Mennonite Weekly Review

NORTH NEWTON, Kan. — A Bethel College professor is part of an ambitious project to revise and update the first Mennonite encyclopedia.

Mark Jantzen, associate professor of history, is the North American representative for the fifth volume of the Mennonitisches Lexikon (Mennonite Encyclopedia).

Begun in the early years of the 20th century in Germany and interrupted by two world wars, the project inspired Harold S. Bender’s English-language Mennonite encyclopedia project in the late 1950s.

The Mennonite Encyclopedia came out in four volumes, published between 1955 and 1959. Thirty years later came Volume 5, edited by C.J. Dyck, which updated and added to the material in the previous volumes.

Meanwhile, the huge historical endeavor that Christian Neff and Christian Hege launched at Weierhof, Germany, in 1913 did not make it to print in its entirety until 1967.

Jantzen’s three entries in Part 1 include articles on Johann Janzen, Ernst Regehr and Wil- helm Mannhardt.

Just as the Mennonitisches Lexikon provided much of the inspiration for the Mennonite Encyclopedia, so did Volume 5 inspire Hans-Jürgen Goertz, professor emeritus at the University of Hamburg, to initiate a fifth volume of the Mennonitisches Lexikon. He is working under the auspices of the Mennonitischer Geschichtsverein (German Mennonite Historical Association).

“The project is at the point where a website has been created,” Jantzen said. The fifth volume is being done in three sections, the first one consisting of biographical entries, and is now online at www.mennlex.de.

“I authored three of the articles and coordinated about 25 more, with authors in the United States and Canada,” Jantzen said.

Among those 25 authors are Bethel emeritus faculty Duane Friesen and James Juhnke, former faculty member Reinhild Kauenhoven Janzen, and Bethel history graduates Mary Sprunger and Rachel Waltner Goossen, who teach history at Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, Va., and Washburn University, Topeka, respectively.