Do you remember the “Good Old Days,” the ones you fib about to your grandkids?  If you saw a picture of a computer in those days, you saw a special room with strong air conditioning and a platform floor (to run all the wire underneath).  The room also contained a large number of huge tape drives.  The magnetic tapes could store a huge amount of data, but using them meant that manipulating the data (editing, sorting, inserting or deleting) was very slow.  You see you had to scroll through much of a tape to find the data item of interest.  To make a substantial change the entire tape often had to be rewritten, which was even slower.    Efficiency increased by an order of magnitude, when good magnetic disks became available, but having to move the disk head meant that there was still a delay in accessing a particular data item.  Today solid-state memory together with faster processors has led to very great efficiency.

There was an analogous change in the form of writing materials that took place roughly at the time of Christ; this was the change from scrolls to codices.  The Egyptian, Greek and Hebrew cultures’ best means for storing permanent writings was a scroll made out of papyrus, or sometimes more expensive parchment.  Shortly before the birth of Christ some Egyptian took the papyrus, folded it, and sewed it along one edge to make a codex (plural codices) – sort of a book.  Of course, all were hand written.  Later parchment was also used, and these have survived in greater quantities.  They were in widespread use by the middle of the second century (150 AD), and after a few centuries they had almost completely replaced the use of scrolls.  The spread of the codex was hastened by the early Christians, who used the format early on.   Most of our extant early New Testament documents are fragments from codices, and our oldest complete New Testament is found in the fourth century Codex Sinaiticus, most of which is in the British Museum (three other institutions hold smaller portions).

The biggest advantage of a codex over a scroll was that a particular passage could be found much more quickly.  A scroll is like a tape drive; you have to unroll it until you get to what you want.  The early Christians did have a solemn church service, which involved communion and readings like those in the Jewish services, and a scroll was fine for this.  The Christian community, however, was a vibrant one; they met together, ate meals, and had many discussions, even arguments, about their newly formed faith.  I can just hear one of them saying, “What did Paul say about that?  Can you find it in what he wrote to the Romans?”  Then someone else saying, “Didn’t our brothers and sisters in Corinth face something like this?  Can you read that?”  Codices were much better for this than scrolls.  Today, we have taken the third step analogous to solid-state memory.  My Bible is on my iPad, and I can do all kinds of sophisticated searches to find what I want.

The readings in our church services come from the Common Lectionary, and I guess it could just as well be on a scroll, since the order throughout the three-year cycle is completely determined.  Somehow, however, I wish that once and a while during the service someone would ask, “What did Paul say about that?  Can you find it in what he wrote to the Romans?”

Please remember:  God loves YOU unconditionally.

Jim