First page of the Martyrology of Usuard, compiled in the late first century
A martyrology is a catalog or list of martyrs and other saints arranged in the calendar order of their feasts. Usuard was a monk of the Benedictine Abbey.
from the Gallica Digital Library, public domain
What image comes to mind when I say “book”?
If you’re like most people, you think of separate pages bound together, with a cover. Known as the “codex,” this has been the most common form of a book for the past two millennia.
The codex is a book constructed of a number of sheets of paper, vellum, papyrus, or similar materials. The term now refers to only handwritten manuscripts. It appears to have first been used by the Romans, perhaps originating with Julius Caesar himself while traveling, who found it useful to fold his scrolls concertina-style for quicker reference. But evidence shows that while scrolls remained popular among the Jews and Romans, the early Christians manuscripts preferred codices (plural of codex) to the then-established bookrolls.
scroll ©Pete Unseth
One theory as to why is the codex allowed Christians to find what they sought more easily in a bound tome than in a scroll, which had to be unrolled from one side to the other every time someone wanted to look up a passage, and then rolled up again. The compact size allowed for all four gospels or all Pauline epistles or even the entire New Testament to be collected in one tome.
Perhaps most importantly, the codex used both sides of the page—whether of papyrus, which was cheaper but wore out quicker; or parchment and vellum, both made from processed animal hides.
The Nag Hammadi texts were contained in 13 leather-bound volumes discovered by Egyptian farmers in 1945. Dated papyrus scraps used to strengthen the bindings of the books helped date the volumes to the mid-fourth century A.D.
Photo: Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont, CA.
Paul was a leatherworker. He would have had the tools and skills necessary to create codices. It’s reasonable to believe that he took advantage of his knowledge to bind his copies of the Scriptures together in a form that would be easy to carry and protected from harm. He may have been among those who popularized the form among believers.
Whatever the reasons, the codex gradually became as popular as the scroll around 300 AD and completely replaced it by the 6th century. Did the fact that the world was by then largely Christian lead to this shift?
Who knows?