Page 149 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

the four Gospels used between late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The sections are indicated in the margin of nearly all Greek and Latin manu- script codices of the Bible, and usually summarized in Canon Tables at the start of the Gospels. There are about 1165 sections: 355 for Matthew, 235 for Mark, 343 for Luke, and 232 for John; the numbers vary slightly in different manuscripts. These numbers referring to sections within the text should not be confused with pagination or foliation, practices which would have been relatively meaningless and perhaps confusing in the early manuscript codex era when most copies of the same text did not maintain identical pagina- tion. The Eusebian canon tables represent a way for the reader to move back and forth between related sections in the texts, and represent an early orga- nizational structure and cross-indexing system. That the Eusebian canons became a convention of Christian Bibles was undoubtedly another reason why Christians might have preferred the codex to the bookroll.
(1) In the second century, when codices appear in any numbers, bookrolls still account for more than 90 percent of surviving books; by the fourth century codices account for 80 percent of the total, by the sixth century, the changeover is complete. (2) Early codices (from the second or third century) in the main are more likely than bookrolls to be written in workaday hands ... Calligraphic and pretentious scripts are a rarity. (3) Christian texts are almost always written in codex form. Only five of one hundred New Testament papyrus fragments listed in the LDAB are written on bookrolls, and Christian writings in the broad- er sense tend strongly to favor the codex form (in excess of 80 percent of all examples.) Conversely, only a small percentage of classical texts written in codex form in the early period (second or third century); pagan texts written in codex form come into their own only from the fourth century on. (4) Coincident to the changeover from roll to codex is a shift of surviving book content from classical literature to Christian texts. Only a tiny percentage of surviving books are Christian in the second cen-
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