Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Some things bring out the romantic in me.
Like books. Pages pressed tightly between bindings call to me though my shelves are full.
And writing instruments. There is always room in the drawer for one more.
And journals. I keep buying them because, well, they are so sophisticated. And so pretty. And so…so…so…romantic.
And then there are scrolls.
I’ve never had a scroll, and I doubt I ever will. But when I close my eyes and picture study in the Kingdom, everyone has a scroll.
Luke 4:6–20 is one of those passages I experience visually.
I’m right there as Jesus steps to the bimah in the synagogue, takes the scroll of Isaiah from the hand of the attendant, skillfully rolls the parchment until he finds just the right place, then runs the yod along the text as He reads:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,because he has anointed meto proclaim good news to the poor.He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisonersand recovery of sight for the blind,to set the oppressed free,to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18–19, NIV)
Then He rolls up the scroll, gives it back to the attendant, and sits down.
Beautiful.
The Word of God has been preserved in many forms.
First, in the minds of men, then on stone, and then on tablets of clay.
In the Middle East, long before the time of Jesus, the scroll had become the chosen medium for the written word.
Continuous rolls of skins or papyrus sheets were fastened together to form a “roll of the book” often twenty to thirty feet long, with the text written in columns.
One of the Dead Sea scrolls contains the entire book of Isaiah—seventeen sheets of parchment sewn together to make a scroll 24 feet long.
The place where Jesus was reading that day in the synagogue would have been only three feet from the end of the scroll.
Papyrus and Parchment
To the south and the east of Israel, men had developed a different writing medium: a frame with raised rims, made of wood and filled with wax. A wooden stylus was used to carve letters into the wax.
Later, flexible materials—papyrus from Egypt and parchment from the East—were folded and stitched together and protected with a cover. Because the assembly looked like a tree trunk when bound together, it came to be called a caudex—Latin for “trunk of a tree.” And in time, caudex became codex, the word we are familiar with today.
The Advantages of the Codex
The codex was less expensive to produce. While the winding of the scroll allowed only one side to reveal writing, the construction of the codex allowed both sides of the page to be filled.
Double-sided pages reduced the size of the volume, making it lighter and easier to carry and to store.
The codex’s binding added stability, and the cover protected the contents.
The codex was far easier to use. The scroll required unrolling one side while rolling up the other, but the codex allowed the reader to move quickly between locations in the text.
Bookmarks could securely mark a place in the codex, but weren’t likely to stay in place while rolling and unrolling a scroll.
The romantic was giving way to the prudent.
But change is hard.
Ancient tradition, including Jewish reverence for “the scroll of the
Book,” sustained the use of the scroll. In synagogues today, the scroll is still the preferred form of the Torah.
Even classical and pagan works were produced as scrolls for centuries.
But a band of rebels played a significant role in the acceptance of the codex— the followers of Jesus.
Why?
They believed the codex would contribute greatly to the spread of the gospel.
A codex was easy to take on the road, but there was more at stake than economics and ease of use.
There was the matter of discipleship.
The rapid adoption of the codex among Christians reveals how anxious the apostles of Jesus were to get New Testament teaching into the churches, how often their teachers referred to the Scriptures, and how important it was to find references quickly and easily.
The codex encouraged a more comprehensive study of the Scripture.
The use of the codex even lent support to the veracity of New Testament development: the binding of the codex made it difficult to insert an unrecognized work into the collection.
In one codex, Paul’s letters were sewn together with the book of Hebrews, indicating that the letter to the Hebrews, authorship unknown, had gained acceptance along with the works of Paul.
By the third century, codices containing all four gospels were in circulation. Then a volume of Paul’s letters was constructed, and soon the entire New Testament was sewn together.
Photo by James Tarbotton on Unsplash
Now books may be going the way of the scroll as digital formats advance on the printed page.
May the continual development of the Bible, with all its study tools, in whatever format, testify to the growth of the church, not just in numbers, but in a love for God’s Word.
No matter what we hold in our hands, let us be like the Bereans,
“for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” (Acts 17:11, NIV)