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INTRODUCTION
Why is it that the earliest Christian "scriptures" are preserved, almost invariably, in the codex format, while the vast majority of contemporaneous literary sources survive in rolls?1 The question has vexed historians since the publication of the Chester Beatty papyri in the 1930s. The ubiquitous use of codices from late antiquity through the modern era has obscured the convoluted history of the form, and has naturalized the idiosyncrasy of early Christian texts. Christian communities, from a very early date, transmitted their authoritative texts in a material form that was at odds with the prevailing book culture of the time, which demonstrably preferred the book roll over the codex for literary texts. Many explanations have been given, but none has proved widely persuasive.
The data are well known. According to the Leuven Database of Ancient Books, 3.2% of all known second-century literary and paraliterary manuscripts are codices, while 68.7% of manuscripts come from rolls.2 Among identifiably Christian manuscripts, however, 77.4% are codices, while only 14.5% are preserved in rolls. Thus, the available data from the second century suggests a near inverse relationship between Christian manuscripts and all other manuscripts in terms of book roll and codex usage. Various explanations have been proposed. Some have seen the Christian preference for codices over rolls arising out of the needs of itinerant preachers or early Christian communities requiring easy access to a four-gospel canon. Some have seen the corpus of Pauline letters (compiled between c. 70 and 100 c.e.) as the impetus for other Christian writings to take codex form. Yet others have suggested the preference for codices reflects the Jewish nature of the earliest Christian communities. Others still have suggested that the adoption of the codex, being a peculiarly Roman form, can be understood as an index of Romanization. Each of these explanations incurs significant problems, many of which will be detailed below, and each is necessarily speculative, as the evidence for first- and second-century Christian texts is scant.
In addressing this topic, we do not propose to solve the "problem" or offer a solution mutually exclusive of other proposed theories; the Christian preference for codices among our earliest evidence may well result from a confluence of factors. Rather, we propose a new way...