About the Museum

The Bible Museum was founded by the Danubian Reformed Church District of the Reformed Church in Hungary in its Ráday street building, Budapest, in 1988 – a year of special importance in Hungarian history.

For political reasons, the Communist leadership wanted to appear to be supporting religious tolerance, especially with regards to the introduction of the Bible to the public; and a significant move by the state in church politics was that it permitted the Bible Museum to be established in socialist Hungary.

The rich library of the Ráday Collection provided a proper background for the exhibition, and the Hungarian Bible Society contributed to the museum’s collection by obtaining and donating foreign language Bibles.

The Director of the Collection was an outstanding academic, Kálmán Bende the exhibition designer was Péter Hubai.

The museum was unique at the time it was opened, because it was the second of its kind in Europe, after the Bijbels Museum in Amsterdam.

The exhibition then consisted of the following parts: the Bible and archaeology, the history of the writing and texts of the Bible, the history of the Hungarian Bible, and the Bible in the languages of the world. Temporary exhibitions also contributed to the rich museum experience.

The Bible Museum received a make-over in 2011, when its reconstruction began.

The exhibition takes the visitors from the time of creation on through the New Testament, until the age when the first Christian communities were formed and early churches were established.

Our goal was to create a museum that would appeal not only to children and student groups, but to people of any age group.

We look forward to seeing you in our museum for a guided tour, an educational program or an organised discussion.

In the context of our lives, the Bible is, if we allow its message to reach us, our common cultural treasure. We seek as our mission to demonstrate this in the language of today through the traditional and interactive elements in the museum.

When one views an early edition of the Bible, in its Hungarian translation, of which we have many examples, one cannot but admire what it meant to the generations before us. Like them, we believe that the Bible is the Word of God (Verbum Dei) and strive to show this at the Bible Museum and to invite you to not only read but to study it.