museum of the bible

museum of the bible

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A few weeks ago I was working on a talk I’d given to an interfaith gathering in the town where I live. I was going through a list of questions I’d be asking, and decided to add the word “interfaith” to the front. When I looked back at the previous week’s blog, it was “interfaith” not “interfaith” that had taken up the most space.

It made me wonder if I’d been reading the Bible more than once lately, or if there was something about the word that spoke to me more than it did on another day. I also began wondering what exactly it is that we mean when we say “interfaith”. Many of us feel we know the meaning, but what does it mean? How much time does it take? How many words? One of the things we were warned about when we embarked on our journey towards faith and away from doubt was to beware of people who spoke in ambiguous and unclear terms.

It wasn’t just people who were actively misleading us, those who lied to us and manipulated us. Nor was it people who were simply ignorant. We were told to watch out for those who pretended to have something but who in fact had nothing at all.

It is a great source of comfort to know that we live in an age when we can easily distinguish people who are deceiving us from those who simply don’t know. People who mean well but who are not quite sure. And in the end, how do we know that there are any others like us? It might be that we’ve been fooled for all of our lives, and not just in the area of our faith. I’ve also come to realise that sometimes it’s more a question of how many words we’ve used to describe something than how many words we’ve understood.

I’m not, for example, an expert on the Bible. I’ve been reading it for over twenty years, but I still don’t fully understand everything that it says. Some of it seems to me to be very straightforward, but many of the verses that I know and understand by heart tell me something different. I could spend the rest of my life reading the Bible and still learn something new every day. We know so much about the Bible, and we can use so many different words to explain what it says, we are beginning to lose the concept of it as a single unified entity. And yet, it remains one of the most powerful tools we have, both for our everyday lives and for all of life, because the Bible is a book of wisdom. I’ve been looking at a picture book of old engravings recently, and there is one image in particular that I find myself returning to time and time again. It is a plate that shows some priests being led out of the Old Temple in Jerusalem. The words “The priests were led out, the Lord is in the midst” were stamped on a plaque that was placed above them. I’m fascinated by this image. There are two priests in this picture, which makes it a rare example of a picture of more than one priest being led out. It’s also the first image in a series of drawings that were done in 1789 to mark the restoration of the Temple after the Jews had returned to Jerusalem in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

At first glance, the figure of the other priest has been altered, with his hat removed, to make it appear that he is not the same person. But as I studied the image I realised that this was not true. The two priests are clearly looking at each other, and in this illustration the priest is the same priest that

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