Providence College library home to rare Bible

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This article was published 07/10/2007 (6706 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTERBURNE — Fuelled by her passion for students to understand a larger literary context, librarian Terry Kennedy has saved loonies and twoonies to buy a rare $7,000 copy of the oldest Christian Bible for Providence College and Seminary.

“This text is just one way to show the history of the Bible,” she says of her six-year quest to earmark memorial donations of $20 and more to purchase the 1536-page facsimile publication of Bibliorum Sacrorum Graecorum Codex Vaticanus B, one of 450 numbered copies of the oldest complete compilation of the Christian scriptures.

The original Greek manuscript, now housed in the Vatican library, was written on parchment by hand in uncial script, or all capital letters, in the fourth century, and collected into one book in 1209. The facsimile versions, published by the Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stata, the official publisher of the Vatican, reproduce the original calligraphy, stains, tears and rips, providing the reader with the sense of reading a centuries-old document, says Kennedy..

Providence library owns copy number 297, one of four copies in Canada and the only one located in Manitoba.

“It’s very well bound and it’s beautiful, with those Vatican (library) markings, the wrinkles in the page, the markings,” she says of the heavy book, whose pages simulate the weight and feel of parchment.

The volume will be officially unveiled Tuesday, Oct. 23 at the evangelical Christian college and seminary located 30 minutes southeast of Winnipeg.

Kennedy began putting aside small donations made to the library in memory of former students and friends of the college when she first learned of the availability of the copies in 2001, shortly after she began working as director of library services.

“I think if we didn’t make it a special project it would never happen,” she says, holding the white parchment-bound volume, measuring 12.5 cm thick. “It would never come out of operating funds. We would never have $7,000 to spend on a single volume.”

The library’s annual acquisition budget is $90,000.

Although the book is a recent copy instead of the actual pages of a rare Bible, it will play a critical role in helping students understand the literary history of the Christian scriptures, explains Providence President Gus Konkel, an Old Testament scholar .

“In teaching the history of (biblical) text, I point out that a Christian Bible is not the same as the Jewish Bible. And they can come down here (to the library) and see it,” Konkel says of the value of the acquisition. The library also has a photo facsimile of a Hebrew language Bible dating back to 800 A.D.

The beginning and end of the original Vaticanus Bible were lost or damaged, later replaced by another scribe in a different hand, and over the centuries, corrections were added, and fading letters darkened. Those changes and additions are also educational for biblical scholars and students, says Old Testament professor Lissa Wray Beal.

“This kind of thing helps them realize that the Bible they hold in their hands didn’t come down from heaven with a cover on it,” she says, referring to easily obtained versions of the English Bible.

For Kennedy, holding the heavy volume in her hands — covered in white gloves, of course — is a dream come true after years of saving for it. But her excitement at acquiring the expensive volume and her desire to have students see it is also tempered by her librarian’s pragmatism. Shelved in the library’s rare book room, the sewn pages of the Vaticanus are to be handled carefully, she says.

“We’ve asked faculty not to flop it on the photocopier, just to save the binding.”

brenda@suderman.com