How were scrolls vs codices used?
Question 1112
If you could visit a first-century synagogue or a wealthy Roman’s library, you would see something quite different from our modern books. Scrolls dominated the ancient world, rolled up and stored in jars or on shelves. Yet remarkably, Christians adopted a different format almost from the beginning: the codex, the ancestor of our modern book. Understanding how these two formats worked helps us appreciate both the physical nature of Scripture and the revolutionary choice the early church made.
The Scroll: The Traditional Format
The scroll (Hebrew: מְגִלָּה, megillah; Greek: βιβλίον, biblion) was the standard format for literary works throughout the ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world. A scroll consisted of sheets of papyrus or parchment glued or sewn together to form a long strip, which was then rolled around one or two wooden rods.
Writing appeared on one side only (the inside of the roll), arranged in columns. To read a scroll, one unrolled it with the right hand while rolling up the read portion with the left. This made finding specific passages cumbersome. There was no way to “flip to” a particular chapter. One had to unroll the entire scroll to find a passage near the end.
Practical considerations limited scroll length. Most literary scrolls were between 20 and 35 feet long. This explains why the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, each filling about one scroll, were separated even though Luke clearly intended them as a continuous narrative (Luke 1:1-4; Acts 1:1). The Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each fit comfortably on a single scroll, as did most of Paul’s letters.
When Jesus stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth, He was handed a scroll of Isaiah. Luke records that He “unrolled the scroll” (ἀναπτύξας, anaptuxas) to find the passage, read from it, then “rolled up the scroll” (πτύξας τὸ βιβλίον, ptuxas to biblion) and returned it to the attendant (Luke 4:17-20). This was the normal way Scripture was accessed in Jewish worship.
The Codex: A Christian Innovation
The codex (Latin: caudex, meaning “tree trunk” or “block of wood”) was essentially a stack of pages bound together on one side, what we today would simply call a book. While the Romans used wax tablets bound together for notes and informal writing, the codex format was rarely used for literary works in the first century.
Yet Christians embraced the codex almost immediately. The evidence is striking. When we examine the earliest Christian manuscripts, the preference for the codex is overwhelming. Of the New Testament papyri dating to the 2nd and 3rd centuries, virtually all are codices. By contrast, pagan literary works from the same period remained predominantly scrolls. Colin Roberts and T.C. Skeat, in their landmark study, demonstrated that Christians adopted the codex format with remarkable consistency from the very earliest period.
Why did Christians prefer the codex? Several factors likely contributed:
Practicality for reference: The codex allowed readers to find passages quickly. One could turn directly to a particular page rather than unrolling through an entire scroll. For a community that studied Scripture, debated interpretations, and needed to locate proof texts, this was enormously helpful.
Economy: Because both sides of each page could be used, a codex required significantly less material than a scroll for the same amount of text. This made Scripture more affordable and accessible.
Portability: A codex was easier to carry and store than multiple scrolls. Early Christians, facing the possibility of persecution and the need to travel, valued the compact format.
Capacity: A codex could contain far more text than a single scroll. This made it possible, for the first time, to bind multiple books together. The four Gospels, or Paul’s collected letters, could be gathered in a single volume. Eventually, the entire Bible could be contained in one codex, as we see in the great 4th-century manuscripts like Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus.
Distinctiveness: Some scholars suggest that the codex format distinguished Christian writings from both Jewish scrolls and pagan literature. It marked Christian books as something new and different.
The Transition in Practice
The Jewish community continued to use scrolls for synagogue worship, and the Torah scroll remains central to Jewish liturgy to this day. The Hebrew Scriptures were considered too sacred to copy in any other format. This created an interesting dynamic: Christians reading the Old Testament in Greek (the Septuagint) used codices, while Jews reading the same texts in Hebrew used scrolls.
The codex gradually conquered the broader literary world as well. By the 4th century, it had largely replaced the scroll for all purposes. But Christians led the way, adopting the new technology centuries before it became standard elsewhere. The format we take for granted, pages bound together that we can flip through at will, owes its triumph in no small part to the early church’s practical and innovative approach to preserving and studying Scripture.
Conclusion
The shift from scroll to codex was more than a technological change. It shaped how Christians read, studied, and transmitted Scripture. The ability to gather multiple books in a single volume encouraged the church to think about the canon as a unified whole. The ease of cross-referencing facilitated the Scripture-interprets-Scripture approach that remains foundational to sound hermeneutics. In God’s providence, even the physical format of the Bible served His purposes for His people.
“And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” Luke 24:27
Bibliography
- 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.
- Kenyon, Frederic G. Books and Readers in Ancient Greece and Rome. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951.
- Metzger, Bruce M. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
- Roberts, Colin H. and T.C. Skeat. The Birth of the Codex. London: Oxford University Press, 1983.
- Skeat, T.C. “The Origin of the Christian Codex.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 102 (1994): 263-268.
- Turner, Eric G. The Typology of the Early Codex. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977.
