EVERY decade or so, I find myself in Washington, DC, always trying to keep a day free to explore its wonderful museums. Perhaps next time I should go and gawp at the self-consciously grandiose Museum of the Bible. After a half-billion-dollar outfitting, it now has 40-foot-high brass doors, epic-scale digital gizmos, and a huge collection of historic Bibles and papyri. It is the focus of the latest series of Radio 4’s true-crime documentary programme Intrigue. Now celebrating eight years on the air, Intrigue is among the most transparent of Radio 4’s efforts to battle with commercial podcasts for younger listeners.
The first of a new six-episode series, Word of God (Radio 4, Wednesday of last week), explores how the museum is having to return more than 17,000 clay tablets and other artefacts that turned out to have been smuggled into the United States, mainly from Iraq and Egypt. Other exhibits turned out to be modern forgeries. At least part of the motivation for setting up the museum seems to have been the opportunity for tax write-offs.
The star of the show is Professor Roberta Mazza, the Italian papyrologist who exposed the smuggling and has a voice made for radio, bursting with personality.
Finding out to what extent the Green family, of Hobby Lobby, a chain of arts and crafts stores, are knaves or fools will be one of the main reasons to listen to later episodes. But they are not quite the fundamentalist ogres that I might have expected the BBC to present them as, and that I had always imagined from their political interventions: it turns out they have a reputation for offering staff in basic jobs good wages and good health care.
Of particular interest is the basic level on which the programme-makers feel that they need to explain details of the Greens’ faith, perhaps even to themselves.
Many readers will be familiar with Cathy Newman as the Channel 4 News scourge of Church of England safeguarding failings, but she also has a weekly show, Cathy Newman with Times Radio Drive, on the digital radio station Times Radio. Last Friday, she turned her attention to the General Synod — a rare case of Synod proceedings’ being covered outside specialist religious programming.
The Bishop of Leeds, the Rt Revd Nick Baines, handled the seven-minute interview well, doing a better job of defending his Metropolitan Archbishop than York might have done itself, although he needed to avoid calling him “Stephen Ebor:”, which means nothing even to most faithful lay worshippers. Baines even got close to articulating the real reason that safeguarding should not be outsourced, which is that nobody and no institution can be meaningfully held to account for something that they have no power over.
He was also remarkably — and refreshingly — direct in his willingness to disagree publicly with other bishops. How different from the stultifying and false public consensus we had from bishops for years over same-sex relationships.