WASHINGTON, July 30, 2012—

The Museum of the Bible, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, has purchased the Washington Design Center, located at 300 D Street SW, Washington, DC, for $50 million. The site was selected as the location for a yet-to-be-named museum to house the Green Collection, one of the world’s largest private collections of rare biblical texts and artifacts.

“After an 18-month search in cities including Dallas and New York, the museum’s board chose the nation’s capital— a destination known for its world-class museums—to be the location of this future museum,”said Mark DeMoss, spokesperson for the Museum of the Bible and member of its board.

The Museum of the Bible will reconfigure the Washington Design Center into a non-sectarian, scholarly-focused, international museum that will illustrate how the Bible came to be, its impact on the world throughout the ages and the story that is told in this best-selling book of all time. The future museum will house the Green Collection, which boasts some 40,000 ancient biblical texts and artifacts—including one of the world’s largest private collections of Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest-surviving New Testament texts in Jesus’ household language and other antiquities dating from the first century B.C. to Torah scrolls that survived the Holocaust. The museum also plans to display items borrowed from other prominent collections from around the world.

Because the yet-to-be-named museum remains at least several years from opening, there are no design plans, construction timelines or completion dates to unveil at this time. Further details will be shared as more concrete plans are in place, including the determination of which artifacts will be on display and the museum’s particular programmatic elements.

“Our intent is for this museum to showcase both the Old and New Testaments, arguably the world’s most significant pieces of literature, through a non-sectarian, scholarly approach that makes the history, scholarship and impact of the Bible on virtually every facet of society accessible to everyone,” said DeMoss.

Items from the Green Collection continue to be displayed around the world through traveling exhibitions like Passages—which recently completed a seven-month run in Atlanta—Verbum Domini—which was on display in St. Peter’s Square during Lent and Easter—and exhibits at colleges, universities and other venues across the globe.

MEDIA NOTE: High-resolution photos available of the Washington Design Center available for use and publication with proper attribution.

About the Green Collection
Named after the Green Family, the Green Collection is one of the world’s largest private collections of rare biblical texts and artifacts. The collection “has created a buzz” (Fox News 2011) and is “a sampler of Jewish, Roman Catholic and Protestant treasures” (USA Today, 2011). Scholars have scoured the world to assemble the more than 40,000 items that today comprise the collection.