Thomas Manson Papers

Date range: 1910-1967

Medium: Archive

Papers of the Rev. Thomas Walter Manson (1893-1958), a distinguished New Testament scholar and minister of the Presbyterian Church of England.

Manson trained for the ministry at Westminster College, Cambridge, and was ordained in 1925. He was appointed Yates Professor of New Testament Greek and Exegesis at Mansfield College, Oxford, in 1932, but resigned after four years to take up the post of Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis in the University of Manchester, a position which he held until his death in 1958.

In 1953 he was elected Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of England, which united with the Congregational Church in 1972 to form the United Reformed Church.

Most of Manson’s writings are in the field of New Testament studies (he served on the New Testament and Apocrypha panels for the New English Bible), but he was also an authority on Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic and Ethiopic texts, and had a particular interest in the Septuagint.

The collection consists mainly of:

memorabilia of Manson’s army service, academic career and foreign visits;
notes and manuscripts of his articles and lectures;
offprints of his articles;
notes for, and texts of, sermons, addresses and broadcasts
correspondence; newspaper cuttings;
2 files relating to his Moderatorship of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of England in 1953.

There is also material relating to the Manson Memorial Lectures, 1962-1967.

Further information:

Published catalogue: Judith B. Shiel, ‘The Papers of T.W. Manson’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, vol. 81, no. 2 (1999), pp. 51–165.
Morna D. Hooker, ‘T.W. Manson and the Twentieth-Century Search for Jesus’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, vol. 86, no. 3 (2004), pp. 77–98.

Location:

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