The world’s oldest Christian Bible, dated to the 4th Century, has recently been digitized. How cool.
It’s remarkable to contemplate how different Biblical studies would have been back then. The vast majority of the populace was illiterate; because there was no paper and no printing press, every copy had to be done by hand on parchment or vellum. Books–any book, of any kind–was so valuable it was worth the equivalent of an average person’s wages over a period of years, and if they were available to the public they often had to be chained down so they wouldn’t be stolen and sold.
Remarkable how books have gotten so cheap that they literally give them away these days. That would have been unthinkable back then.
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Saw this article too — really an awesome find. I can’t wait to see what the experts find, and don’t find, in those vellum pages.
If PETA were around around 1,600 years ago (and I’ pretty sure that’s proper English, although I could have used “circa”…), I have no doubt they would have decried these new fangled “books” as being unfair to the animals that sacrificed their lives for the vellum.
The high cost of keeping books “in print” in antiquity is a point I return to frequently over at my place. It means, among other things, that people had to have darned good reasons to keep any particular work in existence over a period of years let alone centuries or even millenia. The reasons didn’t have to be the same reasons over time but there had to be reasons and understanding the reasons they were preserved is frequently helpful in understanding the works themselves.
Yeah. I’m often amazed at the easy presumptions people make today about books and their significance in times when books were extraordinarily expensive–literally, often requiring a team of scribes an entire year to produce a single copy, with materials orders of magnitude more expensive than the paper and ink in use today–and in societies where just being FUNCTIONALLY literate was rare and being fully literate (able to read and write with ease) was extremely rare, and where translations of any given work were even more rare. Locating a scholar or scholars who were trustworthy and competent and willing (you needed all three) to make you a translation of a work was a major undertaking all by itself.
Now we toss around books like they’re nothing. It’s astounding.
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