Saucy to Princes
Gerald Hammond
- The Book: A History of the Bible by Christopher de Hamel
Phaidon, 352 pp, £24.95, September 2001, ISBN 0 7148 3774 1 - The Wycliffe New Testament 1388 edited by W.R. Cooper
British Library, 528 pp, £20.00, May 2002, ISBN 0 7123 4728 3
Julia Kristeva was in Manchester in March to give a lecture. One of the pleasures of her visit, for me, the day after the lecture and en route to the Manchester United superstore, was to accompany her on a tour of the Deansgate branch of the John Rylands University Library. Mrs Rylands, the extraordinary founder of the collection, was particularly keen on Bibles, and among the many Biblical treasures is a tiny triangular fragment of the text of St John’s Gospel, catalogued as Gr. Pap. 457. A reasonably reliable dating of the fragment is c.125, making it the earliest surviving witness to the New Testament. It was the first time Kristeva had seen the fragment and perhaps the tenth time I had, but I doubt that our sense of wonder was any different. There, in its portable transparent box, was the earliest relic of the Book.
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[*] Reviewed in the LRB by Stefan Collini (13 December 2001).
Vol. 24 No. 14 · 25 July 2002 » Gerald Hammond » Saucy to Princes (print version)
pages 19-20 | 2582 words