Earl A. Pope Lecture in World Christianity: "Noah's Ark Worldwide" by Professor Eric Ziolkowski, Helen H. P. Manson Professor of Bible

As distinguished from a reconstruction, restoration, reproduction, or fabrication, “replica” generally denotes a duplicate, facsimile, or copy of an original artwork or other object. While the Bible itself yields various notions and phenomena of replication, this lecture examines actual replicas of a particular biblical object. With a nod to replicas of other biblical sites and objects (e.g., tower of Babel, covenantal ark and tabernacle, Jerusalem’s Temple), our focus will be on the history of the building and displaying of Noah’s Ark replicas (NARs). This genuinely worldwide practice is as old as the medieval European theatrical mystery cycles (in which a NAR figured as an essential prop), and includes an unusual “arkaiologically”-designed Cornish garden; the popular “rocking Noah’s Ark” funhouses in 20th-century amusement parks in the UK and US; smaller NARs at countless US recreational sites; buildings constructed to resemble Noah’s Ark in Poland, Israel, and Taiwan; and 21st-century mega-NARs in Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Kentucky. If a myth consists of all its versions (as claimed by Claude Lévi-Strauss), these replicas have the cumulative effect of allowing materialized access to the Noachian myth—a demonstrably ever-adaptable myth that is invoked today in support of globally urgent causes ranging from doomsday planning in Norway to biodiversity conservation in South Africa.