One theory has it that the
Christians preferred codices to bookrolls because, being of the lower orders,
they were accustomed to codices and regarded upper-class book-rolls with
suspicion. This cannot be right: the Christians who made most use of books must
in the main have been quite familiar with book-rolls (and what passes for
"popular" literature was in fact almost all written on rolls, at
least in Egypt, where virtually all our evidence comes from), whereas the more
plebeian of the Christians came from backgrounds in which no books of any kind
were in regular use. This last fact may have been important: many Christians
felt no conscious attachment at all to the old written culture and may for this
reason have been especially willing to jettison the old kind of book. But for
the positive attraction of the codex form we have to look elsewhere. It
certainly made it possible to encompass a longer text within a single physical
"book"-an entire Iliad or Aeneid, for instance, which
previously required a number of rolls each. But the suspicion must remain
strong that the Christians saw some other specific advantage in the codex form,
and, as others have suggested, this is likely to have been the greater ease
with which a particular passage can be found in a codex. To find the passage
which you want to read to the faithful or use against your opponent in a
theological squabble, you would commonly have had to unroll up to ten feet of
papyrus. How much easier to mark a page and turn to it immediately! It is
interesting that in the lists of second-century codices that are unconnected
with Christianity or Judaism, of which seventeen are currently known, six or
more are texts which may have been needed for consultation and quotation more
than for ordinary reading. Some are also texts which are likely to have been
wanted in "one-volume" editions, such as Plato's Republic.
Thus the codex had a number of advantages over the book-roll, and it should in
general have made it easier for people to read literary texts. It certainly
made it easier to look things up in a technical handbook, or in a legal
textbook or in a collection of enactments such as was to be found in the new
legal codes of the 290s. The victory of the codex over the book-roll was
natural in an age in which religious books were gaining in relative
importance,·and in which consultation and quotation instead of independent and
disinterested reading were becoming commoner. (William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1989], 295-97)
