Steve Green's Collection and the Museum's 2017 Opening

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Museum of the Bible opened in Washington, D.C. in November 2017, founded and funded principally by Hobby Lobby president Steve Green around biblical manuscripts and artifacts he had rapidly acquired for the project in the years beforehand. It is an active museum dedicated to the history, narrative and impact of the Bible, built around a collection Green assembled specifically for the institution in a compressed span of years rather than inherited from an older, more slowly built archive.

The speed and scale of that acquisition became the museum's defining controversy well before its doors opened to the public. The manner in which Green and Hobby Lobby assembled the collection, buying rapidly and in volume from a market with limited scrutiny of an object's origin or export history, drew sustained attention from archaeologists and antiquities regulators alike in the years leading up to the 2017 opening, and that acquisition history, rather than the museum's exhibits themselves, is the single most consequential fact in its founding story, one detailed at length in a second article on the smuggling case it produced.