Just got back from the MN Science Museum which had a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit. I was sooooo hyped to see it, but wow, most of it was a HUGE disappointment.
First off, there weren’t any scrolls. Just a few fragments from a few books. Tiny fragments. I enjoyed seeing the fragments, knowing they were super old and being amazed that they were written with such perfect penmanship. But, after I went to the five or six boxes in the circular room, I went to the next room to see the rest, and found myself in the gift shop. I kept saying, "That’s it?!"
We knew when we went that the majority of the exhibit was going to be fluff–a room about the Dead Sea, a room about pottery, a room about ancient writing in general. We tried to go slowly through it and take it all in, but not only was it fluff, it was insulting fluff. Imagine what you might see if an atheistic scientist tried to show you why the Dead Sea Scrolls are important. He just doesn’t get it. It was obvious how clueless they were to the spiritual importance of this discovery and how they were bending over backwards to kiss Muslim butt. Blech.
The insulting parts, other than the overall patronizing tone, was the way they dated everything BCE, as if they have the authority to yank Christ right out of the timeline. What the heck is Common Era anyway? Lame.
And, of course, the room about the Dead Sea started with a video on what the planet looked like millions of years ago. We gave up listening to the head sets and reading the informational placards because it seemed so pointless. We came to see the scrolls. Period.
So, with that frame of mind, we finally entered the last room and–WOW–I could have looked at them for hours, but since there were only a few small fragments, there really wasn’t much to see.
I would like to see a DSS exhibit done by a Christian historian. Maybe they could get the facts and the spirit of it right.
