Do you have any sources for that 10% claim. Seems low to me.
Paul asked Timothy to bring the books and the parchments to him. I believe Paul had them.We are used to having access to scripture. I have bibles all over the house and can simply look up stuff online also from laptops or mobiles. That freedom of access comes from technology that was not available in the time of Jesus and the early church e.g. printing press, digital media and the internet.
There is reference to Jesus reading scripture in a synagogue so maybe it is a good bet that most rabbis had a copy of the bible but you would have to go to a synagogue to hear it.
1) Who else owned copies of the Septuagint or ancient Hebrew or Aramaic translations of scripture. How could you get a copy of the scriptures.
2) If you were rich enough could you buy one and from whom. Would any copy you had have to be hand copied.
It seems the early church mainly used the Septuagint when quoting from the OT and it seems most of the NT if not all was written in Greek also.
3) But how much access did the churches have to the written word in the earliest days of Christianity
We are used to having access to scripture. I have bibles all over the house and can simply look up stuff online also from laptops or mobiles. That freedom of access comes from technology that was not available in the time of Jesus and the early church e.g. printing press, digital media and the internet.
There is reference to Jesus reading scripture in a synagogue so maybe it is a good bet that most rabbis had a copy of the bible but you would have to go to a synagogue to hear it.
1) Who else owned copies of the Septuagint or ancient Hebrew or Aramaic translations of scripture. How could you get a copy of the scriptures.
2) If you were rich enough could you buy one and from whom. Would any copy you had have to be hand copied.
It seems the early church mainly used the Septuagint when quoting from the OT and it seems most of the NT if not all was written in Greek also.
3) But how much access did the churches have to the written word in the earliest days of Christianity
The Bible itself did not exist in those times. In fact the bishops of the Catholic Church didn't compile the Bible until three and a half centuries after Jesus ascended into Heaven. But the Jewish scribes did have copies of many ancient writings, some of which would be included in the Bible many centuries later.
Hezser, Catherine "Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine", 2001, Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism; 81. Tuebingen: Mohr-Siebeck, at page 503.
I have seen literacy rate estimates as low as 3%.
During the time of the New Testament, codices, instead of scrolls were becoming more prominent. I'm not sure scrolls had a formal place within the Church or were insisted upon like they were and are within Judaism, at least with regards to the Torah. It's just so much more convenient to carry a book, open it anywhere and find what you need to read, unlike a scroll which involves unwinding the whole thing.
When I think about the process of making such a work, If you wanted a copy of the complete scripture for yourself, you had to be rich enough to afford a copyist to make one for you. That includes the ink, the paper and the binding of the book. You then also have to secure an existent manuscript for your brand new one. If you couldn't afford one yourself, which i suspect many Church leaders couldn't, they would have richer members of their community be benefactors in the creation of such a text. Not even taking into account that you might want multiple copyists for a work as long as the bible to cover certain sections instead of one man doing the entire thing by himself. I have no long how that would take. Each of these factors causes the cost to rise substantially. There might have been mitigating factors that lessened the cost. The conversion of scribes to Christianity and the subsequent devotion would probably result in the willful copying of at least the New Testament or certain books of the bible out of their own pocket for the sake of the Church. Given that the bible became one of the most copied books as the centuries went on there was also likely competition which would have kept cost down amongst scribes hired to make a bible.
As for access to these texts, you had to be able to read for starters so already a majority of the population could not access the bible. The bible would also have to be owned or you would need permission of whoever held it. So access was restricted, not out of malice i believe but out of necessity.
A copy of the Torah was always to be found in one's synagogue. This is true today as it was then. Teaching Torah and learning Hebrew was of primary importance in the lives of children 2000 years ago, as it is today in Jewish communities. The literacy rate for Jews 2000 years ago was always higher than other populations as a result. Often though, school consisted of sitting down and listening to a teacher for hours on end, and reciting back to the teacher what was learned and memorized. The common person was not expected to own a Torah scroll, but communities shared scrolls at synagogues which were often the first library any community had.
When churches split from syngagoues, there was most likely a similar system, whereby the congregation would have access to scrolls donated by the community or purchased by the community for public use and study at the place of the congregation. Older and more established congregations would be expected to have more scrolls, newer congregations would probably not have any at all, and completely rely on the words of the teachers in their midst who may or may not had access to their own personal copies of scriptures.
Later on, groups of scholars created a system in response to a growing problem of keeping such scriptures preserved and copied for future generations to use, as newer congregations sprouted that had no scriptures and no one qualified to copy them. Dedicated scribes would later form communities of scribes that resulted in the monastic movement of later centuries. But synagogues still maintained their Torah scrolls even throughout this period, hence why monasteries typically only focused on only preserving Greek Christian scriptures.
This is probably also why Greek Christian scriptures were mostly used (and later Latin) in churches, leading to a dearth of Hebrew scriptures available to the common Christian as early is the 3rd Century as they were downplayed in their necessity by the self-reinforcing heresy of Marcion inventing the idea that the Tanakh represented an "old" testament, vs a "new" testament of Greek Christian scriptures.
Early Christians would have copied and circulated the earliest Christian writings. Essentially communities sharing and copying texts.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if synagogues, especially smaller ones, did something similar. It's possible that each synagogue had its own Torah scroll, but as for other texts, I wouldn't find it surprising that scrolls were shared between communities. Having a complete set, as it were, would have probably been a very costly possession--and I'm sure that was the case at least sometimes.
I have no idea of course, but given the time-consuming and costly nature of writing at the time, sharing books would have probably been more economically feasible.
-CryptoLutheran
During the time of the New Testament, codices, instead of scrolls were becoming more prominent. I'm not sure scrolls had a formal place within the Church or were insisted upon like they were and are within Judaism, at least with regards to the Torah. It's just so much more convenient to carry a book, open it anywhere and find what you need to read, unlike a scroll which involves unwinding the whole thing.
Well I'm not aware of any Church books, be that the bible, theological writings, liturgies and anything related, being in scroll form. They are all, to my knowledge, in codices.Do you have any evidence that the shift to codices took place this early?
Well I'm not aware of any Church books, be that the bible, theological writings, liturgies and anything related, being in scroll form. They are all, to my knowledge, in codices.
If you need the evidence, look at the earliest copies of the new Testament that we have. Virtually all of them are codices.
But these codices date later than the original early church period. Codex Sinaticus is dated in the fourth century for instance. I doubt if St Paul wrote his letters in a codice more likely on a parchment as a scroll. A codex represents a bringing together of materials that were probably compiled separately. Unless that is someone knows of a Septuagint Codex from the first century.
We are used to having access to scripture. I have bibles all over the house and can simply look up stuff online also from laptops or mobiles. That freedom of access comes from technology that was not available in the time of Jesus and the early church e.g. printing press, digital media and the internet.
There is reference to Jesus reading scripture in a synagogue so maybe it is a good bet that most rabbis had a copy of the bible but you would have to go to a synagogue to hear it.
1) Who else owned copies of the Septuagint or ancient Hebrew or Aramaic translations of scripture. How could you get a copy of the scriptures.
2) If you were rich enough could you buy one and from whom. Would any copy you had have to be hand copied.
It seems the early church mainly used the Septuagint when quoting from the OT and it seems most of the NT if not all was written in Greek also.
3) But how much access did the churches have to the written word in the earliest days of Christianity
From Wikipedia:
"The Romans developed the form from wooden writing tablets. The gradual replacement of the scroll by the codex has been called the most important advance in book making before the invention of printing.[2] The codex transformed the shape of the book itself, and offered a form that lasted until present day (and continues to be used alongside e-paper).[3] The spread of the codex is often associated with the rise of Christianity, which adopted the format for use with the Bible early on.[4] First described by the 1st-century AD Roman poet Martial, who praised its convenient use, the codex achieved numerical parity with the scroll around AD 300,[5] and had completely replaced it throughout what was by then a Christianized Greco-Roman world by the 6th century.[6]"
This would indicate to me that all the original Christian manuscripts were almost certainly in scroll format.
I am using the term codex only as a means to distinguish from scrolls. Codices are in the format of our modern books, that is multiple pages instead of one single rolled up. Of course saint Paul didn't write his letters as published books, but as manuscripts, likely on paper pages instead of a scroll.
I personally don't think Saint Paul wrote on scrolls based on the Church's use of books since as far as we can see Christian manuscripts.
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