Westminster College in Cambridge, England is a theological college of the United Reformed Church. Its principal purpose is training for the ordination of ministers, but is also used more widely for training within the denomination.
Westminster College in Cambridge, England is a theological college of the United Reformed Church. Its principal purpose is training for the ordination of ministers, but is also used more widely for training within the denomination.
The college was founded in London in 1844 with a temporary home in the Exeter Hall in the Strand, before moving to permanent premises in Queen's Square, London in 1859. It then moved to Cambridge in 1899 following the gift of a prime site of land near the centre of the city by two Scottish sisters, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, both noted biblical scholars. Following an appeal for funds from the wider Presbyterian congregation, the college commissioned a new building designed by Henry Hare and built between 1897 and 1899. In 1967 the college began to amalgamate with Cheshunt College, Cambridge, presaging the union of the Congregational and Presbyterian churches to form the United Reformed Church in 1972.[ citation needed ]
The dedication of a new college chapel took place in 1921; it was given by Sir William Noble, 1st Baronet and his wife Margaret. The gift was to commemorate the death of their son William Black Noble in World War I. The 11 stained glass windows are by Douglas Strachan. The decoration of the apse was completed in 1929 by W. Jowsey. [1] [2]
Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson were noted for their study of one of the earliest versions of the Old Gospels, in the Syriac Sinaiticus manuscript discovered in Saint Catherine's Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula. The other important contributions to the field of Aramaic and Theology are the publications of the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a 6th-century palimpsest written in Christian Palestinian Aramaic which contains portions of the Old Testament and New Testament, [3] and another palimpsest manuscript of the Forty Martyrs of the Sinai desert and the Story of Eulogios, the Stone Cutter in the same Aramaic dialect. The sisters found the manuscripts in the antiquities market of Cairo and acquired them for the library in Westminster College. They were sold in 2010 to the Green Collection, displayed in the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. They edited also many other important manuscripts in Syriac and Arabic.[ citation needed ]
In 1897 Lewis and Gibson also found and purchased some fragments of parchment of the Cairo Genizah whilst travelling in the Middle East. With the support of Solomon Schechter they made several more trips to the Middle East, locating the majority of the Genizah at the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. Schechter identified the fragments as forming part of the Hebrew Wisdom of Sirach. [4]
The Cairo Genizah collection was put up for sale by Westminster College for £1.2 million in 2013. [5] The two Oxbridge libraries, the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford and Cambridge's Cambridge University Library combined to raise funds to buy the collection from Westminster after it was put up for sale. [5] This is the first time the two libraries have collaborated for such a fundraising effort. [5] The money was used by Westminster College to help finance a £7 million refurbishment of the College in 2013–2014. [6]
The college is not part of the University of Cambridge, but has joined with six other religious colleges in Cambridge to form the Cambridge Theological Federation, which is affiliated with the university.
Currently, Westminster has connected with it around 50 students; some in training for ministry in the United Reformed Church, and some studying for other work or pleasure. Westminster is served by five academic staff, covering the traditional theological disciplines of Systematic Theology, Church History, Old Testament Studies, New Testament Studies and Pastoral Studies. Traditionally, most students have studied for four years, which includes an internship year working in a local church. However, the College now trains many students part-time and via distance learning, as well as through full-time in-house courses. Most students still work, nonetheless, either for a BA or MA degree (awarded by Anglia Ruskin University) or a BTh or BA/Tripos degree (awarded by Cambridge University).[ citation needed ]
Since 2017 the Westminster College site has also been home to the Woolf Institute of Abrahamic Faiths and Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. [7]
Westminster College is also affiliated with the American writer and Presbyterian theologian, Frederick Buechner. The College awards an annual prize for Excellence in Writing named after the author.[ citation needed ]
Notable former students include
Solomon Schechter was a Moldavian-born British-American rabbi, academic scholar and educator, most famous for his roles as founder and President of the United Synagogue of America, President of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and architect of American Conservative Judaism.
A genizah is a storage area in a Jewish synagogue or cemetery designated for the temporary storage of worn-out Hebrew-language books and papers on religious topics prior to proper cemetery burial.
Saint Catherine's Monastery, officially the Sacred Autonomous Royal Monastery of Saint Catherine of the Holy and God-Trodden Mount Sinai, is a Christian monastery located in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. Located at the foot of Mount Sinai, it was built between 548 and 565, and is the world's oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery.
The Cairo Geniza, alternatively spelled the Cairo Genizah, is a collection of some 400,000 Jewish manuscript fragments and Fatimid administrative documents that were kept in the genizah or storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat or Old Cairo, Egypt. These manuscripts span the entire period of Middle-Eastern, North African, and Andalusian Jewish history between the 6th and 19th centuries CE, and comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world.
James Rendel Harris was an English biblical scholar and curator of manuscripts, who was instrumental in bringing back to light many Syriac Scriptures and other early documents. His contacts at the Saint Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai in Egypt enabled twin sisters Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson to discover there the Sinaitic Palimpsest, the oldest Syriac New Testament document in existence. He subsequently accompanied them on a second trip, with Robert Bensly and Francis Crawford Burkitt, to decipher the palimpsest. He himself discovered there other manuscripts. Harris's Biblical Fragments from Mount Sinai appeared in 1890. He was a Quaker.
The Damascus Document is an ancient Hebrew text known from both the Cairo Geniza and the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is considered one of the foundational documents of the ancient Jewish community of Qumran.
The Syriac Sinaiticus or Codex Sinaiticus Syriacus (syrs), known also as the Sinaitic Palimpsest, of Saint Catherine's Monastery, or Old Syriac Gospels is a late-4th- or early-5th-century manuscript of 179 folios, containing a nearly complete translation of the four canonical Gospels of the New Testament into Syriac, which have been overwritten by a vita (biography) of female saints and martyrs with a date corresponding to AD 697. This palimpsest is the oldest copy of the Gospels in Syriac, one of two surviving manuscripts that are conventionally dated to before the Peshitta, the standard Syriac translation.
Stefan Clive Reif is professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge. He was born in Edinburgh. He has a PhD from University College London and a Doctor of Literature from Cambridge.
Charles Taylor (1840–1908) was an English Christian Hebraist.
Christian Palestinian Aramaic was a Western Aramaic dialect used by the Melkite Christian community, probably of Jewish descent, in Palestine, Transjordan and Sinai between the fifth and thirteenth centuries. It is preserved in inscriptions, manuscripts and amulets. All the medieval Western Aramaic dialects are defined by religious community. CPA is closely related to its counterparts, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (JPA) and Samaritan Aramaic (SA). CPA shows a specific vocabulary that is often not paralleled in the adjacent Western Aramaic dialects.
Agnes Smith Lewis (1843–1926) and Margaret Dunlop Gibson (1843–1920), nées Smith, were English Semitic scholars and travellers. As the twin daughters of John Smith of Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland, they learned more than 12 languages between them, specialising in Arabic, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, and Syriac, and became acclaimed scholars in their academic fields, and benefactors to the Presbyterian Church of England, especially to Westminster College, Cambridge.
Uncial 093, is a Greek uncial manuscript of the New Testament, dated palaeographically to the 6th century. Formerly it was designated by siglum ל.
Codex Climaci rescriptus is a collective palimpsest manuscript consisting of several individual manuscripts underneath, Christian Palestinian Aramaic texts of the Old and New Testament as well as two apocryphal texts, including the Dormition of the Mother of God, and is known as Uncial 0250 with a Greek uncial text of the New Testament and overwritten by Syriac treatises of Johannes Climacus : the scala paradisi and the liber ad pastorem. Paleographically the Greek text has been assigned to the 7th or 8th century, and the Aramaic text to the 6th century. It originates from Saint Catherine's Monastery going by the New Finds of 1975. Formerly it was classified for CCR 5 and CCR 6 as lectionary manuscript, with Gregory giving the number ℓ 1561 to it.
George William Knight III was an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He was a theologian, author, preacher, churchman, and adjunct professor of New Testament at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Taylors, South Carolina. Formerly, he was the founding Dean and Professor of New Testament at Knox Theological Seminary. Prior to his appointment at Knox Theological Seminary, he taught New Testament and New Testament Greek at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. As a pastor, he planted Covenant Presbyterian Church in Naples, Florida and has served numerous other local churches in the Presbyterian Church in America and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. A former president of the Evangelical Theological Society, he has also taught and preached the Bible at many other seminaries and churches around the world. He has authored several works, most notably The Pastoral Epistles and a short commentary of Timothy and Titus as included in the Baker Commentary on the Bible. He received his theological doctorate from Free University of Amsterdam in 1968. Dr. Knight was a member of the General Assembly-appointed Ad Interim Committee to study the number of ordained offices in the Presbyterian Church in America according to Scripture. His Ad Interim Report of the Number of Offices by George W. Knight IIIArchived 2011-09-27 at the Wayback Machine was incorporated into the polity of the Presbyterian Church in America. He also served on an ad interim committee to study the issue of marriage, divorce and remarriage, which brought about the 1992 publication of a Position Paper of the Presbyterian Church in America on Remarriage and Divorce, 1992.Archived 2011-09-27 at the Wayback Machine.
Geoffrey Allan Khan FBA is a British linguist and philologist of Semitic languages. He has held the post of Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge since 2012. Considered one of the world's leading experts on Aramaic, he has published grammars for numerous Aramaic dialects and he leads the North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic DatabaseArchived 8 February 2018 at the Wayback Machine. His other research has included Biblical Hebrew and medieval Arabic documents.
The AqBurkitt are fragments of a palimpsest containing a portion of the Books of Kings from Aquila's translation of the Hebrew bible from the 6th century, overwritten by some liturgical poems of Yanai dating from the 9–11th century. This Aquila translation was performed approximately in the early or mid-second century C.E. The manuscript is variously dated to the 6th-century CE, or 5th-6th century CE.
The siglum AqTaylor are fragments of a palimpsest containing a portion of the Palestinian Talmud in upper script, and part of the Book of Psalms of Aquila's Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible in lower script. This latter is a Greek biblical manuscript written in codex form. This manuscript has been dated after the middle of the fifth century C.E., but not later than the beginning of the sixth century C.E.
The siglum Taylor-Schechter 12.182 designates a manuscript written on parchment in codex form. This is a palimpsest of a copy of Origen's work called the Hexapla. The manuscript is dated to 7th-century AD, and is the oldest of the hexapla manuscripts. The hexapla was completed before 240 AD.
Codex Sinaiticus Rescriptus, mostly originating in Saint Catherine's Monastery, Sinai from Sin. Georg. 34; Tsagareli 81, is an accumulation of nineteen Christian Palestinian Aramaic palimpsest manuscripts containing Old Testament, Gospel and Epistles pericopes of diverse Lectionaries, among them two witnesses of the Old Jerusalem Lectionary, various unidentified homilies and two by John Chrysostom, hagiographic texts as the Life of Pachomios, the Martyrdom of Philemon Martyrs, and the Catecheses by Cyril of Jerusalem. The palimpsests manuscripts are recycled parchment material that were erased and reused by the tenth century Georgian scribe Ioane-Zosime for overwriting them with homilies and a Iadgari. Part of the parchment leaves had been brought by him from the Monastery of Saint Sabas, south of Jerusalem in the Kidron Valley, when he moved to St Catherine's Monastery and became there librarian. In the nineteenth century most of the codex was removed from the monastery at two periods. C. Tischendorf took two thirds in 1855 and 1857 with the Codex Sinaiticus to St Peterburg and handed it over to the Imperial Library, now the National Library of Russia, and the remaining third left on a clandestine route [so-called collection of Dr Friedrich Grote (1862-1922)] and found its way into various European and later also into US collections, at present in a Norwegian collection. From the New Finds of 1975 in the Monastery of Saint Catherine missing folios of some of the underlying manuscripts could be retrieved, with one connected to Princeton, Garrett MS 24.
Taylor-Schechter 16.320 is a Greek biblical manuscript written on parchment in codex form. This is a palimpsest that contains the Palestinian Talmud and the Septuagint Psalms. The manuscript is dated 550 – 649 CE.
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