Craft Shop Family Buys Up Ancient Bibles for Museum

OKLAHOMA CITY — At least one example of the printed word is in great demand even in the digital age: ancient Bibles.
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With a goal of establishing a national Bible museum of great depth and size, the evangelical Christian family behind the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores has been spending heavily to amass a collection that has set dealers buzzing in the staid world of rare books.

Specialists estimate the family has bought illuminated, or decorated, manuscripts, Torahs, papyri and other works worth $20 million to $40 million from auction houses, dealers, private collectors and institutions, some of which may be selling because of financial pressure.

The man leading the effort is Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby, a private company based here that is a favorite of scrapbook makers, do-it-yourselfers and home decorators. The company, founded by his father, David, in 1972, now numbers 439 stores and has generated a family fortune that Forbes magazine estimates at $2.5 billion.

With money to spare, the younger Mr. Green, 46, has found a passion to complement his vocation, and is working with specialists in deal-making and history who, using company money on behalf of the family, began buying with a flourish about six months ago.

“They have caught everyone’s attention because no one in recent memory has spent so much so quickly on Bibles,” said Dr. Eric White, curator of special collections at the Bridwell Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The collection now includes more than 30,000 items, according to Mr. Green and his team. Some of those were shown to The New York Times at Hobby Lobby offices in Oklahoma City, including a New Testament papyrus from the second century A.D., a lavishly illustrated and illuminated Martin Luther New Testament and a Spanish Inquisition Torah.

“The goal is to create a museum around the story of the Bible,” Mr. Green explained. “No book has been persecuted as much or loved as much. Its incredible story needs to be told.”

Mr. Green is Pentecostal, but other family members worship in churches of other denominations, including Baptist and Assemblies of God. The family gives to a variety of Christian causes, Oral Roberts University and evangelical ministries among them, and adheres to Christian principles, closing its stores on Sundays, playing Christian music in them and operating Mardel, a separate chain of religious bookstores.

With sales last year of just over $2 billion the company has no long-term debt, Mr. Green said over a lunch of sandwiches that began with a prayer at the company’s nondescript, sprawling corporate headquarters. Despite the recession, profits rose in 2009, he said, perhaps because people spent more time at home.

For the Green family, the time seems ideal for buying religious works.

As Sam Fogg, a London dealer of rare manuscripts, put it, “Between 1988 and 1993, the Bible market rocketed,” and then it languished even as the broader art market rose.

In addition, “Libraries are rethinking their mission in the age of digitization,” said David N. Redden, executive vice president at Sotheby’s books department. “They are wondering what their holdings should be: whether they are about collecting rare books or disseminating information. If the latter, do they need rare books? In some ways, it is not a bad time to be buying.”

The Green collection aims to be one of a kind. Other Bible collections in the United States, including one at the American Bible Society in Manhattan, generally intend to inspire readership, said Dr. Scott Carroll, who began advising Mr. Green about six months ago. “Our goal is to inspire people with the story of the Bible and its history.”

Dr. Carroll, a former professor in ancient studies who has specialized in Biblical manuscripts, recently resigned from Cornerstone University, a nondenominational Christ-based liberal arts school in Grand Rapids, Mich., to become executive director of the museum and an adviser to Mr. Green. In the 1990s, Dr. Carroll helped another collector, Robert Van Kampen, build the private Van Kampen Collection of Bibles and related material in Orlando, Fla., and helped oversee its academic objectives, including archaeological digs.

Some who are knowledgeable about the rare book market suggest that the group’s buying has pushed up prices. The buying has also spawned some skepticism about the overall quality of purchases made in such rapid-fire style. Among the 30 objects that the Green group offered for examination recently were a silver amulet from the first or second century inscribed with a passage from Deuteronomy, also known as the Shema; the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a manuscript originated from the Monastery of Mt. St. Catherine that was home to the earliest near-complete copy of the Bible, and the first volume of a Complutensian Polyglot Bible that was used for the comparative study of the text of Scripture. It contains the first printing of the Septuagint, or Old Testament Scriptures in Greek.