Floor B1
All Creation Sings
Immersive worship experience on the lower level — the museum as a place you enter with the senses, not only with a ticket.
Museum of the Bible · Washington, D.C.
Founding scholar of a 430,000-square-foot civic museum
400 4th Street SW. Opened 17 November 2017. One of two founding scholars. Executive Director of Education through the opening. Senior Advisor to the President from 2020.
- 2024Sagamore of the Wabash
- 2021Three Telly Awards
- 2020United Nations address
- 2017Museum of the Bible opens
- 2014Inaugural University Professor
- 1994NEH · Isthmia / Corinth
The record
He did not decorate a museum. He helped stand one up.
In 2010 Jerry A. Pattengale became one of two founding scholars of Museum of the Bible, with Scott Carroll. He established the international Green Scholars Initiative and served as Executive Director of Education through the public opening on 17 November 2017. He left that directorship in December 2018 and returned in spring 2020 as Senior Advisor to the President.
The building is the former 1920s refrigerated warehouse at 400 4th Street SW, three blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Lead architect: SmithGroup. Official museum figures: 430,000 square feet; eight levels including basements; about 170 feet from lowest level to rooftop; construction and property more than $500 million. Three permanent exhibit floors — History, Stories, Impact — plus galleries, theaters, a children’s experience, research labs, and a rooftop garden.
In August 2015, while he was building the scholarly and education arm, the museum announced a long-term alliance with the Israel Antiquities Authority. Floor 5 still carries that partnership.
- 430,000
- square feet
- 8
- levels
- > $500M
- construction & property
- 17 Nov 2017
- public opening
The doors, the nave, the garden
Education inside the machine
What the Education Directorate was for
Give the public a tactile sense of the biblical timeline using peer-reviewed, state-sanctioned evidence. Give students and faculty a chance to work on real pieces rather than locking everything in a vault. That is the pedagogy he championed — galleries as classrooms, labs as extensions of the university. The Green Scholars Initiative was the research arm of that idea: Vatican, IAA, and Cambridge University Library partnerships; undergraduates and faculty on real papyri.
Floor by floor
A visitor’s map, tied to his job
Floor names and uses follow Museum of the Bible’s published overview. Original architectural stills; not MOTB marketing photography.
Floor 1
Grand Hall · Vatican Gallery · Courageous Pages
The civic nave: limestone, marble, and a long luminous ceiling. Children’s galleries and a long-term Vatican Museums / Vatican Library presence. This is the room visitors remember.
Floor 2
The Impact of the Bible
Permanent floor on how the text has marked law, letters, art, and public life. Education’s public argument: the Bible is not only believed; it has been used.
Floor 3
The Stories of the Bible
Immersive narrative of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament — walk-through spaces, theater, and first-century settings. Story as pedagogy.
Floor 4
The History of the Bible
How the text was copied, canonized, translated. Hundreds of artifacts and media programs. Manuscripts, Torah scrolls, the slow work of transmission. This floor is closest to the scholar’s brief.
Floor 5
IAA · World Stage · Scholars Initiative
Long-term Israel Antiquities Authority gallery The People of the Land. World Stage Theater. The Scholars Initiative conference room — the research network Pattengale founded, written into the floor plan.
Floor 6
Biblical garden · views of the Mall
Rooftop garden and gathering rooms looking toward the Capitol. The museum as a neighbor of the American civic landscape, three blocks from the House.
Scrolls
Editorial work, then an IAA exhibition
General editor, with Emanuel Tov, of Brill’s Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments in the Museum of the Bible Collection (2016). He was a program director and managing scholarly editor — not a Qumran cave excavator. Later, as Senior Advisor, he is institutionally connected to MOTB’s hosting of the authentic IAA exhibition “Dead Sea Scrolls: The Exhibition” (announced November 2025–September 2026). He is not listed as exhibition curator.
Official museum visitor guide