Every fall, the Quayle Bible Collection prepares to unveil its new exhibit. The collection was gifted to Baker in 1925 by former student, professor and president William Quayle. It contains “more than 800 Bibles and other religious and historical documents, some dating as early as 2000 BCE.”
“Most universities have a rare manuscript collection of some kind. Since our university is Methodist, and [William Quayle] was also a bishop of the Methodist Church, our special collection is religiously related,” Associate Professor of Religious Studies Dr. Nicholaus Pumphrey said. “We’ve got primarily Bibles here, but we don’t have just Bibles. We’ve got cuneiform tablets, we’ve got history of the world, we’ve got some science texts. We don’t have just Christian stuff. We’ve got Jewish texts, Buddhist texts, a little bit of everything.”
This year’s exhibit is titled “The Scriptures of Abraham: The Bible and the Qur’an,” and will focus on the similarities between the texts of both the Christian and Muslim holy books. The exhibit will emphasize how “Muslims recognize the connection of scriptures and refer to Jews and Christians as the ‘People of the Book,’ but many Jews and Christians might not be aware of the links. Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Jesus, Noah, Adam, and many more figures found in the Bible are also found in the Qur’an.”
In a way, Pumphrey began working on this exhibit when he became the director of the Quayle Collection in 2015. During his early days working there, Pumphrey learned from students working in the archive that Quayle had several Qurans or pages from Qurans, which was when he first conceived of an exhibit that would showcase Quayle’s interest in religions other than Christianity.
“As far as I can tell, in one of his Qurans, he outlines and actually draws in it the similarities of Jesus in the Quran and in the Bible,” Pumphrey said. “Next year will be the 100-year anniversary of his death. And that’s when he gave us the collection, so I thought it would be kind of an appetizer. This is the charcuterie board of getting into what Quayle collected and why.”
Helping Pumphrey for this exhibit were several Baker alumni who worked with him when Quayle’s Qurans were first discovered in the collection’s archives. Senior Livi Sisney is the only current Baker student who got to be involved in curating one of the displays.
“I ended up working on the exhibit because it was the final project for Pumphrey’s museum studies class,” Sisney said. “I’ve always been interested in Islam as a religion, and I thought it would be cool to work with some of the Quran pages that I knew we had in the archive collection, because I used to work there.”
In terms of content, this exhibit is definitely an outlier in the Quayle Bible Collection’s history.
“It’s probably the first to first exhibit to not be completely Bible focused. I’ve done some in the past where we talk a lot about Jewish interpretation, but that’s very similar to a lot of the Christian interpretation,” Pumphrey said. “This is definitely the first one that talks a lot about Islam. My hope behind this is showing that Quayle himself was interested in this kind of stuff.”
For Pumphrey, getting to work in and curate Quayle’s archive is incredibly rewarding.
“I get to play and create. I’m not artistic, so this is like my art. When I was in grad school, I used to translate a lot. I did a lot of work on Hebrew [and] Arabic, and I don’t get to flex those muscles as much in the random times when I write Hebrew or Arabic on the board in class as I do here,” he said. “This lets me actually flex my brain.”
Ultimately, Pumphrey believes Quayle’s collection is an example for students on learning from more than one place, culture, or experience.
“This is an incredibly valuable collection, and students can get hands-on experience working with these historic documents. It also [shows] students that there’s more to the world than just where people grow up in Kansas or Missouri or wherever they’re from. I mean, we have the history of the world in this room, and we’ve got books from India, we’ve got books from Japan, we’ve got books from all over the place,” Pumphrey said. “And it’s right here, just hiding in Baldwin, Kansas. So it’s perfect for students to get their hands on these texts, or just see them in cases, and understand more about the world.”
The open house for “The Scriptures of Abraham: The Bible and the Qur’an” will be Thursday Sept. 26, from 3-4:30pm.
