TODAY, if you scroll through amazon.com seeking to buy [a Bible], you will be presented with an overwhelming range of choices. There are different translations, layouts, print sizes, and cover colours. You will find illustrated versions, electronic versions for different handheld devices, and Bibles with a seemingly endless variety of accompanying commentaries.
Such options might seem like a modern expression of consumerism that emphasises choice and convenience, and that is true, but the diversity of biblical options is as old as the Bible itself. For 2000 years, Christians have been making choices about the forms of their Bible, and there has never been a single one for the whole of the faith.
The word “Bible”, derived from the Greek biblia, means “books”, plural. The individual books that make up the Old and New Testaments were already circulating among communities from Syria to North Africa in the second century and had been given the special status of scripture, a place of honour that set them apart from other ancient texts, however instructive. But the Bible has remained plural; it was and is a book of books. We can think of it as a library of the sacred.
Even today, Catholic and Protestant Bibles contain different numbers of books, as do the Orthodox Bibles, with between 66 and 73 books. At the far end of the spectrum is the Bible of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, with between 81 and 84 books, a good number of which other Churches have rejected or lost.
For early Christians, the canon was not simply a list of acceptable books. It was a way of reading, praying, and thinking about what a book was. Each biblical book was not just a collection of words, but a living body of the written and spoken, a shared set of beliefs about Jesus Christ expressed in communal living and prayer. The books were alive. “Canon” is a dry word, but it could take many forms. The first martyrs were living expressions of the Gospels. They were themselves holy books. The canon embodied the written and oral. It was the whole of life.
For all the necessary talk of bishops and theologians, the early story of the Bible is not primarily about which books were deemed scripture and which were excluded by the sole discretion of religious authorities. The revolution of the Bible lay in Christians’ distinctive attitude toward their sacred writings. Words are powerful, particularly holy ones, and for Christians this meant both spoken and written.
The Gospels and the writings of the New Testament authors circulated among communities orally and as leaves. In comparison to the Jewish tradition, early Christians did not have such a reverential attitude toward the written words of scripture. The writings of the New Testament were not the preserve of learned scholars, but for the people. Written in common language, they were neither elegant nor refined, reflecting both their authors and their intended audience.
The Christian revolution was that scripture was meant for all, whether literate or not. You did not have to be able to read or study them. They could be transmitted orally in daily conversation, prayer, and worship. They were not intended for the desk, but for caring for thy neighbour.
THE Bible grew organically into canon, fostered by the worship, reading, and devotional practices across Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean, and Africa. Canon formation was a social act by which communities granted certain texts a status of authority for a wide range of reasons, although most prominently out of the belief that those works came from the earliest writers of the faith and carried the true teachings of Christ. They were sanctioned to be read in worship. In other words, the Bible was not created by fiat. Instead, it took shape in diverse communities in which certain texts gradually emerged as its essence, even if there was not (and would never be) full agreement about that essence.
The rich evidence from the Egyptian community at Oxyrhynchus, where papyri were found in a rubbish dump, suggests that biblical texts were frequently copied and widely owned. It is difficult to judge the quality of such early biblical manuscripts, some of which have survived precisely because they were discarded with the refuse. But it seems likely that literate Christians read extensively, combining scriptures with apocryphal texts and pagan literature. Christians did not live in isolation from the communities around them.
Reading in the early Christian world would have been a social event; biblical texts were shared aloud and discussed in groups of men and women. Pieces of papyrus with Christian writings were owned by rich and poor, men and women, free and enslaved. Indeed, women seem to have been prominent as owners of written texts.
Those who possessed such texts incurred grave risks. During periods of persecution, churches were ransacked, and texts confiscated or burned. Those who guarded them faced martyrdom, and fear drove some Christians to collaborate with their enemies. During the Diocletian persecution of the early fourth century, for instance, church leaders who willingly handed over copies of scriptures to the Romans were denounced by other Christians as traditores, from which we get our word “tradition” (literally, that which is handed down from generation to generation), as well as “traitor”.
Although many of the co-operators were ultimately forgiven, the Donatists of North Africa — often maligned as the radical opponents of Augustine — regarded their mendacity in surrendering the holy texts as permanently invalidating their priestly functions.
This exaltation of the Bible’s constancy was at odds with practical realities as the scriptures spread geographically and were passed down through the generations. Even the best scribe transcribing the text on to papyrus or parchment could make errors, unwittingly creating yet another version. The result was predictable. Each copy of an Old or New Testament text was unique.
And then there were the people, real or imagined, who wilfully corrupted God’s word for their own purposes. Christians shared with non-Christian writers of antiquity a fear that their books would circulate in pirated or adulterated forms.
FROM the second century, the Bible as a book, or rather codex, was a product of evolving technologies and new knowledge. The codex was not invented by Christians, but emerged from their interaction with Roman society, where bound volumes or notebooks were widely known. What was innovative, however, was the zeal of Christians to make the book form their preferred way of gathering their sacred texts.
It enabled a new way of reading, distinctive from scrolls, that allowed persons to move easily from one part of the Bible to another and back again. The codex became a means by which Christianity distinguished itself from Judaism and Roman culture.
By the fourth century, the codex had replaced scrolls as the standard form of Christian scriptures. Today, we are so familiar with books that the revolutionary nature of the change is not immediately obvious.
The codex, like language, embodied the distinctive attitude of Christians toward their sacred writings. Instead of consisting of separate scrolls, the codex brought together the books of scripture into one collection, emphasising that the centre of the story is Jesus Christ. That story was highly transportable. Christ had commanded his followers to go into the world, and they could now do so with a book that could be carried in a pocket or a bag. Early Christians placed their faith in a new technology that enabled them to perform the fundamental obligation. With roughly bound texts, they missionised the world.
A codex might be composed of papyrus, made from plants, or parchment, made from the flayed skins of animals. Vellum, a form of parchment, generally came from calves and lambs, and was regarded as higher quality. Although papyrus continued to be used in North Africa, by the third century the breakdown of trade networks had limited the amounts available in the West, and papyrus was also not favoured for prestige codices. Parchment and vellum were also much easier to form into pages than papyrus.
The enormous Codex Sinaiticus of the fourth century originally comprised 730 sheets of parchment, requiring animals in numbers available only to a few scriptoria. The skins were scraped until sufficiently thin and all marks and evidence of veins were removed. Given the skill, material, and financial resources required, it is hardly surprising that such complete Bibles were a rarity in the early Christian world.
Between the second and fifth centuries, Christian collections of their scriptures transformed from rudimentary and practical stitched-together collections into precious volumes that sought to convey the piety and influence of both their creators and their creators’ patrons. In these bespoke, luxury Bibles, which came probably from the eastern Mediterranean, the Old and New Testaments were, for the first time, placed together in a manner familiar to us.
These creations, astounding both then and now, did not reflect how most Christians knew the Bible — in parts that circulated separately. They were akin to the 19th-century Russian imperial Fabergé eggs; they do not tell us how most Christians of the period made an omelette.
But beautiful codices were designed not simply to look at, but through. Both in the Orthodox tradition of the East, and among Latin Christians in the West, the Bible became an icon, a window into heaven. The book was held aloft in worship, carried in the procession, and kissed. It was regarded as sacramental, like the baptismal water and the eucharistic bread and wine. At the church councils of the fifth century, the physical presence of a Bible among the gathered Fathers was an awe-inspiring symbol of the presence of Christ and the Holy Spirit. It had come a long way from a rubbish dump in Egypt.
This is an edited extract from The Bible: A global history by Bruce Gordon, published by Basic Books UK at £30 (Church Times Bookshop £27); 978-1-5293-8344-7.