The Codex
The triumph of Christianity within the course of two or three centuries was a remarkable happening. The pendulum swung from the persecuted to the righteous dispenser of mob justice as the underground movement rose to take on the mantle of imperial rule. In the deep folds of that mantle were the tools that allowed the revolution to take place: sacred texts, codified and hammered out in the streets and back rooms of Alexandria, Rome, and any other place touched by the Apostles and disciples in the dissemination of the Word.
From the beginning, the new interest in Christianity and the wave of Christian literature that followed demanded a new form of presentation. The codex, a cheap, compact alternative to scrolls, was exactly what they were looking for, and they took to it with a vengeance. In later years, parchment became fashionable for books, but in the early days when the Bible first emerged, the books of which it was composed, up until the fourth century, were mostly written on papyrus and always in codex form. Papyrus accounts for over 88 percent of all the early codices found to date.5
Several methods were open to make a papyrus codex; the earliest method to be adopted was simply to cut the required number of sheets from a roll, lay them on top of each other, then fold the whole pile. This produced a single, huge “quire” which, if the sheets numbered sixty, for example, would result in a codex consisting of 120 leaves (or if both sides of each “leaf” are counted, 240 pages.) It seems an exceedingly cumbrous and inconvenient format, particularly as the inner margin was often very narrow, but it was quite common in the earlier period. Later methods required that each sheet be folded separately, forming a succession of small quires consisting of four sheets folded to form eight leaves, or sixteen pages. Once sewn and laced together, this method allowed the new codex to open flat—a great improvement. Used today for most modern books, it is still referred to as a “codex binding” and remains a throwback to the days of the pharaoh’s own sacred sedge.
Evolution of the codex and the book (after Johnson, 1973).
At this point in history there may have been many who did not see the codex as anything more than a simple copybook or notebook. To a first century Roman it meant a collection of wooden tablets, each page a wax tablet or pugillare, held together along one edge by cords. This constituted a “block” or “codex” from the Latin caudex, or trunk of a tree or block of wood. In Martial’s day the wooden leaves could be replaced by parchment, some of his books were produced this way, but in scroll-crazy Rome it was still a novelty, a notebook that served as a new tool for the busy man about town. Among people who still valued the papyrus scroll as the definitive text, these first codices were considered simply a handy notebook useful for drafting text for a book in scroll form.
On the other hand, there were those who wanted to convert their scrolls to this new compact form. In that case, they wanted something more than a simple scribe writing out copy in a bound volume. The process involved is well illustrated in a publication by Pope Gregory the Great. In Constantinople, before becoming pope, Gregory preached a series of sermons about the Book of Job, which were taken down in shorthand on wax tablets. Then the text was transferred from tablets to papyrus rolls, thirty-five in all. After Gregory became pope in 590 A.D., the scroll texts were transferred and condensed into six parchment codices. This illustrates the concept described by Richard Clement, dean of libraries at Utah State University, who reminds us that while the parchment codex that evolved was certainly a desirable end-product, the wax tablet, the papyrus scroll, and the papyrus codex all played important and integral parts in its production. Thus the parchment volumes that became the hallmark of the medieval library often represented the end products of an evolution in which papyrus paper played an important role.6
In comparison with the traditional scroll, the new notebook format provided more space and less bulk as well as a more contained format. At the same time, it facilitated the consultation and reading of a specific passage, all of which were significant factors for public readings at important Christian ceremonies and celebrations. People then moved on from the notebook to the more book-like codex, which happened, as Tom Standage noted, when Christians saw a value in having something with a larger capacity. “They were . . . happy to abandon the traditional view that codices were for notes, and that real documents should be written on scrolls. This view is also supported by the fact that Christian texts had distinctive formatting right from the start. Rather than the traditional ‘river of text’ of a Greco-Roman document, which lacked punctuation, paragraph marks, and spaces between words, Christian documents had large letters to indicate the beginning of each paragraph. They also had marks to separate words, along with punctuation, section marks, and page numbers. All this made Christian texts much easier for ordinary people (as opposed to specialist lectors) to read aloud. So the switch from scroll to codex may be just one aspect of a wider abandonment of Greco-Roman literary customs.”
Even after the switch to the codex format, writing on the reverse side was still not easy unless the verso had been polished. Early writers were forced to write against the grain in order to make use of this new resource. This problem was later solved when Egyptian papermakers produced special paper for codices to make writing on both sides easier. Still, the copyist could no longer simply add on to a codex as with a roll, one had to estimate more precisely the length of the finished work. But Christians needed more books for less money and were quite willing to suffer these disadvantages. On the other hand, pagans, those Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans still of non-Christian persuasion, continued to prefer scrolls. In a way the codex helped to distinguish Christians from pagans, a quality that the Christians would probably have encouraged.
Skeat considered the question of economy,7 since the copyist could now write on both sides of a codex page, whereas the roll only allowed the use of the inside (recto), it has been suggested the early Christians converted to the codex form because they got more paper for their money, which perhaps meant they would use every square inch on the page. But when he analyzed the codex pages he found no attempt to economize; some of the Gospel codices could just as well have been written on a roll using the same amount of papyrus. He found one codex that was noted for its lavish use of papyrus, the text occupied only 30 percent of the total page area, leaving 70 percent blank. Thus, he concluded that wherever papyrus may have been regarded as “expensive,” it was certainly not in the field of book production.
Taking on the codex form later proved to be a wise choice because a codex Bible survived abuse, and its contents were better protected. Because it was flat, there were no air spaces to collapse like in a scroll. Consequently, from the fourth to the eighth century, papyrus codices gained such wide acceptance that many religious texts formerly in scroll form were converted to codex form.
During the early confrontations with the Roman Empire, the papyrus codex became a weapon loaded with the new teachings of Christ and the Apostles and more easily concealed in times of threat than a bulky pile of scrolls. It was a handy, compact way of providing answers at impromptu meetings, which were often held under illegal or clandestine circumstances.
In order to further define the early codex format, Gary Frost, conservator emeritus at the University of Iowa’s main library, coined the term, “the African codex model,” which he shrewdly observes “was produced in Africa as an evangelistic medium for service throughout the Roman Empire. That the papyrus codex is better suited for travel and open country reading while the scroll is more easily read in interior library settings may speak volumes in explanation of the emergence of the codex among early Christians.”
Frost also helps us to see how the codex format resembles similar modern technological developments in the book trade and compares the codex to the paperback. It seems that the codex and the modern paperback have no rounding or backing, that is, no shaping of the contour of the back of of the book. The binding has a rectangular shape, so that the resulting book shelves like a videocassette or DVD case. Its all-paper construction, equitable leaf attachment, attachment of covers as if they were outer leaves, and a flush trim of covers and pages to the same size are all perennial features of the paperback and the codex.
Certainly papyrus was up to the task, as Lewis noted, earlier suggestions that papyrus pages in a codex would be more exposed to damage and would tend to ravel at the edges has been shown to be illusory. Everything in a codex depended on the paper used and for this, papyrus turned out to be a good choice since, as Lewis also noted, during the whole of an immense period of time from 3,000 B.C. to 900 A.D., the method of manufacture of papyrus paper changed very little, except for a very gradual decline in quality. All the evidence indicates that in its original state, papyrus was at least as durable as the best hand-made paper of ancient or modern times, if not more so. Documents from Ravenna written in the fifth century A.D. have survived to modern times without any of the benefits of present day conservation techniques.
Papyrus produced by the ancient factories had, and retained for years and years, the following qualities: it was white (or slightly colored), flexible and durable, and its surface was shiny and smooth. It was not for lack of these qualities that papyrus gave way to parchment and paper, but because these other materials were better able, with the passage of time, to meet the needs and conditions of different times and places for carrying the written and eventually the printed word. (Naphtali Lewis, 1974)
According to Roberts and Skeat, papyrus document production reached a turning point in the third century, when the codex achieved parity with the roll. By the fifth century A.D., the roll barely accounted for 10 percent of the market, and in the sixth century it vanished as a vehicle for literature, and with that ended the great Roman love affair with scrolls. Thereafter, the codex form remained unaltered for more than a thousand years, until the twin developments of rag paper and printing transformed it into the book of today.
For businessmen and the recorders of public records, the scroll or individual sheets remained the mainstay, mostly because they were easy to use: you simply started writing on them. With a codex the pages were laid out, written on, then assembled and stitched, procedures that were accepted in the book trade, but not in everyday commerce.8
Until the rise of rag paper in the tenth century there were no cheap alternatives. Parchment and vellum (the finer form of parchment) were expensive, making up 23–38 percent of the cost of a book.9 Later they became the new vehicles, but papyrus continued to be used for books and even had some illustrious fans, including Saint Augustine in the fifth century, who apologized for sending a letter to his wealthy friend, Romanianus, written on vellum instead of the more usual papyrus.
As Frost has pointed out, once early Christians got into the book business, they found that it was a blessing in disguise, because the codex became a new tool of communication as well as a mechanism for forging social solidarity. A codex could enable “distance learning” and thus spread ideas beyond any central control and beyond any parent literature or culture. In sum, papyrus, the great vehicle by which the Egyptians reached the afterlife, the reed that had supported the Roman Empire, and by which the Jewish prophet was saved in a papyrus basket as baby Moses, was now instrumental in the spread of Christianity.