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The New Testament first popularized the codex form in 100AD for scripture and was the first book ever produced from the printing press in 1500AD.
A conservative, bible believing perspective!
God's providence gave us the 27 book New Testament Canon, not the church.
God, not men decided the canon. This providence does not mean that church
leaders were inspired in their selecting the canon, only that God had his
eye on the scriptures the whole time and brought about His will to form the
Bible we see today!
The New Testament first popularized the codex form in 100AD for scripture and was the first book ever produced from the printing press in 1500AD.
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The New Testament first popularized the codex form in 100AD for scripture
and was the first book ever produced from the printing press in 1500AD.
Introduction:
A "codex" is a fancy word for "book format" with a binding, as
opposed to a scroll format.
Codices were used in the ancient world in the first century for
secular purposes. Scrolls on the other hand were almost the exclusive
format used for the Old Testament.
It seems that Christians broke with Jewish tradition and began using
the codex format from the very earliest time. This is quite striking. After
this point scripture began to be copied in the codex format.
With the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in 1436 AD, the
Bible was the first mass-produced book in history and was published in 1456
AD in Mainz, Germany.
I. Discussion:
1. "Aside from the characteristic notation of nomina sacra there
is another fascinating observation concerning the Canonical Edition: from
the very beginning, New Testament manuscripts were codices and not scrolls.
The following statistics demonstrate that the codex form was rarely used
for non-Christian literary texts during the first centuries C.E. In the
first and second centuries, one hundred scrolls would be produced for every
two codices; in the third century, every eighth manuscript was a codex; in
the fourth century, more than half of the manuscripts were codices; and at
the end of the fifth century, only one in ten manuscripts was produced as a
scroll. By the end of antiquity, codices had thus almost completely
replaced scrolls as the dominant literary medium (table 2). These
statistics have to be treated with caution because fragments of ancient
manuscripts usually cannot be dated with certainty. New manuscripts are
still being discovered or published for the first time. In addition, the
number of text witnesses is not distributed evenly over time. As a
consequence, the percentage figures for one century cannot necessarily be
accurately compared to those for other centuries. Nevertheless, past
studies using less material and dating the material differently have
basically reached the same conclusion: from the fourth century on, codices
largely replaced scrolls in the publishing business. The First Edition of
the New Testament of the extant tradition, however, strongly suggests that
this was the title of the archetype." (The first edition of the New
Testament, David Trobisch, p 19, 2000)
II. Table 2: The Scroll and Codex Ratio For Non-Christian Texts
Century
Scrolls
Codices
Total
% Scrolls
% Codices
1
252
1
253
99.60
0.40
1-2
203
4
207
98.07
1.93
2
857
14
871
98.39
1.61
Sum
1312
19
1331
98.57
1.43
2-3
349
17
366
95.36
4.64
3
406
93
499
81.36
18.64
Sum
755
110
865
87.28
12.72
3-4
54
50
104
51.92
48.08
4
36
99
135
26.67
73.33
Sum
90
149
239
37.66
62.34
4-5
7
68
75
9.33
90.67
5
11
88
99
11.11
88.89
Sum
18
156
174
10.34
89.66
SOURCE: Data from Colin Henderson Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the
Codex (London: Oxford University Press, 1983), 37. (reproduced in: The
first edition of the New Testament, David Trobisch, p 20, 2000)
By Steve Rudd: Contact the author for comments, input or corrections.
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