Scrolls and Codices: How Did the Early Church Read Its Scriptures?

Question 1112.

Scrolls and codices were the two great book formats of the ancient world, and the choice between them turns out to carry more theological weight than you might expect, because the early church’s adoption of the codex over the scroll was one of the most striking cultural decisions the first Christians ever made.

If you picture a first-century synagogue or a wealthy Roman library, you would see shelf after shelf of rolled scrolls. Step into an early Christian meeting a generation or two later, and you would very likely find something different in their hands: an early form of the book as we still know it today. Understanding how scrolls and codices were actually used tells us something about how seriously those first believers took the task of handling God’s word.

The Scroll: The Traditional Ancient Format

The scroll (Hebrew מְגִלָּה, megillah; Greek βιβλίον, biblion) was the standard literary format across the ancient Near East and the wider Greco-Roman world for well over two thousand years. Sheets of papyrus or parchment were glued or sewn edge to edge to form a long continuous strip, which was then wound around one or two wooden rods.

Writing appeared in narrow columns on one side of the material only, and a reader unrolled the scroll with one hand while rewinding the already-read portion with the other. This made scrolls superb for continuous reading from beginning to end but genuinely cumbersome for finding a specific passage quickly, since there was no way to jump directly to a given point without unrolling everything in between.

The Codex: A Distinctly Christian Preference

The codex, by contrast, consisted of separate sheets folded and stitched together along one edge, exactly like the books we still use today, with writing on both sides of every leaf. Codices existed in the wider Roman world mainly as informal wax or parchment notebooks used for everyday jottings, rarely for serious literature, which was still overwhelmingly published in scroll form.

What is genuinely remarkable is how quickly and thoroughly early Christians adopted the codex for their Scriptures. Of the identifiable early Christian manuscripts surviving from the second and third centuries, the overwhelming majority are codices, while contemporary pagan literary texts from the same period remain overwhelmingly scrolls. This pattern is so consistent that papyrologists treat codex format itself as one marker suggesting Christian origin for an otherwise unidentified fragment.

Why the Early Church Chose the Codex Over the Scroll

Several practical advantages likely drove this preference between scrolls and codices. A codex allowed far more text to be included in a single volume, since both sides of each leaf could be used, whereas a scroll of comparable bulk could hold roughly half as much. This mattered enormously for a young movement that needed to carry multiple Gospels or several of Paul’s letters together as a single collection rather than as separate unwieldy scrolls.

A codex also made it dramatically easier to locate a specific passage for teaching, preaching or debate, since a reader could flip directly to roughly the right section rather than unrolling a long scroll from the beginning. For a movement built around itinerant teaching, apologetic debate with sceptics, and constant cross-referencing of Old Testament prophecy against its fulfilment in Jesus, this practical advantage would have mattered a great deal.

A Possible Theological Dimension

Some scholars have suggested a further motive behind the shift from scrolls and codices as competing formats to a settled Christian preference: that believers wanted to distinguish their sacred writings from the scroll format long associated with the Hebrew Scriptures as read in the synagogue, or wanted to distinguish the fixed, bounded collection of apostolic writings from the more fluid, expandable nature of a scroll. I hold this suggestion loosely, since the evidence is circumstantial, but I do not think it unreasonable that a young movement conscious of both continuity with and distinction from the synagogue might have found the codex a fitting vessel for a new covenant scripture alongside the old.

Whatever the precise motive, the practical result was enormous. The codex format made it possible, for the first time, to bind multiple Gospels together as a single fourfold Gospel collection, or to gather Paul’s letters into one volume a travelling teacher could carry and consult easily. This physical innovation likely assisted the early recognition of a defined New Testament canon, since a codex naturally invites the question of exactly which books belong bound together inside its covers.

How Scrolls and Codices Shaped the Manuscripts We Now Possess

By the time we reach the great uncial codices of the fourth century, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus among them, the codex format had become entirely standard for Christian Scripture, and it remained so for the rest of Christian history right down to the printed and digital Bibles you read today. Every Bible on your shelf, in a real physical sense, descends from that early Christian preference for bound pages over unrolled scrolls.

You can read more about the raw writing materials themselves in my article on what materials biblical manuscripts were written on, and about how the fragile survival of papyrus in particular has shaped the evidence we possess in why so many papyri fragments survive.

The Torah Scroll in the Synagogue Today

It is worth noting that Jewish communities never abandoned the scroll for their own liturgical reading of the Torah, and Torah scrolls remain hand-copied on parchment by trained scribes according to strict rules to this day, unrolled and read aloud in the synagogue exactly as they were in Jesus’ own day. This living continuity between ancient scrolls and codices as parallel traditions, one preserved by the synagogue and one adopted by the church, is a striking picture of how both communities have each guarded God’s word according to their own long-standing customs.

When Jesus stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth and was handed the scroll of Isaiah to read, as recorded in Luke’s Gospel, He was engaging with exactly this scroll tradition, unrolling it to the appointed place before reading aloud a passage that pointed to Himself. It is a small but telling detail that the incarnate Word Himself handled a physical scroll with evident familiarity and reverence, treating the written text as authoritative before He ever opened His mouth to preach.

What This Means for How We Read Scripture Today

There is something worth pausing on here, something easy to overlook because it has become so utterly ordinary to us. The convenience we take for granted every time we flip to a cross-reference or compare one Gospel with another exists because the earliest Christians made a deliberate, almost countercultural choice about how to physically package the words of Jesus and His apostles. They wanted their Scriptures usable, portable, searchable and bindable as a coherent whole, and they built the technology of their day to serve that purpose.

That same instinct, that Scripture should be handled, searched, cross-referenced and lived with rather than simply admired from a shelf, is worth carrying into how we approach our own Bible reading. The 2 Timothy 3:16-17 vision of Scripture as profitable for teaching, reproof, correction and training assumes a book you actually open and use, not one you leave rolled up on a shelf. The account of Jesus reading from the Isaiah scroll in Luke 4:16-21 shows exactly this kind of active, purposeful engagement with the text.

So, now what?

So, having traced this whole story of scrolls and codices together, the next time you pick up your Bible and flip effortlessly from Genesis to Revelation, or hold four Gospels and thirteen of Paul’s letters together in one slim volume, remember that this convenience was not inevitable, and that the story of scrolls and codices lies quietly behind it. It reflects a decision made by ordinary believers in the first two centuries who wanted their sacred writings to be as accessible and as usable as possible, and who reached for the most practical technology available to make that happen. Historians of the ancient book trade still regard the shift from scrolls and codices as separate, competing formats into an almost universal Christian preference for the codex as one of the more remarkable and rapid technological transitions of the ancient world, achieved not by imperial decree but by the grassroots habits of ordinary congregations copying and recopying their Scriptures generation after generation.

Scrolls and codices both served God’s purposes faithfully in their own generation and their own community, one carrying the Torah through the synagogue across millennia with unbroken reverence, the other carrying the fourfold Gospel and the apostolic letters through the growing church across the Roman world and beyond. What matters most is not which format carried the words but whether we, like those early Christians, actually open the book, search its pages and let it shape our lives, day after day, the same way believers have done for two thousand years across every format their Scriptures have ever taken.

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

2 Timothy 3:16