Information about Westminster College, Cambridge

Westminster College in Cambridge is a theological college of the Presbyterian Church in England, now the United Reformed Church. Its principle purpose is the training of clergy for ordination. The Principal of the college is the Revd Dr Susan Durber since St Francis Day 2007.

The college was founded in London in 1844 with a temporary home in the Exeter Hall before moving to permanent premises in Queen Square, London. 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 1897–1899.

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.

Library

Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson were noted for their study of one of the earliest versions of the Old Gospels in Syriac Sinaiticus discovered in the monastery St. Catherine, Mount Sinai. 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[1], 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 edited also many other important manuscripts in Syriac and Arabic.

In 1897 Lewis and Gibson also found and purchased some fragments of parchment of the Cairo Genizah whilst travelling in the Middle East. They enlisted the support Solomon Schechter who together 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 text of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) [2].

The library also housed the library of Eberhard Nestle, but this was sold to the Van Kampen Collection in Florida in 1996 [3].

The college is not part of the University of Cambridge, but is united with six other religious colleges in Cambridge to form the Cambridge Theological Federation which is affiliated with the university. In concentrating on religious studies for training clergy, the college is in some ways closer to the original conception of the main university colleges when they were founded. However, with the general decline of the church, the demand for new clergy is low at present and there are very few students enrolled at the college.

The college also accommodates several conferences a year.

External links

• Westminster College web site