The Wheaton Archives & Special Collections and the Marion E. Wade Center are pleased to announce new additions to their archival holdings donated from the estate of Ralph Blair. Dr. Blair collected widely in the areas of American evangelicalism and British Christianity. Earlier this spring, several boxes containing artifacts from the Blair collection arrived at Wheaton College for campus archival staff to add to our rich collections. These items will soon be available for research, and a few highlights from the collections are featured below. We are grateful for these donations!
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The Jim Elliot Bible Project
In November of 2024, Wheaton Archives & Special Collections collaborated with the Museum of the Bible to digitize Jim Elliot’s three college-era annotated Bibles held in CN 277: Jim Elliot Collection. After digitization was completed in February 2025, two archives interns, Ava Pardue and Mariah Sray, both part of Wheaton’s Aequitas Fellows Program in Public Humanities and Arts, spent the summer indexing all the annotations in the Bibles.
Ava Pardue just finished her freshman year at Wheaton. Along with being an Aequitas Fellow, she plans to major in English and Classical Languages. Mariah Sray is a senior at Wheaton with a major in Classical Languages integrated with Choral Studies.
Below, we feature an interview with Ava and Mariah about their work on the project.
What drew you to the Jim Elliot Bible project?
Ava: When I heard about the opportunity to work with Elliot’s Bibles, I jumped at the chance to engage with language, theology, and history in a way that could be useful to the public. One of the three Bibles is a Greek New Testament, which I was particularly interested in studying with the knowledge of Koine Greek that I’ve picked up during the last several years. And ultimately, I think the biggest thing that drew me to the project was a chance to look at Jim Elliot—a man hailed as a martyr, hero, and catalyst for modern missions—as an ordinary college student.
Mariah: An interest in exploring archival work drew me to this internship, but I was also curious to learn more about Jim Elliot. I knew the broad contours of his death in Ecuador but wasn’t familiar with the details of his life. I was also interested to how Jim interacted with his Bible, especially his Greek New Testament.
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