Writing Faith

By Timothy Stanley

Current digital transformations of information technology have given rise to an explosion of scholarly interest in the history of the book. Although this research has focused predominantly on the rise of movable type after Gutenberg, the second-to-fifth-century-CE transition from scroll to codex warrants renewed attention. Here, a peculiar footnote comes to the fore: Christians were early adopters of the codex for their sacred scriptures. In Writing Faith, Timothy Stanley begins with a novel investigation into Jacques Derrida’s unanswered question concerning the mediatic nature of Christianity. There, the relationship between writing and faith comes into sharper focus. It is in this light that the codex’s cosmopolitan capacity for transmitting the written word can be re-evaluated in its scrolled Greco-Roman and Jewish bibliographic contexts. Christian faith is bound up in this technical development, and can inform how religious mediation is understood after Derrida. Writing Faith aims to recover vital questions for today’s digital times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781506423296

Timothy Stanley

Timothy Stanley is a historian of the United States at Oxford University. He blogs on American politics for the London Daily Telegraph and has written for The Atlantic, Dissent, and National Review. He is co-author of The End of Politics: Triangulation, Realignment, and the Battle for the Center Ground and co-editor of Making Change Happen: Twentieth Century Liberal Reformism in America.

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1

The Early Codex Book

Current digital transformations of information technology have given rise to an explosion of scholarly interest in the history of the book.[1] However, although this research has focused predominantly on the rise of movable type after Gutenberg, Roger Chartier, a prominent book historian, has suggested that the only real parallel to today’s revolution in the media and forms that transmit the written word . . . [is] the substitution of the codex for the volumen.[2] Chartier’s comment significantly refocuses book history on the second- to fifth-century CE transition from scroll to codex. Here, a peculiar side note comes to the fore: Christians were early adopters of this book form. In 1933, Frederic Kenyon was one of the first to note the Christian addiction to the codex.[3] Ever since, a range of competing claims have been made to explain why early Christian communities pervasively and persistently chose the codex over the roll book for their finished sacred scriptures at least two hundred years before the codex became dominant within the Greco-Roman context. This first chapter outlines the historical context of this bibliographical peculiarity. My contention is that strictly socio-economic explanations do not adequately apprehend this example. The problem revolves around how Christian difference is understood in this context and in relation to techniques of written reproduction more generally.

The Christian Codex

The artifactual evidence for the codex’s relation to the culturally dominant roll book[4] in the first few centuries of the Common Era requires a brief introduction. The earliest known reference to a codex comes from the letters of Martial (b. 38–40, d. c. 101–104), a Roman who wrote sometime during 84–86 CE, in a poem that mentioned pugillares membranei.[5] In Martial’s poem, parchment pages had been beautifully bound into a set of classical literature—Homer, Virgil, and the like. Martial’s codex is noteworthy because the common Greco-Roman preference at this time was the papyrus roll, or scroll. The typical use of parchment pages was for note taking, as they were easily washed or scraped clean for reuse. In Latin, caudex means a block of wood or a tablet used for note taking, sometimes on a wax surface to write with a stylus. In Greek, these were known as deltos or pinax. So, it is presumed that parchment pages beyond waxed wood could have been a Roman innovation. As it happens, one of the first references from a Greek author to such parchments is attributed to the Apostle Paul in 2 Timothy 4:13, where he wrote, "When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books [biblia], and above all the parchments [membranas]" (NRSV).[6] Martial therefore advanced the codex beyond utilitarian note taking to produce finished literature. Before this time, when an author wanted to produce a finished piece of literature such as Martial describes, the scroll remained the dominant form. As Harry Gamble puts it, To appreciate how peculiar this step was one must realize that a codex or leaf book was not recognized in antiquity as a proper book. It was regarded as a mere notebook, and its associations were strictly private and utilitarian.[7] Although codices were in use throughout the second and third centuries,[8] a distinction emerged between a finished scroll and the inferior utilitarian codex, and this may explain why few of these codices survived.[9]

When it comes to the early Christian adoption of the codex, Larry Hurtado provides one of the most recent accounts in his book, The Earliest Christian Artifacts.[10] As of August 2003, a total of roughly 9,875 manuscripts listed in the Leuven Database of Ancient Books range from the fourth century BCE to the eighth century CE. Of the total manuscripts that are rolls, only 2.7 percent are Christian. However, if the total number of codices is delineated by religion, then 73 percent are Christian. Considering that there are no Christian texts in the database before the second century, this in itself is a strong affirmation of the codex’s predominance for Christian cultures. Looking at the manu-script form for each century, codices make up only 4.9 percent of the 2,752 total manuscripts in both formats in the second century. In the third century, codices make up 21 percent of the 2,267 total, and by the fourth century, codices make up 56 percent of the 1,181 total. Of the 41 manuscripts listed as Christian for the second century, about 71% (29) are codices and about 22% (9) may be rolls.[11] For the third century, a similar pattern can be found, with 67 percent of Christian texts in codex form, whereas 20 percent are rolls. Over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries, an overall shift in book form occurs as the codex gains dominance across all of the artifacts.[12]

Hurtado’s assessment tempers the claim that Christians were the only users of the codex, even if they still indicate a strong preference, predominance, and pervasive use. Moreover, it is unlikely that a significant enhancement to the artifactual base will change much in the future. As Roger Bagnall points out, there simply were not a large number of Christians at this early stage, and it is unlikely that archeologists will ever discover a large trove of new manuscripts from the second century.[13] More importantly, for my argument below, however, it appears as though the artifacts support the idea that the codex was reserved only for those texts that later became part of the Christian canon. As Roger Bagnall concludes, In texts other than the Old and New Testaments, however, codices barely outnumber rolls; in full copies of the scriptures, the codex is absolutely standard.[14] Hence, even with Bagnall’s qualification that non-Christian texts make up something like three-fifths of the population of codices,[15] the artifacts continue to bear out the same conclusion proposed by earlier historians of the codex: Christians predominantly chose the codex for their sacred literature.[16] So, although Christians did not invent the codex, it is widely accepted that they chose this form well before it became dominant in the Greco-Roman as well as Jewish cultures, and they did not waver from this choice over time. This has led scholars to provide a variety of explanations for this pervasive early choice, which requires further evaluation.

Beyond the Socio-Economic Codex

Given the summary of artifacts above, any account of early Christian codex use faces two challenges. First, it must explain the near-exclusive Christian choice of the codex, noted above. Second, it must include early Christians’ pervasive use of the codex over time. Whatever features of the codex can be linked to early Christian communities, they must be intrinsically relevant from very early on in the tradition’s history, as well as persist for that tradition over time as it expanded into new contexts. Hence, it is important to avoid assuming that cost and technological advantages from the codex’s later history can be read back into the early codex.[17] What follows will demonstrate why a strictly socio-economic explanation for the early Christian codex is unsatisfactory on its own terms.

One argument suggests that the codex was more economical, and thus, if a community used it, they did so for cost-saving reasons. Such was the argument of Guglielmo Cavallo, who linked the codex to the uneducated and poor nature of early Christian communities. Hence, their poverty would have driven them to use less expensive codices, thus excluding them from the more dominant scrolled bibliographic culture.[18] However, although one could write on both sides of a page of a codex, and although a codex may appear to have been easier to use, upon further interrogation, Cavallo’s explanation proves problematic. As T. C. Skeat suggests, the maximum cost savings would have been roughly 26 percent.[19] If Skeat’s estimation is correct, then this is not a huge savings. It is also important to note that there was a great deal of manufacture involved, which would have taken technological skill and time, thus cutting against the assertions of lower educational status that drive Cavallo’s argument.[20] Furthermore, as Roberts and Skeat note, it does not appear that the early Christian text makers were particularly parsimonious, using small script or other devices to make the texts even more inexpensive.[21] The early manuscripts were not deluxe, at least not until imperial sanction in the fourth century, but nonetheless, this does not seem to be a strong motivational factor. The larger problem, though, is that once Christians became rich—or, indeed, given that they may have been a more economically diverse community in the first place[22]—then it is likely that more wealthy patrons would be making the text format decisions for their scriptures.[23] Furthermore, the problem is not only that Christians never switched to the scroll once their economic disposition changed, but that if poverty and economic factors were the prominent motivation, then one might expect other groups besides Christians to adopt the codex for their literature for similar reasons at the same time. The artifacts do not bear this out.

This concern for economic factors has led other scholars to focus upon the codex’s cultural, class, and gender associations. For instance, Loveday Alexander draws attention to the differences between the social standing of the scroll and codex. Some of what is known of the codex’s uses comes from its representation in the literature within scrolls and the artwork of places such as Pompeii.[24] In this regard, Alexander points out that the codex was often associated with dependent figures: wives, schoolchildren, clerks.[25] Thus, a class distinction is implied, which correlates to other studies of early urban Christians:[26] they belonged to groups such as prosperous artisans, small business people and clerks, clients and dependents of the educated elite, but not, for the most part, fully participant in the social world of the dominant literary elite.[27] In sum, Christian communities were typically made up of utilitarian clerks, which also drew upon a female class of citizens. As such, its books would have followed their class conventions. Alexander’s account is more nuanced than those who assume that early Christian communities were impoverished, and most likely, non-literate.[28] In addition, she is quick to point out the broad agreement among those familiar with early Christian literary artifacts concerning their basic early nature.[29] Many early codices of the second century tended to be smaller pamphlets—typically, eight sheets folded down the middle and sewn together in a single quire. Multiple-quire codices do arrive by the early third century, most notably the Chester Beatty Manuscripts, but before the large codices such as Vaticanus and Alexandrinus of the fourth and fifth centuries, the typical Christian codex of the third century was rarely more than three or four Gospels in size.[30] Furthermore, Alexander’s theory ties in neatly with more recent work on the gender and social standing of scribes within the Roman Empire. Elizabeth Haines-Eitzen provides an insightful investigation into Eusebius’s fourth-century description of Origen’s girls trained for beautiful writing,[31] as well as the Shepherd of Hermas’s self-description as a scribe who had copied everything letter by letter for [he] could not find the syllables.[32] It is in this light that Alexander’s theory attempts both to appreciate the more economically diverse nature of early Christian communities, and to retain the basic premise that early codex use was driven by the typical Christian’s class standing within Greco-Roman society.

However, although there is much to commend these socio-economic accounts of the Christian codex, and I will be drawing upon their insights in future chapters, its both consistent and persistent use remains difficult to explain solely on that basis. Again, if Christian communities grew in social standing and prominence in the third and fourth centuries, then it follows that they would have pursued the social conventions of the literary elite once their population became more economically powerful. At the very least, more diversity would be expected in the artifacts than what is currently present. Moreover, any socio-economic consideration must reflect a specific advantage for Christians alone and which persisted for them over time. Although this advantage should include Christianity’s socio-economic diversity, it must link the codex to the future development of the tradition as it spread into new cultural and socio-economic contexts. Such a link would be both unique to the group and differentiate it from the wider population.

It is at this point that the question of Christianity’s unique religious disposition arises. The problem is not a simple matter of integrating religion into book history. Moreover, the issue cannot be resolved through specialist biblical studies that seek to illuminate the wider historical importance of early Christian manuscripts.[33] Rather, the relation between religion and techniques of written reproduction must be refigured. While book historians have opened their methodological approaches to include sociological modes of inquiry, the religious relation remains undeveloped. For instance, the early twentieth-century New Bibliography school’s interest in text production[34] has blossomed into a much more diverse and interdisciplinary research area.[35] A key example of this transformation can be seen in Donald McKenzie’s 1981 essay Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve,[36] which introduced the Anglo-American scholarship to the French annales school. McKenzie sought to encapsulate the need for a wider sociology of the text that could account more adequately for the relationship between publishers, authors, and reading publics depicted in Lucien Febvre’s then untranslated The Coming of the Book.[37] As this sociology of texts developed, further questions emerged concerning its focus on communication processes. This was a point made by Thomas Adams and Nicholas Barker in their A New Model for the Study of the Book, which expanded their account to include the wider zones of political, legal, and economic influences surrounding a text.[38] However, the case of the early Christian codex draws attention to the limits of the historical inquiry into the subject. An inquiry into the religious context for the early codex book runs aground precisely at the point at which it draws on socio-economic factors. What is needed is a specific insight into the coincidence between Christian religion and the development of the book. Said another way, the very attribution of Christianity to the codex’s development requires further explanation. Such was the insight of Jacques Derrida, who will be the focus of the next chapter.

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Anthony Grafton, Introduction, The American Historical Review 107 (2002): 84–86. ↵

Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 18. ↵

One of the first to highlight the early addiction to the codex by Christians was Frederic G. Kenyon in The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri: Descriptions and Texts of Twelve Manuscripts on Papyrus of the Greek Bible (London: E. Walker, 1933), vol. 1, 12. Although I will be engaging the work of Gamble, Roberts, and Skeat as well as a number of others who have moved beyond Kenyon’s initial comments, Larry W. Hurtado, in particular, notes that addiction is probably too strong, in The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 80. Graham Stanton nonetheless rightly recovers the credit due to Kenyon’s initial contribution. Graham Stanton, Jesus and Gospel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 166. ↵

The term book is being used in this context to refer to a single work by an author or editor for a particular audience. It is recognized that this is a particularly Hellenistic notion of a book that arises in the third century BCE. Cf. K. Van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 25. ↵

Colin H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London: Oxford University Press, 1987), 24. Cf. David C. Parker, An Introduction to the