Codex and Canon

We all know from Sunday School about the scrolls used for Old Testament texts, but if you’ve been imagining rolled up New Testament books, your imagination got it mostly wrong. Early Christian manuscripts were almost always in codex form. This is noteworthy because the rest of the world still prefered the roll. We might say the early Christians were codex trailblazers; everyone else waited a few centuries before they began to prefer codices to rolls. It’s an historical anomaly that begs for an explanation.

Quoting Michael Kruger (Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books) on the reason Christians prefered the codex and what this tells us about the development of the New Testament canon:

The most plausible suggestions link the codex with the early development of the New Testament canon. Is is evident that the Christians began to prefer the codex about the same time that the New Testament canon was beginning to take shape. [It has been] suggested that the codex was chosen because it was able to do something a roll could never do: hold all four Gospels in one volume. In a similar vein [it has been suggested] that the codex was chosen because it could hold all of Paul’s epistles in one volume and allow easy access to individual letters. Regardless of which of these theories proves to be more plausible — and each has strengths and weaknesses — they agree that the significance of the codex lies in its role in the development of the corpus of New Testament books. In this regard, the codex performed two critical functions: (1) positively, it allowed certain books to be physically grouped together by placing them in the same volume; and (2) negatively, it provided a natural way to limit the number of books to those contained within the codex; that is, it functioned as a safeguard… .

… [I]t seems that the dramatic adoption of the codex by early Christians could rightly be regarded as a symptom of the canon’s development. It is a sign that Christians were already linking some books together and excluding others. Thus, the widespread Christian use of the codex proves to be a substantial piece of historical evidence that the establishment of the New testament canon was well under way by the turn of the century… 

Who knew that codices could help give us confidence in our canon?

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Other quotations from this book:

• A Canon Based on Probability
• Canonical Bookends
• Like a Thermometer, Not a Thermostat
• Getting Our Expectations Straight
• Evidence of an Emerging Canon in the New Testament