip here that I wanted to go there, and on the car ride from the airport my mom suggested it first. Great minds think alike! Our meal tonight had more spices in it than all the meals that I have eaten in Eastern Europe combined. It is nice to be back in a place with spicy cuisine, even if that cuisine is from the other side of the world.