Does Scripture Speak for Itself?: The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation

Is the Bible the unembellished Word of God or the product of human agency? There are different answers to that question. And they lie at the heart of this book's powerful exploration of the fraught ways in which money, race and power shape the story of Christianity in American public life. The authors' subject is the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC: arguably the latest example of a long line of white evangelical institutions aiming to amplify and promote a religious, political, and moral agenda of their own. In their careful and compelling investigation, Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon disclose the ways in which the Museum's exhibits reinforce a particularized and partial interpretation of the Bible's meaning. Bringing to light the Museum's implicit messaging about scriptural provenance and audience, the authors reveal how the MOTB produces a version of the Bible that in essence authorizes a certain sort of white evangelical privilege; promotes a view of history aligned with that same evangelical aspiration; and above all protects a cohort of white evangelicals from critique. They show too how the Museum collapses vital conceptual distinctions between its own conservative vision of the Bible and 'The Bible' as a cultural icon. This revelatory volume above all confirms that scripture – for all the claims made for it that it speaks only divine truth – can in the end never be separated from human politics.

Jill Hicks-Keeton is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Arguing with Aseneth: Gentile Access to Israel's Living God in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2018), for which she was awarded the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise.

Cavan Concannon is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Profaning Paul (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Assembling Early Christianity: Trade Networks and the Letters of Dionysios of Corinth (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and 'When you were Gentiles': Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul's Corinthian Correspondence (Yale University Press, 2014).