Dozens of senior congressional aides are expected to attend an invitation-only luncheon in the U.S. Capitol hosted by the Museum of the Bible (MOTB) and featuring a special presentation on the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) as the gallery seeks to raise its profile on the congressional campus.

“The Dead Sea Scrolls are currently on display in the museum and they will be there through September, and as part of our outreach to the Hill and the city and the government, we want to make people aware that they are at the museum, and we invite everybody to come and view them,” Matias Perttula, MOTB’s director of Strategic Engagement, told The Washington Stand.

“We also want to create a better relationship with the government, with the Hill, to let Capitol Hill folks know that we’re here to serve them. We are a pillar of the community and invite everybody to just come and be a part of it and we can find ways to partner in the future,” Perttula added.

Officials at the museum are planning more such outreach events on the Hill, as well as in the executive and judicial branches, plus across the District of Columbia. More than three million people have visited the MOTB since it opened in 2017. The museum is owned by a nonprofit organization founded in 2010 by David and Barbara Green, of the Oklahoma City family that founded and owns the hugely successful Hobby Lobby national chain of arts and crafts stores.

The March 4 luncheon “is really in line with our mission to invite all people to come and engage with the transformative power of the Bible. The Dead Sea Scrolls prove the validity of the Bible. They are a huge indicator of the validity of the Scriptures,” Perttula added.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) is sponsoring the event, which is also being co-hosted by HillFaith, a non-denominational ministry devoted to sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ among the 12,000+ staffers who work on Capitol Hill for senators, representatives, and congressional committees. Staffers, although rarely seen in the media, are, by virtue of their daily access to Members of Congress and the essential work they perform for their bosses, among the most influential groups in the nation’s capital.

A featured speaker at the luncheon will be Dr. Robert Duke, MOTB’s Chief Curatorial Officer, who is one of the world’s leading experts on the content and significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The scrolls were discovered in 1947 in caves on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea near Qumran, Israel.

“I will be overviewing the discovery, publication, and impact of the Scrolls for people of faith (or not). The Dead Sea Scrolls are what I consider to be the greatest archaeological discovery ever, since these texts are important for confidence in the Bible read by billions around the world,” Duke told TWS.

“My hope is to create an interest in the Bible through these texts that were hidden for 2,000 years,” he said, adding, with a grin, that he plans to “conclude by offering to teach a weekly Hebrew class. How does Hebrew on the Hill sound?”

The scrolls consist of more than 900 ancient manuscripts written mostly in Hebrew more than two millennia ago. The manuscripts include fragments of every book of the Old Testament, except that of Esther. Their discovery helped confirm the accuracy of the earliest previously available translations such as the Greek language Septuagint.

“The importance of the discovery of scrolls in the 11 caves by the Dead Sea cannot be overstated,” Duke told TWS. “The Dead Sea Scrolls has given me increased confidence in the preservation and transmission of the Bible. The world of the New Testament has also been brought into more vivid color because of the Qumran library.”

Also on display at the luncheon will be the Aitken Bible, the first to be printed in America in English and the only book to be endorsed by Congress. The Aitken Bible is historically significant for being the only Bible officially approved by the (Continental) Congress, being recommended by many of the Founders, and for being the first English language Bible printed in America, according to the Journal of Congress for September 12, 1782.

The Bible has been translated into more than 700 languages since the first edition of the Gutenberg Bible appeared in 1455 in Latin. John Wycliffe produced the first English edition translation of the Bible, an act for which he was ultimately burned at the stake. William Tyndale authored the first English edition of the Bible based on the original Hebrew and Greek. It is estimated that more than five billion Bibles have been bought since Gutenberg.