Moses and Buddha - who knew?

Last night Puget Sound Christian College hosted a night at the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Pacific Science Center. The night started well - driving down together to The Continental, a wonderful Greek restaurant on the Ave in the U-District that has been run by the same family for two or three generations. My parents used to go there a lot when my Dad was working on his PhD at the UW, and the current owner, who still recognizes my parents, was in college when they first got married!

The exhibit itself was very interesting and well done. I learned a lot about Qumran, the ancient city near where the caves/scrolls were discovered. I was saddened by the Essenes' incredible commitment to ritual purity - almost to the point they were enslaved to it and missed the heart. Though there weren't many of the scrolls themselves, we did see a number of the real fragments. The most staggering was seeing a little piece of Genesis and realizing I had just read that same verse a few mornings ago! God is so amazing - He has preserved His word perfectly for us to read! It's absolutely staggering.

Unfortunately, on our way to the gift store we were routed through the "politically correct room," or as I liked to call it, "the heretical room." As you're leaving this amazing room full of the oldest known written texts of the Bible you're met with illuminated texts from the Middle Ages (okay...cool...), and then Buddhist writings and parts of the Koran. I was pretty steamed. Another evidence of the Post-Modern corruption of life. Do those writings have ANYTHING to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls? If they had an exhibit of Buddhist scrolls found in some lake somewhere, would they feel the necessity to include the Christian Bible at the end for 'balance' and 'fairness?' I think not. I asked one of my students if he has a lighter so I can burn the heretics...then I thought better. Andy was thankful for that.