John Rylands Library

I've always loved the history of Manchester.

I can't quite describe to you why, but oddly enough, when I went to England, my best research trips were always to Manchester, where you've got both the great round reference library and you've got the John Rylands library with a magnificent it was built as almost like a chapel but it is in fact a library and then you've got the resources of Manchester University and you've got the old Chetham's library in which it was one of these chained libraries where books had to be chained in so that people would not escape with them and Anyway, my research topic drove me to this space, and it was lots of fun.

And I certainly went to see Cross Street, because Cross Street was significant in lots of stories of Manchester.

It was the old dissenter's chapel.

Initially, he collected it along with many other manuscript fragments.

But what it was actually, they did not recognize until someone – so it was actually kept in the Manchester, England, in the John Rylands Library in the basement there.

And so it took many more years for it to be discovered, the significance of it, when a young student was going through these – ancient manuscripts, these pieces.

And this is just the size of a credit card, right? The size of a credit card, about three and a half inches tall and two and a half inches wide.

The other is in St. Paul's Cathedral Library, wanting probably seventy-eight leaves.

There is a lithograph reproduction in the Rylands Library, one of six copies printed on vellum, made from the Bristol copy by Francis Fry in 1862.

The Cathedral copy, lent by the Dean and Chapter for the purpose, was shown in the Caxton Exhibition of 1877.

The Testaments reached England sometime in the spring of 1526, and everything possible was done to prevent the entrance of the forbidden books and to destroy those which did come in.

Having shown that in this passage the Great Bible and the Bishop's Bible differ in twenty-six places, he adds, Of these twenty-six variations, no less than sixteen are new, while only ten are due to the Genevan version, and the character of the original corrections marks a very close and thoughtful revision, based faithfully upon the Greek.

He further shows that throughout the entire epistle, the changes amount to nearly fifty, and among the new readings are some phrases which have become very familiar to us, as less than the least of all saints, middle wall of the partition, fellow citizens with the saints.

It may be mentioned that copies of the chief editions of the Bishop's Bible are preserved in the British Museum, in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, in the Rylands Library, and in that of the British and Foreign Bible Society.

And now at this point a notable fact occurred.

So there are several things to say about this.

One thing I'll say, this manuscript is kept in the Manchester Library, in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England.

And I did a, I was doing a BBC show once when they were doing something on manuscripts and they had, they wanted to film me just looking at this thing.

And so they gave it to me under glass.