Meticulously researched and lucidly written, this remarkable volume is the first biography of an important late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century biblical scholar, James Rendel Harris. Falcetta's work is masterful, thorough, and impressive. It is a biography that will remain the definitive work on “a trailblazer, a man of boundless enthusiasms, of eccentricities, of perilous adventures, and, above all, of discoveries” (1). In Falcetta's hands, the life of Harris becomes not simply a story of an individual whose quest for manuscript discoveries produced important collections now housed at the John Rylands Library in Manchester and in libraries at Harvard, Birmingham, Haverford, and elsewhere. The story told here is also about history of Quakerism in England, the formation of institutions like Woodbrooke College in Birmingham, the impact of World War I, the Armenian Genocide, the nature of biblical scholarship in the last century, the original insights Harris brought to the study of manuscripts, and the relationships between a wide circle of scholars, including the Iraqi Alphonse Mingana, Fenton John Antony Hort and James Hope Moulton, Adolph Harnack, George Frazer, and many others.  Falcetta's story is based upon deep archival work, including a substantial corpus of extant letters to and from Harris, as well as a comprehensive understanding of Harris's own publications, the publications of his wife Helen Balkwill Harris that appeared in a variety of Society of Friends’ publications, interviews with those who knew Harris, and a substantial bibliography that includes works as wide ranging as nineteenth-century devotional readings, travel diaries, catalogs of manuscripts, and key scholarly works.

Falcetta begins the story with Harris's birth in Plymouth in 1852 and shows how the unconventional approaches Harris was later to take as a scholar had their origins in his family's “deep roots in local Nonconformity” (7). His early schooling in Greek and Latin, German and French, and math and science led to admission to Cambridge for mathematics at the time when the “triumvirate” of New Testament Textual Criticism—Lightfoot, Wescott, and Hort—was reshaping the study of early Christian manuscripts and rewriting the history of the text of the New Testament. It was in this exciting atmosphere that Harris turned from mathematics to textual criticism and, most importantly, to a curiosity and passion for manuscripts. The chapters that follow the story of Harris's beginnings are guided by Harris's biography—his travels, his discoveries, his personal life—as well as a keen interest in how the historical circumstances shaped Harris's life and the impact that Harris had on subsequent scholarship. Harris's travels to Egypt, Palestine, Sinai, and elsewhere offer Falcetta key pivots for Harris's discoveries—the driving theme throughout the biography. He begins and ends his book with a line from Harris's own letter to Percy Smith in 1941: “They laugh at me at Woodbrooke,” Harris writes, “and say I have made a new Lord's Prayer with a versicle in it which says ‘give us this day our daily discovery’” (480). This line, which Falcetta echoes in the title he has chosen, sums up the force of Harris's curiosity, his contributions to subsequent scholarship, and the sense of western fascination with and travel to the Near East in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

It is difficult with a biography as comprehensive as this one to wish for something more or to find any justifiable critique, but I did find that the story sometimes lost its through line because of Falcetta's commitment to a holistic approach, one that does not just tell the key events of Harris's life but also devotes substantial space to broader historical events, key discoveries and their impact, the religious life of Harris and his wife, and so forth. At key points, there are sometimes large digressions into the history of religious life, especially Quakerism, and important historical events. A timeline listing both the key events in Harris's life as well as the historical developments that Falcetta highlights as essential for understanding Harris might have given readers a helpful guide.

Given Falcetta's approach in capturing historical developments, one curious omission surprised me: there is virtually no mention here of the colonialist enterprise, which surely shaped western scholars’ approach to finding manuscripts, procuring them for libraries, and their understanding of the contemporary cultures in which these historical remains were found. At times, for example, it is not clear whether Falcetta's tone and choice of words are taken from precise quotations in Harris's and others’ letters or whether the tone of the letters has now filtered into this twenty-first-century biography: for example, in Falcetta's description of Rendel Harris and his wife Helen's 1888 visit to Cairo, he writes that “Rendel employed an Arabic boy in a yellow gown” (74); later, in Jerusalem, in the visit to the Ethiopian monastery above the Holy Sepulcher, Falcetta writes “the Ethiopians were good looking” (87); later in this same trip, after Harris has been to St. Catherine's monastery in Sinai and he is reunited with Helen at Port Said, Falcetta says “she found him in good shape, happy and brown as an Arab” (92). At each of these points, the reader needs to know whether the language here belongs to Rendel Harris and his wife Helen or to a paraphrasing. Colonialism, which so deeply shaped the quest for Near Eastern artifacts, is obscured in these instances and, indeed, throughout this otherwise richly layered biography.

These suggestions aside, this book is well worth the wait. It will be an important addition to academic libraries and of great interest to students of the history of biblical scholarship. James Rendel Harris comes alive in these pages and his contributions, which have long shaped my own work, are key to understanding the dynamic history of manuscript studies, textual criticism, and the intersection of present and past in any historical inquiry.