A iBook would have been useful

[rooster]

Actually this is more of a question.

In 2 Tim 4:13
Paul mentions "...bring with thee books, but especially the parchments"

My question is, what exactly are the nature and content of these documents?
Obvious candidates would be that those documents would be Paul's personal copy of the Torah and old testament writings; or perhaps correpondences and letters; or even blank parchment for writing or documents of his citizenship; or perhaps records of the teachings and life of our Lord. Can we only guess or have somebody done some homework on this and can affirm or give insight on this?

Anybody's input will be much appreciated.

P.S i have read that the books propably meant papyrus(though still no clue to content ), codex forms were invented much later.

 

[Henaynei]

Actually this is more of a question.

In 2 Tim 4:13
Paul mentions "...bring with thee books, but especially the parchments"

My question is, what exactly are the nature and content of these documents?
Obvious candidates would be that those documents would be Paul's personal copy of the Torah and old testament writings; or perhaps correpondences and letters; or even blank parchment for writing or documents of his citizenship; or perhaps records of the teachings and life of our Lord. Can we only guess or have somebody done some homework on this and can affirm or give insight on this?

Anybody's input will be much appreciated.

P.S i have read that the books propably meant papyrus(though still no clue to content ), codex forms were invented much later.

All "books" were in scroll form, as you suggested. But not all scrolls were of parchment/a very thin leather - some were of papyrus/a paper of plant fibers.
The parchment was, of course, much more durable than the papyrus. It was also more expensive. Special books would have been on the parchment, such as Torah. It may have been that at least one of the other scrolls to which Ah'aul is referring is one of the Megillot - separate scrolls of certain books such as Esther - that are used during certain feast and festival services.

The T'NaKah was not, at that time, in one volume. So the three scrolls could very likely have been the Torah, the Ketuvim/Writings and the Neviim/Prophets.

 

[rooster]

Much appreciated!

were there any other writings or records that were essential for Rabbis back then?

 

[Henaynei]

No, Oral Traditions, aka Oral Torah, aka Mishna - was......well........Oral

Remember that all "volumes" were laboriously handwritten - there were no Barnes&Nobles or Amazon.com back then - LOL. It could well take a year to reproduce one volume - a Torah scroll could take much longer.

 

[rooster]

cool.thanks for clearing that up.