At the opening of the Colloquium on Tuesday 26 July 1976, the participants assembled in the main conference room of the reconstructed library of the University of Münster, where they received an official welcome from the Pro-rector, Herr Professor Dr Friedemann Merkel. In reply, Professor William R. Farmer, representing the organizing committee, spoke as follows:

We thank you for all that you have said and for all that has been done by this university and especially by Dr Liebers and his assistant Dr Rüter of this university library. We are grateful for this fine room and for all its appointments, which are ideal for the kind of discussions we intend to hold. We especially appreciate the painstaking efforts that have been taken to assemble the Griesbachiana which grace our deliberations and for the imaginative and tasteful manner in which these books and pictures have been arranged.

On this occasion it is fitting that something should be said about the genesis of this Colloquium and about the benefactors and patrons who have helped make what started as a dream four years ago become a reality at this time.

In 1965 in Göttingen a small-scale conference was held for the purpose of discussing the importance of Griesbach's solution to the Synoptic Problem. Out of this conference, which included Eugene Roesenstock-Hussey and Hans Conzelmann, came the idea for a large-scale international conference on Gospel studies. This led to the organizing of the ‘Festival of the Gospels’ which was held in Pittsburgh in 1970.