Codex Complex

Codex Sinaiticus (L) and Codex Alexandrinius (R) at the British Museum in 1976.  Photo by Ferrell Jenkins: https://ferrelljenkins.wordpress.com/2011/11/page/3/

Early Septuagints and ancient copies of the Old Testament books are written on scrolls, but the codex format began replacing scrolls in the late first century after Christ.  A codex is basically a modern book: individual pages sewn together with a backing, but the term is mostly used to refer to a hand-written manuscript rather than a printed book.  Codices have many advantages over scrolls: it is much easier to find or open to a specific passage, they are easier to store, to transport, and---in the case of the Bible---to collect a number of works into one volume.  

For reasons that are unclear, Christians were early adopters of the codex form and almost all Christian books are in codex form (and the reverse is true, too: almost all ancient codices are Christian), including the earliest known copies of the Bible.  There are three of these, known as Codex A, B, and Aleph; also known as the Codices Alexandrinia, Vaticanus, and Sinaiticus (named after where they were found or where they are now stored), and collectively as the great uncials.  These three are most significant because they both very old (dating from the third or fourth centuries AD, or 200s-300s) and thus written very near to the time of the original authors, and because all three are nearly complete.  For studying the composition of the Bible they are invaluable.  

Their value lies in the fact that they are the oldest actual collections of the Bible---Old and New Testament---which we have.  None of them are quite complete: there are missing sections and torn pages, but all clearly once contained all 66 books of the modern canon, and all 66 books are included between the three of them.  But even if we can say the 66 books were collected by the third century that still doesn’t answer the question of how and why they were chosen.  More on that next week.