Larry Hurtado
ONE OF THE MOST puzzling questions in the history of the book is why early Christians so emphatically embraced the codex over the scroll as the preferred format for their books.
According to one major authority on early Christian manuscripts, about 98% of all non-Christian sources dating from before 300 A.D. are recorded on scrolls and about 2% on codices, whereas among identifiably Christian manuscripts of the same period the percentages are almost exactly reversed. In the light of such a clear preference for the codex-format over the scroll among Christians we may very well ask why they made such a choice.
In the light of contemporary evidence, explanations based on the practicality of the form are not entirely convincing. It is unlikely that early Christians were somehow uniquely aware of practical advantages of the codex which remained invisible to a wider Roman culture. While the codex may seem inherently superior to the scroll today, this is probably only because of our relative familiarity with the bound book over the scroll. Ancients, who for centuries had found the scroll perfectly suitable for reading, did not apparently regard the codex as so obviously advantageous.
The preference for the codex appears to have been one of the features that distinguished early Christianity from its cultural environment in general, and from Judaism in particular. Among the Christian writings intentionally copied on fresh scrolls are theological tractates, liturgical texts, and magical writings. Christian copies of Old Testament writings, on the other hand, and copies of those texts that came to form part of the New Testament, are written almost entirely as codices. Exceptions are often written on the reverse side of reused scrolls as informal copies probably intended for personal study. In the light of the fact that contemporary Jewish scholars turned to the scroll for the recording of scripture, early Christians may have used the form to differentiate their copies from the Hebraic tradition.
One reason for this may have been to indicate that a given copy of a scriptural writing came from Christian hands. Theological arguments between Christians and Jews often focused on the text of Old Testament writings, each accusing the other of interfering with the text to remove offending material or insert passages in order to legitimise their respective beliefs.
Before printing presses and publishers' imprints, it is possible that the codex served to indicate to Christian readers that a particular copy had a sound provenance. As a visual and physical marker of Christian texts in the first few centuries it is probably the earliest manifestation of an emergent "material culture" in early Christianity.
The extent to which early Christians were pioneers in their use of the form is indicated by the many experimental ways in which they adapted it. In the pre-300 A.D. period, for instance, they tried everything from single-quire codices of as many as 104 leaves, to multiple-quire codices varying from two-leaf quires on up through larger ones. Had the codex already been developed for such serious use, it is unlikely that such experimentation would have been necessary.
By the fifth century A.D. the codex had come into more general use. We may very well wonder whether its eventual adoption was a consequence of the wider culture coming to recognise the practical advantages of a form already developed by their Christian predecessors. It is just as likely that the coming of the codex is one of several examples of the impact that Christianity was to have on the wider culture of late Roman antiquity.
Larry Hurtado is Professor of New Testament Language, Literature, and Theology and Vice-Dean of Divinity at The University of Edinburgh.
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