A Peshitta Finds a Resting Place
The Yonan Codex now resides in The Scriptorium: Center for Christian Antiquities, in Grand Haven, Michigan. This nonsectarian institute houses one of the largest collections of ancient biblical and ecclesiastical manuscripts in the United States.
Founded in 1993, the Scriptorium is funded by Mr. and Mrs. Robert Van Kampen, whose collection constitutes the bulk of its resources. Among the center’s holdings are:
• ancient Greek and Coptic manuscripts, including the Mississippi Codex 2, a Coptic volume dating to about 350 A.D. and containing the books of Jeremiah, Lamentations and Baruch;
• boxes of largely unstudied papyri in Syriac, Coptic and Greek, including one liturgical fragment in Greek dating to the late first or early second century;
• numerous fourth- and fifth-century papyrus fragments of biblical and apocryphal texts in Coptic;
• several of the earliest and best-preserved Greek minuscule texts, along with medieval illuminated Latin Bibles;
• some 1,500 cuneiform tablets, dating from the 27th to the 6th centuries B.C., very few of which have yet been read.
A research and teaching center, the Scriptorium also sponsors the excavation of a fourth-century Coptic monastery in Wadi Natrun, Egypt. The center offers summer seminars for students and annual conferences for scholars. A recent multi-disciplinary conference on reading ancient Greek texts, held at a castle in England owned by the Scriptorium, is to be published in conjunction with the British Library. The center’s Michigan facilities include the personal library of Eberhard Nestle—the 19th-century German scholar who standardized the Greek text of the New Testament—which the Scriptorium bought from Westminster College, Cambridge.
The Scriptorium is open to the public by appointment only, Tuesdays and Thursdays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Saturdays 10 a.m. to 12 noon. For reservations and information, contact The Scriptorium Office of Education, Dr. Jerry Pattengale, 926 Robbins Road, Grand Haven, MI 49417. Phone: (616) 847–7220, or (800) 333–8373. The address of the Scriptorium’s home page is www.scriptorium.org.