Ancient Manuscripts

Dublin has treated us well so far. Apart from a few showers last night (conveniently timed for our walk home from the pub), we've had blue skies and reasonable temps for our first day in Ireland's capital.

It's a compact place, with history everywhere, even when you don't expect it. We were having a bite to eat before visiting the Book of Kells, the ninth-century illuminated manuscript of the Gospels. Turns out, the bite to eat was at the Chester Beatty Library, which I read about as I ate a yummy salad plate of carrots, hummus, grape leaves, tomatoes and cucumbers.

Chester Beatty was an American collector and expat who donated his remarkable library to Ireland. It contains treasures that rival if not exceed the Book of Kells, including fragments of papyrus on which is written some of the earliest known copies of the Epistles of St. Paul.

To see the Book of Kells requires standing in several queues and jostling with others to even catch a quick glimpse of the manuscript. But at the Chester Beatty collection I stood alone, almost in tears, in front of the Letters of St. Paul to the Corinthians.

Had I been able to decipher the Greek, this is what I would have read:

"Love is patient,
love is kind,
it does not envy,
it does not boast...
Love does not delight
in evil but rejoices in the truth.
It always protects,
always hopes, and
always perseveres."

(Top photo, a map of the world from the first modern atlas, 1570, from the Chester Beatty collection. Above, books in the Long Room at Trinity College, Dublin.)