Page 150 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

tury; perhaps 10 percent in the third; about 40 percent in the fourth, and more than 50 percent by the fifth. (5) Also coincident to the transition to the codex is a change of material from pa- pyrus to parchment. As early as the fourth century, a quarter of the surviving witnesses are parchment; by the seventh parchment predominates (Johnson, op. cit. [2009], p. 266).
Another reason for the association of early Christian books with the transi- tion from the roll to the codex is that of the religious movements of antiqui- ty only Christianity and Judaism produced significant quantities of religious literature, and Jews did not adopt the codex until roughly 900 CE. Without surviving Pagan religious literature proportionate to the number of Pagan believers, the Christian book and its evolution from the roll to the codex may appear to the historian even more prominent among the surviving literature than it was.79 In his Early Christian Books in Egypt (2009), Roger Bagnall showed that the number of surviving Christian documents in codex form relative to the number of surviving non-Christian documents in codex form during the transitional period from the first through fifth centuries CE is roughly proportionate to the overall percentage of Christian versus non-Christian documents surviving from the period. He correlated these statistics with the ratio of estimated Christian population versus the non-Christian pop- ulation in Egypt during the same period.80 He also documented the high cost of producing books by hand during the first centuries of Christianity, showing that book ownership would mainly have been limited to govern-
79 “Greek and Roman religions appear to have been largely indifferent to the use of texts. Al- though particular items—an occasional ritual manual, votive inscription, aretalogy, hymn, written ora- cle, or magical text—have been found, they do not occur in connection with a particular culture or in a quantity that would justify speaking of a religious literature. Exception might be sought in Orphism or Hermeticism, whose fragmentary literary remains are relatively extensive, but if these are exceptions, they prove the rule. No Graeco-Roman religious group produced, used or valued texts on a scale com- parable to Judaism and Christianity, so that apart from Jewish literature, there is no appreciable body of religious writings with which early Christian literature can be fruitfully compared” (Harris, Books and Readers in the Early Church [1995], p. 18).
80 Among his many books, Bagnall co-authored with Bruce W. Frier The Demography of Roman Egypt (1994).
150