The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
July 26, 2009
Vol. 12 no. 28

Everything But...
Every Sunday we sit on the edge of our pews - at least some people do - to hear read the texts of Scripture for that particular day in the Christian year. Particularly in the Protestant tradition we are a people of texts, of the Word, which we try to flesh out in our reading, hearing, preaching, and then in our living. We read from beautifully and clearly printed Bibles, but that’s not the way those texts originally looked. The early manuscripts of the Bible were not that easy to decipher.

I have spent the last two weeks surrounded by the images of these texts. This was the seventh time I have visited the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) on the campus of St. John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota. HMML is below ground and includes the gallery for the St. John’s Bible, the first handwritten complete Bible with marvelous illuminations or colourful illustrations surrounding the text.

Going deeper into the library are study carrels equipped with state of the art microfilm readers. There are very few “real” manuscripts in the library. In 1964 the new library began to microfilm as many endangered collections of old manuscripts as possible, then make them available to scholars to consult and translate them. Before the 1974 communist takeover in Ethiopia, a large number of Ethiopian manuscripts were microfilmed. Today the technology is computer digitization. Fr. Columba Stewart has sent the digitizers to photograph several huge collections in the Near East, and now overwhelmed by the number of manuscripts we are starting to catalogue and describe what we have.

For a wonderful tour of all that HMML does to preserve our written heritage: www.hmml.org. We are poorer for what we haven’t read.