The Museum of the Bible is currently being constructed in Washington D.C. Once completed in 2017, it will put on display more than 40,000 artefacts, manuscripts and texts related to the Holy Scripture.
It will have a total area of 430,000 sq. ft. and eight floors. Costing about $400 million, the museum will have five floors as its central exhibit area: Impact, History and Narrative of the Bible; long-term international libraries; and long-term international museum galleries.
The museum will also have a biblical garden, ballroom and performing arts hall.
Around 300 to 350 construction workers and contractors are busy on any given day, according to CBN News, which toured the place.
"Our idea and our desire is to tell the Bible story in such an engaging way that people will want to spend hours in the museum," museum founder Steve Green said.
Green's family also owns the Hobby Lobby and one of the largest collection of Bible artefacts in the world.
"When we think of the word 'museum,' sometimes you think of old and dusty. But what we will be doing is making this technologically advanced, where that it is very engaging and interactive, where that somebody could have a customised tour if they wanted to," he said.
According to the museum website, the collection will old manuscripts including the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, "a palimpsest manuscript containing biblical texts from the fifth to ninth centuries CE, which comprises the world's largest corpus of Christian Palestinian Aramaic, a dialect of Aramaic close to the language Jesus would have used."
It will also have the Rosebery Rolle, undocumented copy of Wycliffe's New Testament in Middle English and rare illuminated manuscripts.
The museum will also carry the first editions of the King James Bible and Douay-Rheims Bible, incunables, undocumented large fragment of the Tyndale New Testament and early tracts and Bibles of Martin Luther.
The first edition of the Eliot Indian Bible, the first Bible printed in America, will also be on display along with the Aitken Bible, handwritten letter from Thomas Jefferson, Bibles owned by Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Babe Ruth and former presidents of the United States and the original manuscript of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic."
