| Many of our earliest examples, like the volume of John in the Bodmer collection called P66, were probably ‘single quire’ volumes. That is, all the pages that make up the entire book were stacked in a single pile, then the whole pile was folded together (or perhaps the folding was done earlier) and bound in the middle. Anyone who tries this at home will find that only so many sheets can be put together this way before the volume gets very bulky and the middle pages stick out quite a bit further than the outside ones. Trimming the inside pages to acheive a more uniform look only narrows these pages, allowing less room for the contents. Thus, at some point it was discovered that dividing the whole into smaller stacks, called quires, folding each quire individually, and then attaching all the quires together at the folded end, could form a volume that was less cumbersome and with pages of more uniform size. This would also allow the codex to hold a greater volume of pages. And this meant that multiple books could now be more easily joined together. But what happens to those separate books when you ‘package’ two or more of them together in a singe codex? Most likely you make a statement that, in some sense, these books belong together, and others don’t belong. J. K. Elliott has said: Collecting the four chosen Gospels into one codex had the effect of according a special status to those four but, possibly more significant, helped to limit the number of Gospels to these four and no more! The fourfold Gospels could fit into one codex, but not onto one roll, so the adoption of the codex would itself have had the effect of enforcing the fourfold Gospel canon as a fixed entity. 174 Beginning with the third-century codex P45 in the Chester Beatty collection, which contains all four Gospels plus the book of Acts, over 2,000 handwritten codices survive which contain the four Gospels bound together in a single codex. 175 In Chapter 2 we noted in passing, from the cases of Marinus of Caesarea and Euplus of Catania, that these four-Gospel codices must have been fairly commonplace already in the third century. |
