Saint John's Bible Speaker to Examine Ancient Roots of the Manuscript

Michael Patella

Champlain College will  host Fr. Michael Patella, the chair of the Committee on Illumination and Texts for the Saint John's Bible, as  the Spring  keynote speaker on Monday, March 23 for the Saint John's Bible series. Patella, who will be speaking at 7:30 p.m. in the Perry Hall presentation room, will talk about  "Athens or Jerusalem: Where is Home for the Saint John's Bible?" He will discuss what we might learn from Athens and Jerusalem. The talk is free and open to the public.

The Saint John's Bible is spending a "Year in Residence" at the Miller Information Commons at Champlain. The Saint John's Bible is the first hand-written, hand-illuminated Bible commissioned since medieval times. Produced by a team of artists under the supervision of renowned calligrapher Donald Jackson, the Saint John's Bible contains 160 illuminations scribed on vellum with quills and brushes and unites ancient Benedictine tradition with a modern vision for a new millennium.

Watch the video of the talk:

St. John's Bible

In addition to working with the Saint John's Bible, Patella is also a Benedictine monk of Saint John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minn. He is a professor of New Testament and teaches undergraduate and graduate theology at Saint John's University, where he is a seminary rector and director of the graduate school's Holy Land Studies Program.  He earned a License in Sacred Scripture from Rome's Pontifical Biblical Institute and a Doctorate in Sacred Scripture from the École biblique et archéologique française in Jerusalem. He recently published a book called "Word and Image: the Hermeneutics of The Saint John's Bible."


Founded in 1878, Champlain College is a small, not-for-profit, private college in Burlington, Vermont, with additional campuses in Montreal, Canada, and Dublin, Ireland. Champlain offers a traditional undergraduate experience from its beautiful campus overlooking Lake Champlain and over 90 residential undergraduate and online undergraduate and graduate degree programs and certificates. Champlain's distinctive career-driven approach to higher education embodies the notion that true learning occurs when information and experience come together to create knowledge. Champlain College is included in the Princeton Review's The Best 384 Colleges: 2019 Edition. For the fourth year in a row, Champlain was named a "Most Innovative School" in the North by U.S. News & World Report's 2019 "America's Best Colleges,” and a “Best Value School” and is ranked in the top 100 “Regional Universities of the North” and in the top 25 for “Best Undergraduate Teaching.” Champlain is also featured in the Fiske Guide to Colleges for 2019 as one of the "best and most interesting schools" in the United States, Canada and Great Britain and is a 2019 College of Distinction. For more information, visit champlain.edu.