Before we ask how accurately the Bible was copied, it helps to ask a simpler question: what was it copied onto? The materials ancient scribes used, and the form of their books, explain a great deal about which manuscripts survived, where they were found, and why the Christian scriptures look the way they do. They also explain one of the most surprising facts in the history of books: the early Christians were among the first people to adopt the codex, the ancestor of the modern book.
Papyrus
For most of antiquity the standard writing material of the Mediterranean world was papyrus, made from a tall reed that grew along the Nile. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder describes the process (Natural History 13.68–83). The pith of the stem was cut into thin strips. One layer of strips was laid side by side vertically, a second layer horizontally on top, and the two were pressed and beaten together. The plant’s own sap helped bind them. When dry, the sheet was polished smooth. Sheets were then glued edge to edge to make a roll.
Papyrus was cheap, light and pleasant to write on, and it was made in enormous quantities in Egypt. Its weakness is moisture: in damp climates it rots. That is why almost all surviving ancient papyri come from Egypt, where the dry sand preserved them. From the 1890s, the British scholars Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt excavated the ancient rubbish heaps of Oxyrhynchus, a town in Middle Egypt, and recovered hundreds of thousands of papyrus fragments: tax receipts, letters, contracts, classical literature, and early Christian texts. More than fifty of the papyrus manuscripts of the New Testament come from Oxyrhynchus alone.
The New Testament itself mentions writing materials. The writer of 2 John says he would rather not write “with paper and ink” (2 John 12), using the word for a papyrus sheet. And in 2 Timothy 4:13, Paul asks Timothy to bring “the books, especially the parchments.”
Parchment
Parchment is animal skin, usually of sheep, goats or calves, prepared for writing. The skin is soaked in lime, scraped clean of hair and flesh, stretched on a frame and dried under tension, then smoothed. The finest kind, from young calves, is called vellum. Pliny passes on a story that parchment was invented at Pergamum in Asia Minor when the Egyptians stopped exporting papyrus (Natural History 13.70); the English word “parchment” comes from the name of that city. The story is a legend, since leather had been used for writing long before, but Pergamum may well have improved the process.
Parchment is much stronger than papyrus and lasts far longer, even in a damp climate. It can be written on both sides, and a mistake can be scraped off and corrected. Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls are on parchment or leather, and Jewish law came to require it for Torah scrolls. From the fourth century onwards, the great manuscripts of the Bible were written on parchment: Codex Sinaiticus is thought to have used the skins of several hundred animals.
Parchment could also be reused. A scribe might scrape or wash off an old text and write a new one over it. Such a manuscript is called a palimpsest. One of the most important manuscripts of the Greek Bible, Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus from the fifth century, was erased in the twelfth century and overwritten with sermons by Ephrem the Syrian. The faint biblical text underneath was deciphered by Constantin von Tischendorf in the 1840s, and modern imaging is still recovering more from palimpsests today.
The scroll
For most of antiquity, a “book” meant a scroll: a long roll of papyrus or parchment, written in columns, which the reader unrolled with one hand and rolled up with the other. Scrolls have practical limits. A long book like Luke or Acts filled a whole roll of around ten metres. Finding a particular passage meant winding through the roll. And a scroll was normally written on one side only.
Jewish scripture was, and in the synagogue still is, written on scrolls. When Jesus reads in the synagogue at Nazareth, he is handed “the book of the prophet Isaiah,” unrolls it to the place, reads, and rolls it up again (Luke 4:17–20).
The codex
The codex is a stack of sheets folded and fastened together at one edge: a book with pages. Its ancestor was the set of wax tablets, wooden boards coated with wax and tied together, that Romans used for notes and school exercises. By the first century CE, Romans also used small notebooks of parchment. The poet Martial, around 85 CE, recommends pocket parchment editions of authors such as Homer and Virgil for travellers (Epigrams 14.184–192), which shows that the codex was known as a format for literature but still a novelty.
Through the first three centuries CE, the scroll remained the normal form for literature among Greeks and Romans. The codex replaced it only gradually, and became dominant only in the fourth century.
The Christian preference
Christians were different. Colin Roberts and T. C. Skeat, in their classic study The Birth of the Codex, gathered the evidence from the papyri. Among surviving Greek literary texts from the second century, only a small percentage are codices. But among Christian manuscripts of the scriptures from the same period, almost all are codices. Larry Hurtado, revisiting the evidence in The Earliest Christian Artifacts, confirmed the pattern: early Christians overwhelmingly preferred the codex for the books they regarded as scripture, even when they used scrolls for other texts.
Why? Scholars have offered several explanations, none of them certain.
- Practicality. A codex is more compact, uses both sides of the writing surface, and makes it easier to find a passage. These advantages are real, but they apply equally to non-Christians, who were much slower to adopt it.
- Collections. A codex can hold much more than a scroll. Harry Gamble argues that an early collection of Paul’s letters, too long for one roll, may have been published as a codex and set the pattern. Others point to the fourfold Gospel collection.
- Distinctiveness. A codex looked different from both the Jewish Torah scroll and the pagan literary roll. It may have marked the Christian scriptures as something new.
- Everyday use. Codices were associated with practical, working texts rather than prestige books. Christian scriptures were books to be read in worship, studied, carried by travelling teachers and consulted.
Whatever the reason, the choice mattered. The codex made it possible to bind the four Gospels together, or all of Paul’s letters, or eventually the whole Bible, in one volume. Single-volume Bibles such as Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus (see Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus) would have been impossible as scrolls. In that sense, the format in which we read the Bible today, as one book with pages, began with the choices of the first Christian copyists.
What survived, and where
The materials also explain the shape of the evidence.
- The early papyri of the New Testament, from the second to the fourth centuries, survive almost entirely from Egypt, because papyrus lasts only in dry conditions. This means our earliest evidence is geographically concentrated, a limitation scholars are well aware of.
- The Dead Sea Scrolls survived because they were placed in dry caves in one of the driest places on earth.
- The great parchment codices from the fourth century onwards survived in monasteries and libraries, where they were cared for over many centuries.
- Scrolls and codices that wore out were usually discarded or, in Jewish practice, placed in a genizah. Very many manuscripts that were used, loved and copied simply did not survive.
So the manuscripts we have are a sample, not the whole picture. But it is a large and varied sample, and the next articles look at what it contains.
Sources
- Bagnall, Roger S. Early Christian Books in Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
- Gamble, Harry Y. Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
- Hurtado, Larry W. The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006.
- Martial. Epigrams 14.184–192.
- Parker, D. C. Codex Sinaiticus: The Story of the World’s Oldest Bible. London: British Library; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2010.
- Pliny the Elder. Natural History 13.68–83.
- Roberts, Colin H., and T. C. Skeat. The Birth of the Codex. London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1983.
- Turner, Eric G. The Typology of the Early Codex. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977.
- Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article gives its own literal rendering.