The Manuscript Room at Chester Beatty

In 1950, a fire broke out in a small library near Dublin where the Chester Beatty collection of biblical papyri was stored. A young curator named Margaret McNamara smelled smoke before the alarms triggered. She did not grab her coat or her lunch pail. She ran toward the flames, not away from them, pulling ancient manuscript fragments from their display cases with her bare hands. She suffered burns on both palms. When a firefighter asked why she hadn't simply evacuated, she said, "You don't understand what these pages are."

She understood something that casual observers did not. The papyri in that room contained some of the earliest surviving copies of Paul's letters — texts that had already survived two millennia of neglect, persecution, and deliberate destruction. Each fragment was irreplaceable. The faith recorded on those pages had been handed down at enormous cost, and Margaret refused to let carelessness destroy what centuries of hostility could not.

Jude never intended to write a letter about conflict. He wanted to write about salvation — the shared joy of it, the beauty. But he saw smoke. False teachers had slipped into the church, and the precious deposit of faith was in danger. So he pivoted. He urged believers to contend earnestly for what had been entrusted to them, because you do not stand idle when something irreplaceable is burning. The faith was delivered once for all. There is no second copy.