by Timothy Beal
Why this Christian propensity for the codex? Some reasons were probably practical. Codices were somewhat cheaper to produce, since they allowed for text to be written on both sides of each sheet. Still, other inefficiencies in early Christian manuscript production suggest that such savings were not the primary motivation. More importantly, a single codex could hold more writing than a reasonably sized scroll. One of the oldest Christian codices, dating to around 200 CE, includes all of Paul’s letters in its 208 pages. A scroll with all of Paul’s letters would have been absurdly long and unwieldy.
Perhaps the predominance of the codex in early Christian scriptural culture is rooted in the very origins and early spread of the movement itself. It has been suggested that Paul and his disciples used small codices in order to publish and disseminate his letters in highly portable and handy form (a single sheet folded over two or four times to make eight or sixteen pages). It has also been hypothesized that Jesus’s disciples, as well as the followers of other rabbis during his time, used simple codices like handy notebooks in order to write down the sayings of their teacher.
Whatever led to the unique rise of the codex among early Christians, the new medium was profoundly influential on the scriptural culture that developed around and by means of it. Above all, it facilitated new practices of reading. A scroll prescribes a linear reading experience. You start in one place and continue to scroll along in one direction. You don’t easily jump back and forth in the text. Cross-referencing is not practical. Nor is reading short passages from different parts of the text (testimonia may have originally emerged as a remedy to this problem). Codices, by contrast, readily accommodate random access. A reader can easily jump backward or forward in the text, or between two different texts in the same codex, without losing her place. She can even bookmark related passages to read together, one after another. In this way, the codex encourages readers and hearers to discover intertextual connections. This particular feature of the codex probably appealed especially to early Christian communities interested in relating different passages to one another by means of cross-referencing.
Still, early Christian codices were not like modern books, especially in their storage capacities. The longest were not more than two hundred pages, and most were considerably smaller than that. Given that they were intended for public reading, moreover, their handwritten scripts were quite large. The technology of the codex did not reach the point of being able to hold anything close to an entire canon of Jewish and Christian Scriptures until the fourth century. Nor was there any such thing as a closed canon of those Scriptures until that time. The closing of the canon and the binding of it into a single big book seems to have gone hand in hand.
It is no coincidence that this establishment of the Bible as a single closed canon of Scriptures for all Roman Christians, and the concomitant establishment of a narrower Christian orthodoxy, took place in the century after Constantine’s conversion, as Christianity ascended to state power. As the imperial religion, its increasingly hierarchical structures not only enabled but encouraged greater regulation and uniformity.
The main point I want to make here is that neither Jesus nor his followers nor Paul nor any of the authors of any of the texts now in the New Testament, let alone any Christians who lived during the first three hundred years of Christianity, could possibly have imagined the Bible, a single book containing a closed canon of Jewish and Christian Scriptures. It was both physically and socially impossible. Not only were there just too many different varieties of Christianity with too many different important writings with too many variants in too many different languages; there was simply no medium to bear anything close to that large of a library. It took the twin emergences of a top-down imperial Christianity and a big enough book to make the Bible possible.
Scattered Throughout the Whole World
By the fourth century, the technology of the codex had reached the point that it was possible, if still not very practical, to hold a body of literature as large as the Christian canon of Scriptures in a single volume. What would such a book have looked like? The earliest known Christian Bible, Codex Sinaiticus, dates to the mid-300s. Reconstructed from loose pages found in a waste bin in the library of Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai in 1844, it would have been about twenty inches high and seventeen inches wide and would have contained about 700 pages of parchment. That’s a lot of animal hide. Analysis of the handwriting indicates that three or four different scribes wrote the text. Needless to say, not only was this Bible book large and cumbersome; it was very expensive to produce. Even this complete Bible book, moreover, is not identical in contents to the canon as we now have it: its Old Testament includes some Apocryphal Jewish texts but is missing others that eventually were included, and its collection of Christian Scriptures includes two texts that eventually did not make the canonical cut: the Letter to Barnabas and an abbreviated version of an early Christian text known as the Shepherd of Hermas.
The invention of the big codex did not lead to the immediate publication of the Christian Bible as a big book. In fact, most Bible manuscripts dating to the fourth and fifth centuries were not whole Bibles but collections of certain biblical texts—the Psalms, for example, or the four Gospels. As is well known thanks to novelist Dan Brown, Constantine commissioned Eusebius in 322 to produce fifty copies of the “sacred Scriptures . . . written on prepared parchment in a legible manner, and in a convenient, portable form, by professional transcribers thoroughly practiced in their art.” None of those copies survive, but it is likely that they were Gospel Books, not whole Bibles or even whole New Testaments. It would have been impossible at that time to produce a conveniently portable codex of anything more. Moreover, as Eusebius himself made clear in his catalogue of “undisputed,” “disputed,” and “heretical” Christian writings (discussed earlier), the canon of the New Testament was not yet fixed.
Nor did the media invention of the big book and the concomitant rise of Christianity to imperial power mean that biblical texts were suddenly standardized and made uniform from one copy to the next. Biblical manuscripts of the late fourth century were widely and significantly different from one another. It was this fact that led Pope Damasus, who avidly sought to make Rome the center of Christendom, to commission Jerome, at that time an up-and-coming theologian and grammarian, now remembered as the patron saint of Bible translators and librarians, to study all the various versions of Scriptures and establish a single authoritative Latin edition from them. In his preface to his edition of the Gospels, Jerome clearly recognized the challenge.
You ask me to . . . sit in judgment on the copies of the Scriptures which are now scattered throughout the whole world . . . The labour is one of love, but at the same time both perilous and presumptuous; for in judging others I must be content to be judged by all; and how can I dare to change the language of the world in its hoary old age, and carry it back to the early days of its infancy?
The task was especially daunting given that there were so many significantly different Old Latin translations being used in Rome. So many, in fact, that Jerome complained, “There are almost as many forms of texts as there are copies!”
By the time of his death in 420, Jerome (probably working with a team of translators and scribes) had produced an entire Bible written in the Latin of his time. His primary sources were the Greek and Hebrew texts that he had been able to collect, but he also consulted Old Latin versions. The result was the basis of what eventually became the standard Vulgate (“common” or “popular”) Bible for all of Western Christendom.
Still, it would be wrong to suppose that, as soon as Jerome finished his edition, Western Christianity had finally found its single, established, authoritative version of the Bible (even if it wasn’t original but based on comparing various earlier versions). Not at all. For one, whole Bibles, including all of the Old and New Testament texts in a single bound volume, were still relatively rare. The oldest surviving whole Vulgate Bible, known as the Co
dex Amiatinus, dates to the beginning of the eighth century. The sheer size of this volume gives some clue as to why, practically speaking, such whole Bibles were rare: it is twenty inches high, a little over thirteen inches wide, seven inches thick, has over two thousand pages, and weighs about seventy-five pounds.
For more than a century after Jerome, the Old Latin codices of Christian Scripture, which he had complained were unreliable, remained dominant. Only very slowly, by around the seventh or eighth century, did his Vulgate gain clear preeminence. Evidence for this gradual takeover by the Vulgate is found in surviving manuscripts. There are about 370 biblical manuscripts or fragments in Latin that date to earlier than 800. Only about a third of those dating to the fifth century are from the Vulgate. By the sixth century, however, there are twice as many Vulgate manuscripts as Old Latin ones. By the eighth century, there are twelve times as many.
Jerome’s Vulgate itself was never fixed and changeless. At some point after his death, several additions were made to it. Passages from his other writings were copied into it as introductory prologues to various books. Even more significantly, Jerome’s canon was altered. He had excluded Apocryphal books such as Baruch and Tobit, because, although they appeared in the Greek manuscripts of the Septuagint (used by Greek-literate Jews as well as Christians), they did not appear in his Hebrew manuscripts, which he believed were more original. Yet all the Vulgate Bibles that have survived include them. Jerome had not translated them, and so these Apocryphal parts of the Vulgate Bible must have come from the Old Latin versions. Ironic, since these unreliable versions were the very problem that the Vulgate was intended to remedy.
Beyond these additions to Jerome’s authorized Vulgate Bible, there are many variants among the early copies of the Vulgate that have survived. Some are minor, but others are quite significant. Some of the oldest known manuscripts of this Bible include the letter to the Laodiceans, an epistle that must have been regarded as canonical by some authorities and not by others during the early centuries of Roman Christianity. Another very early Vulgate Bible has the four Gospels edited together into a single, harmonized narrative. Even with the Vulgate, then, there was a significant degree of instability. It would be more accurate to talk about the Vulgates than the Vulgate.
After Gutenberg
We might have expected the invention of the printing press and the rise of print culture, with the Bible at its center, to give the Bible the fixity and permanence that had been sought since Jerome a thousand years earlier. Mechanical printing, after all, made it possible to produce thousands of copies of one book, each identical to the next. But for that fixity to be achieved, there would need to have been a single, original book to mass-produce. When it came to Christian Scriptures, there was no such thing.
Gutenberg’s first Bible, published in 1456 with a print run of about 185, was a Vulgate Bible based on one of several widely available manuscript versions. This “Gutenberg Bible” has become an icon of the print culture that he inaugurated. As printing businesses began popping up throughout Europe, however, it quickly became clear that there were many more sales to be made by publishing translations of the Bible into common-day languages. Within two decades of Gutenberg’s first Bible, there were nine German Bibles in print. By the mid-sixteenth century, as Protestantism gained momentum, many different Bibles would appear in many other modern languages as well, and these would be made from different “original” manuscripts in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
Indeed, the Protestant Reformation was as much a media revolution as it was a theological revolution. It was in many respects a biblical-literacy movement, aimed at making the Bible as readily available and accessible as possible in order to make real the ideal of a “priesthood of all believers.” At the same time, print culture was quickly transforming Bibles and other books from collectable manuscripts into tradable commodities. They were no longer held strictly within the domain of wealthy and powerful patrons who commissioned expensive hand copies of whole Vulgate Bibles, Gospel Books, and Psalmodies for churches, monasteries, and the homes of the literate elites. They were mass-produced consumer items. So emerged the business, both theological and capitalist, of publishing Bibles for the masses.
Not only did the print revolution enable the proliferation of many new Bible translations; it also helped foster a more acute awareness of the problems of biblical translation, since it soon became clear that there was no single original from which to translate. Especially influential in this regard was the great Catholic theologian and linguist, Erasmus. In 1516 he published Novum Instrumentum, which was the first print edition of the New Testament in Greek. The book had two columns per page: the beautifully designed Greek text on the inside column and Erasmus’s Latin translation of that text on the outside column. His translation frequently diverged significantly from the Vulgate, thus implicitly challenging its authority and reliability. That challenge was softened by the book’s original title: Novum Instrumentum, “new instrument,” indicating that the text was meant to be a research tool for scholars rather than a rival edition of the New Testament. Two years later, however, he republished it under the title Novum Testamentum. The clear message was that the Vulgate was not the definitive embodiment of Christian Scriptures, but one among other fallible witnesses to them.
Then, in 1522, a team of Spanish scholars directed and funded by Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros of Spain completed the six-volume, polyglot (multilingual) edition of the Bible known as the Complutensian Polyglot Bible (after its city of publication, Complutum, the Latin name of Alcalá de Henares, Spain). It remains as one of the towering monuments to print culture. I have had the rare opportunity to examine an original copy for myself, and I can attest: not only is it one of the grandest and most ambitious achievements of sixteenth-century biblical scholarship; it is also a work of great bookish beauty. Its Old Testament, published in four volumes, incorporates seven different columns of text written in four different languages using five different type fonts. On the inside top left is the Greek Septuagint with an interlinear, word-by-word Latin translation. Next to that is the Latin Vulgate version of the Old Testament. Next to that is the Hebrew. And next to that, on the far right, is a narrow column of verbal roots corresponding to the Hebrew text. On the bottom left is an Aramaic paraphrase of the Torah, known as Targum Onkelos. Next to that is its Latin translation. And on the far right is a narrow column of Aramaic roots from the Targum. The New Testament, published as the fifth volume, is simpler but no less visually striking. It has parallel columns of Greek and Latin Vulgate, with the words in each version keyed to the other for easier comparison and cross-referencing. At the end of the volume is a Greek dictionary. The sixth volume includes a Hebrew and Aramaic dictionary and grammar guide for use with the Old Testament.
First page of the Gospel of Luke in Erasmus’s Novum Testamentum (1535 edition). The left column is the Greek text, and the right column is Erasmus’s own translation (secun-dum, “second”) into Latin, implicitly challenging the authority of the Latin Vulgate version.
Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University
The sizes and appearances of the different fonts were designed to signal the status of each text relative to the others. Because Greek was the original language of the writings of the New Testament, for example, the Greek font for that text is larger, rounder, and more ornate than the one used for the Greek text of the Septuagint, since it is a translation. Likewise, the Latin font of the interlinear translation of the Septuagint (a translation of a translation) is smaller and plainer than that of the Vulgate translation. And the Hebrew font of the Old Testament is larger than that of the Aramaic paraphrase of the Targum.
Several other polyglot Bibles, produced by teams of scholars in other parts of Europe, followed over the next century and a half. The largest, known as the Paris Polyglot (completed in 1645), boasted ten volumes and included seven different versions of biblical literature (or parts
of it) in six different languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Old Syriac, and Arabic. The most highly regarded and influential, however, was the six-volume London Polyglot (1657), also known as Walton’s Polyglot after its lead scholar, Brian Walton. Compiled, edited, and annotated by an all-star team of biblical scholars and linguists, its Old Testament includes nine different versions: the Hebrew, the Greek Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, the Aramaic Targum, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Old Syriac version known as the Peshita, an Arabic version, and an Ethiopic version of the Psalms and Song of Songs, as well as two other versions of the Targum and a Persian translation. Its New Testament includes the Greek and Latin Vulgate versions along with many variants found in other ancient Greek, Syriac, Latin, Ethiopic, and Arabic manuscripts, along with a Persian version of the four Gospels.
On one of my visits to the archives of the American Bible Society in New York, I was allowed to browse the early rare manuscripts of its Scripture Collection. The curator and resident scholar is Dr. Liana Lupas, a Romanian American woman who is as warm and collegial as she is formal and erudite. The collection is her domain, and she knows it like the back of her hand. We started with the obvious: early English Bibles. She smiled slightly and pulled down a few extremely rare volumes from a nearby shelf. No doubt she expected me to start with those. But when I asked about the early polyglots, her face lit up. She quickly escorted me to the dimly lit back of the room. They were all there. She pulled out first editions of Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum, the Complutensian Polyglot, and the London Polyglot from the shelves and laid them open on the floor for me to explore. Kneeling before them, she gave me extensive guided tours of each volume, revealing as much about their beauty and craft as their literary contents. There are no better illustrations of the term “magnum opus.” These were mammoth scholarly projects that demanded aesthetic as well as intellectual passion and rigor. They were all-encompassing works, demanding one’s whole heart, mind, and strength.
