Christian Preference for the Codex
There is a strong Christian preference for the codex for their manuscripts throughout the first millennium (Figure 1), whereas roll is the preferred book form of other religions overall, namely, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Jewish and Islamic (Figure 2).
According to stats based on the Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB) [1], the number of non-Christian manuscripts started to decrease significantly around the 3rd century AD, , and codex also became the major book form for those in the 4th and subsequent centuries. Although the time frame corresponds with the rise of Christianity, correlation is not necessarily causation. What caused the decline in classical literature is still an intriguing question.
Canon and Codex
Scholars have made various proposals to explain the Christian preference for the codex. One proposal is that early Christians had “a particularly strong preference for the codex for the texts that they used as Scripture”[2]. Another is that “the codex was the means of gathering together originally separate compositions”, and that Christians adopted it to hold all four gospels or Paul’s letters[3].
Ideally we would like to translate these proposals into quantitative statements which can then be either verified or falsified by analyzing or querying manuscript data. The following two examples should suffice as proof of concept.
First, if the early Christians particularly preferred the codex for their Scriptures, the fraction of scripture in codex form should be much larger than that in roll form. This is corroborated by manuscript data. As seen in Figure 3, in terms of both raw number of scripture manuscripts, and fraction of scripture manuscripts in the same bookform, codex far outweighs roll. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the numbers of scriptural text in codex and roll are both small, but the difference in fraction is very pronounced, and the same trend is maintained throughout the first eight centuries.
Second, if Christians chose codex for its capacity to hold texts separately composed, especially the New Testament Scriptures that were coming into existence, one would expect to find a large fraction of scriptural anthologies in codex, and none in roll, in the early centuries. The manuscript data is ambiguous. On the one hand, there are neither Jewish nor Christian anthologies in roll form [4]. By contrast, multiple scriptural anthologies (e.g., the Gospels and Pauline epistles) in codex form are dated to as early as the 2nd century (Figure 4). On the other hand, the fraction of anthologies is less than one-third of the total number of scripture texts dated to between the 2nd and 5th century. The number of anthologies in roll form is actually larger than that in codex form before the 5th century, although it is less than one-tenth of the total number of manuscripts in roll form.
Notes:
- [^1]. Leuven Database of Ancient Books. Accessed September 26, 2018. https://www.trismegistos.org/ldab/.
- [^2]. Hurtado, Larry W. The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006.
- [^3].”Codex and Canon: A Response to John Meade (Part 2).” Canon Fodder. October 12, 2017. Accessed June 01, 2018. https://www.michaeljkruger.com/codex-and-canon-a-response-to-john-meade-part-2.
- [^4]. The Five Books of Moses (Torah), are always found in the same scroll, suggesting that they were copied and transmitted as one text, like the Minor Prophets, not an anthology; There are a handful of Qumran fragments (LDAB 397678, 398004, 412276 and 495021) which seem to derive from two or more separate works, but their composition is unclear. Interestingly, anthologies of Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who influenced some early Christians, are in codex form and dated to the 3rd century.
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