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or cross-referenced. After his arrival in Caesaria, Palestine, from Alexandria, in 234 Christian scholar and theologian Origen (Ὠριγένης Ōrigénēs or Origen Adamantius) undertook compilation of the Hexapla, an elaborate tool for textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible containing the Old Testament written in six parallel columns laid out across each page opening, in a series of large, thick codices. The project is thought to have taken roughly 20 years to complete, by Origen with a team of assistants and scribes, some of whom may have been slaves. To undertake his scholarly work Origen collected a very significant library, though we have little understanding of its precise contents.
Origen was the first Christian biblical scholar, and the first Christian scholar to undertake the study of Hebrew. His Hexapla was not only a mas- sive scholarly achievement in the early days of Christianity, but also a land- mark in book history, since the Hexapla was undoubtedly the largest scholar- ly endeavor in the early history of Christianity—a work so large in terms of sheer information quantity that it could only have been written in a series of large codices, the format of the book that was gradually replacing the pa- pyrus roll between 100 and 400 CE. In papyrus roll form the Hexapla would have occupied hundreds of rolls and would have been virtually impossible to use, a consideration which would have assured that the codex format was employed. The volumes of the Hexapla were also presumably the first codi- ces to display information in tabular form– a form that Origen appears to have invented.
It has been estimated that the original Hexapla consisted of about 6000 folio pages in perhaps 40 codices, and that because of the immense cost of its production—perhaps 150,000 denarii based on Diocletian’s price edict— it probably existed in only a single complete copy. This copy may have been preserved in the library of the bishops of Caesarea for several centuries but was lost in the Muslim invasion of in 638, if not earlier. The three column page format of the large codices of the Hexapla is thought to have been influ- ential on the four column format of the other large codex produced about a century later, which did survive—the Codex Sinaiticus. It is also likely
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