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Another man comes in with a very old hand-written book. Rick thinks it dates back to the 1500s or 1600s. Neither Rick nor the owner can figure out what language it was written in. Rick explains that back in the 1500s there weren't many printing presses and in Europe literacy was very low.

The binding of the book is moldy and there's no cover page at the start of the book which leads Rick to believe that there are missing pages as well.

The owner wants $500 but Rick wants to show it to an expert. The seller is in a rush and doesn't want to wait for an expert to examine the book so he brings his selling price down to $300 but Rick won't buy it for anything more than $250. The seller agrees to the $250.

Rick then takes the book to his friend Rebecca's shop; she's an expert in books. Rebecca takes a look at the book and tells Rick that the spacing in between the words are evenly spaced which makes her believe that the book was hand written but this book is a printed version of the original book. She also has no idea what language it's written in and wants to take pictures of the book and send them to her friend back east who might have more answers.

Some days later Rebecca has heard from her friend about the book. The language it's written in is Russian Church Slavonic and it's from the early 1800s. The book has the followings of Saint John. Both Rebecca and Rick wonder about the monk who had to sit down and spend four months of his life getting hand cramps and going blind writing it. This book is worth $1,500 which is far more than the $250 that Rick spent for it.

That is St. John Chrysostom

I love Pawn Stars. I missed that episode, however. Boy, everything comes through that place. I wouldn't ever have expected to hear the name "St. John Chrysostom" uttered on that show, though. At least they got Rick to look at it and not Chumley!

I flipped on Pawn Stars half way through that segment, and almost fell over hearing the words "Byzantine, St. John Chrysostom, Russian Orthodox, Church Slavonic, Divine Liturgy" etc, actually spoken on a reality show.

Beautiful thing!

Having never seen the show (nor even heard of it), I was reading away, absolutely clueless as to what my sister and friend, Rose, was going on about. Very interesting.

Many years,

Neil

It was a very interesting show and did nothing to build Rick's "street cred" with any Orthodox/Catholic slavs!

I'll give Rick credit, though. He once refused to buy a relic of a saint after a lady told him what canon law said.