Scrolling through the Bible

The Bible is bound up with history in many ways. One of them is the basic way that the Bible has come down to us.

The most prominent medium by which the Scriptures were recorded for us was on papyrus, which is largely unique to the Nile Delta in Egypt and began to be used for writing books as far back as the third millennium BC.

Making the papyrus scroll

Papyrus is a reed that grows between seven and 16 feet in height and has a long three-sided stalk without joints, which is roughly the thickness of the human wrist. It is amazing to think that someone in the third millennium looked at this plant and thought, ‘I could use that for writing’. Due to its vital use in recording the Scriptures, one can see the providential hand of God at work in its discovery as a medium for writing.

To make it into a writing material, the hard, outer shell was cut away. This revealed the softer pithy centre, which the Greeks called biblos. This centre was then cut into thin strips. These were placed side by side on a hard, smooth surface, while other strips were placed at right angles in a layer over them. These two layers were then fused by means of a press that broke down the cellular structure of the papyrus fibres and released the juice of the pithy centre that acted as a glue. This formed a sheet that was then dried, trimmed, and the surface smoothed out with pumice. The size of a single sheet ranged from four inches to 11 inches in width and from eight inches to a foot in length.

The next step in the manufacturing process was to paste individual sheets together to form a longer strip, which was then rolled up as a scroll with wooden dowels at either end. One side had the fibres running horizontally – this would be called the recto. The other side, which had the fibres running vertically, was called the verso. A flour paste was used to join the separate sheets.

A standard roll had about 20 sheets and ran to about 11 and a half feet. The strip of glued sheets was rolled up with the recto, the intended side for writing, facing inwards for protection. Writing on both sides of the papyrus was quite unusual. It is thus interesting that the scroll mentioned in Revelation 5:1 was ‘written on the inside [the recto] and on the back [the verso].’

It is reckoned that the two longest books of the New Testament – Luke and Acts – would have filled scrolls of about 30 to 32 feet in length. Not surprisingly, one of the librarians at the famed Library of Alexandria, Callimachus, used to say: ‘A big book [scroll] is a big nuisance’.

Once a papyrus scroll was produced, it was often wrapped in cloth or leather and stored in some kind of container, usually a jar.

Alexandria and books

Since most papyrus grew in the Nile Delta, Egypt eventually came to supply papyrus for the most of the Mediterranean world and it became a major book production centre. In fact, the library of Alexandria was deemed one of the wonders of the Ancient World and made Alexandria a centre for scholarship.

The great Bible exegete Origen (185–254), who played a critical role in the defence of the Old Testament as Scripture in the face of the rejection of it by the various heretical groups known as the Gnostics, did much of his early studies in this remarkable city.

All of the original copies of the books of the New Testament, which scholars call ‘autographs’, were written on papyrus. Currently, there are 97 papyri of various portions of the New Testament extant. The oldest is called p52 – which dates from AD 125 – and contains a portion of the Gospel of John, namely, John 18:31–33, 37–38. Virtually no other book from the Ancient World is so well attested as our New Testament.