July 5, 2006
The [_Letter to the Colossians_][1] is usually grouped w/ Philemon and Ephesians. The letters refer to the same people, and Ephesians reproduces multiple verses from Colossians. In Colossians Paul is addressing a church in a city he has not visited. The Christian community in Colossae was founded by Epaphras, one of Paul's disciples. It seems that now the community is confronted w/ new teachers who are delivering a variant Christian message, and presumably Epaphras asked Paul to send along a letter of support for orthodox teachings. That Paul is sending instruction to a community he never visited is a perfect example of the unprecedented documentary model of organization so prominent in early Christianity.Significant verse:Col 4:16: When this letter is read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans; and you, for your part read my letter that is coming from Laodicea.Laodicea is one of those maddening names from antiquity that, like "Antioch" and "Alexandria," is applied to [several places][2] at once--Laodice was the beloved of a Seleucid king who apparently named a city after his wife every time they made up after a fight--but in this case we are almost certain that the Laodicea referred to is [a city in Anatolia on the Lycus River][3] not far from Colossae. Laodicea is one of the celebrated Seven Churches in Asia to which John addresses Revelation.Here we have a Pauline reference to a letter to the Laodiceans that seemingly has not survived. An apocryphal "Letter to the Laodiceans" popped in and out of the canon for a few centuries but has maintained only a small audience in the past 500 years. Many scholars consider Ephesians to be the lost letter to Laodicea, as several early mss of Ephesians omit the words "in Ephesus," on which the traditional attribution is based. It is nonetheless vy likely, given the difficult conditions of the time, that more than one Pauline letter failed to survive.At any rate here is the machine in action: Paul instructs the Colossians to read this letter in their churches and then forward it to Laodicea to be read in those churches. He has also sent a letter to Laodicea to be read in Laodicean churches, and instructed the Laodiceans to then forward it to Colossae for reading to the Colossians. This kind of circular distribution is the likely forerunner to an eventual collection of all the Pauline letters extant, and when the letters were finally collected, it was almost certainly in the form of a codex.--Codices start showing up in the documentary record in a big way in the early medieval period, but there are codex pages extant from the early Christian era and significant evidence that the codex was the preferred medium for early Christian writings. Early Christianity did not invent the codex--there are indications of occasional codices in the centuries before Christianity, and a charming (and phaps true) story about an impatient Julius Caesar, while on campaign in Gaul, fan-folding scrolls to make them easier to manage. But there is no evidence in the documentary record of any other organized group seizing upon the new medium w/ the alacrity that Christianity demonstrated.Thus John Dominic Crossan in [_The Birth of Christianity_]4:_The Christian preference for the papyrus codex is very striking when its ratio of scroll to codex is contrasted w/ the ratio for pagan Greek literature in discoveries dated before the year 400 CE.... For pagan Greek literature, the ratio of scroll to codex is eight to one. For early Christian literature, it is almost the reverse. There the ratio of scroll to codex is one in seven. It is only in the 300s that the ratio of scroll to codex finally and irrevocably reverses itself in favor of the book format in Greek literature (scroll to codex is one to three). But even in the 200s_ [the] Christian ratio of scroll to codex was one to thirteen. The victory of codex over scroll happened only slowly and late for Greek literature but almost instantly and early for Christian literature.Crossan presents data compiled by the scholar Colin Roberts, who lists 14 manuscript fragments dated to the second century as the earliest witnesses to documentary Christianity. Twelve of those fragments are from codices; one of the remainder is written on the reverse of a scroll, suggesting the use of what's available, not a choice of scroll over codex. [p. Oxy 405][5], a fragment of Irenaeus'_Adversus Haereses_ dated c.190 CE, is the sole extant second-century Christian manuscript from a scroll.This is quite remarkable.The fragments also provide some remarkable evidence of the people who wrote them. [Paleographers][6], the scholars of antique handwriting, distinguish between "literary hands," the writing produced by professionally trained scribes, and "documentary hands," the writing produced by literate everyday people. ("Documentary" in this usage applies to all documents that are not literary texts.) Crossan again:_Roberts described the authors of the items on his list as "far from unskilled," but_ [w/ three exceptions] they were "not trained in calligraphy and so not accustomed to writing books, though they were familiar w/ them; they employ what is basically a documentary hand but are at the same time aware that it is a book, not a document on which they are engaged. They are not personal or private hands; in most a degree of regularity and of clarity is aimed at and achieved. Such hands might be described as 'reformed documentary'.... Their writing is based, w/ some changes and a few exceptions, on the model of the documents, not on that of Greek classical manuscripts nor on that of the Graeco-Jewish tradition.... Behind the group of papyri is is not difficult to envisage the men familiar to us from the documentary papyri in the Arsinoite or Oxyrhyncus: tradesmen, farmers, minor government officials to whom knowledge of and writing in Greek was an essential skill, but who had few or no literary interests."I think there are a couple of factors at work here. One is that a codex was apparently a lot cheaper than a scroll; literate Greeks and Romans looked down upon codicies as little more than scratchpads. But [codices offered a substantial bandwidth advantage over scrolls][7]. Scrolls were inscribed only on one side: the "back" side of the roll served as protection for the interior text when the scroll was furled. A codex provided double-sided pages, just like a book, and for a given sheet of papyrus doubled the available writing surface as compared to a scroll. Codices were almost certainly more common than scrolls in the realms of business and agriculture, and more familiar than scrolls to the first literate Gentile Christians.Thus first century documentary Christianity was created and promulgated not by professional scribes, trained scholars or priests, but by literate representatives of the common people. They selected against the high-falutin' and expensive scroll as their preferred medium, adopting instead the inexpensive and vastly more accessible codex. These same people are privately distributing their documents in an organized way throughout the Empire's urban centers. It was the first media revolution since the invention of writing. What happens when you throw a media revolution and no one comes?The Dark Ages.--One of the Things I Thought I Knew when I started this was that early Christianity led the way as the codex steamrollered the scroll in the first/second centuries. Not so. Christianity led the way, but hardly anyone followed for about 200 years. In this early Christianity is so far out in front of the cultural curve that it's hard to overstate the gap between the church and the empire at large. My favored description, that "Christianity got online before everyone else," hardly does it justice. Literate Christianity initiated a media revolution--and hardly anyone paid any attention. Had the culture of the empire embraced the unprecedented Christian model of popular documentary organization and distribution in the third century, the Dark Ages would've been considerably less dark.What's missing is popular literacy. That's in part because of bandwidth limitations; it would have been difficult (but not impossible) to initiate an empire-wide push for popular literacy in the third century, or for that matter in the tenth century. There existed no standardized training texts in sufficient quantity to reach out to millions of people, but such texts could have been created easily enough had the social elites of antiquity wished them created. They did not. So far as I can tell, education in the Empire was an urban, class-based privilege; a tiny fraction of the population was educated vy well in both Greek and Latin, and everyone else was consigned to the 95+ percent of the population that was illiterate.Early on, it appears that the thoroughly pagan nature of existing educational institutions alienated many early Christians. [_Brittanica_][8] informs us that in the third century schoolteachers were denied baptism, which makes modern Christians shudder, but by the fourth century schools were well-integrated into Christian society and most of the schoolteachers were themselves Christians. And yet I can find no indication of a blooming documentary popular culture in the late Empire. It just didn't happen.At the moment I'm inclined to think that the relevant metric is per-capita literacy. The Empire contained something like one million literate subjects, which ain't hay; we ought to be able to make the game go w/ a million players. But those players are scattered across a population of 50-60 million, and the way the curve collapsed suggests that one million out of 50 million isn't enough. I'm poking around web sites looking for literacy data for the first five centuries of the common era, but so far I'm not having a lot of luck.In 50 years, sadly, literacy will likely not be a determinate popological variable. One doesn't have to be able to read to watch a movie or a TV show, and in another half-century the mediaverse will be even less reliant on text than it is now. But for the ages stretching from the invention of writing to just vy recently literacy was a necessary attribute for full cultural participation, and popular literacy was a vy spotty thing for much of that time. This sharply affects the applicability of the theory.At any rate the Empire's low per capita literacy rate and magnificent roads combine to create an unusual popological condition: a bandwidth surplus. In [Popology 10][9] I assert, "Bandwidth is where culture happens. Bandwidth is finite. Bandwidth always increases. Bandwidth is scarce. This is the lens through which popology views media, culture, history." From the introduction of the printing press until the end of time, those assertions are true. They are not true in antiquity. In the Roman Empire, great steaming piles o' bandwidth are lying around doing nothing. [1]: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=58&chapter=1&version=49 [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laodicea [3]: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0064&query=head%3D%236023 [4]: http://www.harpercollins.com/authorintro/catalog/book_xml.asp?isbn=0060616601 [5]: http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/Tyndale/staff/Head/POxy405.htm [6]: http://autocww.colorado.edu/~blackmon/E64ContentFiles/LinguisticsAndLanguages/Paleography.html [7]: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/scroll/scrollcodex.html [8]: http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-47482?hook=89077 [9]: http://www.lawrence.com/blogs/patrickquinn/2004/may/18/popology/
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El_Borak (Bill Hoyt) says…
"What happens when you throw a media revolution and no one comes? The Dark Ages."
Have you read Cahill's "How the Irish Saved Civilization"? Good study of the movement of data in a time when there was just about zero bandwidth and what happens when a people gets a feverish desire to make their own.
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quinno (Patrick Quinn) says…
I have, and should read it again, but I'm away from my books.
I'm puzzled by the slow/zero growth in documentary culture between 100 CE and the invention of printing. It doesn't make sense. Even after allowances are made for the barbarian invasions and the inefficiencies inherent in handwriting, _pagan_ classical culture ought to have performed better than it did, let alone literate Christianity.
I have nothing concrete yet on which to base this, but I think that social elites in antiquity and the Middle Ages made a point of ensuring that most kids didn't learn to read. External constraint is the only answer that makes sense.
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lazz (anonymous) says…
Pillaging and plundering and fleeing the plagues and all, perhaps they, too, were away from their books ...
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quinno (Patrick Quinn) says…
Phaps so... but we're talking about a period of about 1,000 years--about 30 generations--in which there is no substantial increase in documentary popular culture and relatively little increase in literacy rate.
1,000 years is a long time.
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El_Borak (Bill Hoyt) says…
"there is no substantial increase in documentary popular culture and relatively little increase in literacy rate."
I wonder how much of that was simple opportunity cost. We love literacy today mostly because it opens opportunities for us. Most of us don't learn to read simply because we'll like reading, but because a person who can't read - unless he's really good at faking it - is going to be a modern serf, and we want to avoid that.
But what if it would not get you something else? Under feudalism, assuming a serf could learn to read, he'd still be a serf, just as a nobleman who couldn't read was still a nobleman. So why learn to read when you have potatoes to hoe or serfs to harass?
Possibly the only places there was any marginal utility was the church and the court, which made up a pretty small % of the population, and even then, the church provided literacy 'services' to the court, e.g. Asser wrote the life of Alfred the Great and monks, if they didn't start the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (as I suspect they did not) quickly inherited the job. There are secular writings early, but they are very scant compared to church writings.
P'raps I'm way off (and I'll admit I'm speculating) but literacy is great for tying large areas together, for trade, and for cultural endeavors, for accumulating technological knowledge. The dark ages, especially early, didn't seem to have much of that, but settled very quickly into very isolated, very small hierarchical agrarian societies: a vicious cycle on steroids.
Learning and literacy for their own sakes would eventually bring them back, but those demand a leisure class and a society of burned-out cities, barbarians raids and rulers, and subsistence farming, is not terribly conducive to that.
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quinno (Patrick Quinn) says…
All true, but still....
You make an excellent point in expressing the problem in the grammar of economics. I grant the opportunity cost, which is amplified by higher immediate real cost and lower potential return. And I grant Lazz's point that the population of late antiquity and the medieval period were dealing w/ world-xformative cataclysms over a nontrivial part of the period. I agree all around, but I'm not convinced that it's sufficient to explain the _static_ mediaverse. A substantially retarded expansion, sure, but this is vy close to all stop for a millenium, and that doesn't square w/ me.
I'm working on a half-assed attempt at an exposition of the reasoning behind my suspicion of prolonged external constraint that includes some of my nuttiest popological speculations. I'll get it up in the next couple of days and ask you guys to have at it.
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El_Borak (Bill Hoyt) says…
"It is nonetheless vy likely, given the difficult conditions of the time, that more than one Pauline letter failed to survive..."
FWIW, I consider it a near certainty. Paul was active for 15-25 years, depending on when we start counting, and yet we have only 10 or so letters from him, excluding Hebrews and assuming 2Cor might be several together. That works out to a letter every year or three. In my opinion, that's not bloody likely. Paul certainly had a lot of free time and a lot of issues to deal with though he could not appear everywhere in person. The letter is the obvious solution and one we know he availed himself of.
Certainly some, like Philemon, were personal rather than doctrinal in nature and a few like the Timothys and Titus were both doctrinal and personal. That leaves half a dozen doctrinal letters in 20 years. Not a lot of output. Peter went 30 years and wrote (or dictated) 2, Jude 1, James 1, John 4 and a gospel in 70 years. When looked at that way, it's not really a lot of output, even if the distribution system kicked in early and got them around.
At this time (40s-50s ad) it was probably the Pharises and scribes in the Christian community that got the duty of copying, and certainly a few of those were not on the same page as Paul (I wonder how happy they would be making copies of Galatians for everyone). But even assuming they could make plenty of copies of extant letters for every church (questionable) there were certainly more that went before because there would be (e.g. Corinthians) doctrinal instances that would need Paul's expertise and advice, especially in new churches. If Paul did most of hs work in the 50s, who had been answering questions in his young churches (and how) for the prior decade?
I put 2Peter and Jude in the 60s (in fact, I put them on the same day by the same hand) and by that time, it was probably obvious to the church leadership that general epistles were going to be more efficient than running old Peter all over Asia. But that makes me think that it would probably be early, before they discovered the tiger they had by the tail, that more than one church received a letter from Paul, read it to the congregation, and, considering the relevant matter(s) settled filed it away or (God forbid) threw it away.
As has been mentioned before, when the first Christians thought "scriptures" they thought "Septuagint," Old Testament, the Law, Psalms, and Prophets. I don't know, but often wonder, how long it took them to decide that the product of Paul's hand, which often interpreted the law and prophets in new ways, would be considered God-breathed in the same way their other scriptures were.
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quinno (Patrick Quinn) says…
Agreed. I think it's useful to think of Paul as a voluminous writer not unlike any other voluminous writer, and that it's stretching credibility to believe that his entire output was a dozen documents.
Lately I've been thinking about Paul as the head of an activist organization. From that perspective, it's reasonable to assume that Paul faced the same demands of office that attach to the head of any other activist organization, large or small. Those demands might well have been even sharper in Paul's case, since his subject matter is so profound.
Colossians is suggestive document in this respect, because it's sent to a congregation he's not visited and refers to _another_ letter sent to _another_ congregation he's not visited, which (I think) would inevitably create expectations in _every_ congregation he'd not visited. So I imagine Timothy returning from, say, Nicopolis:
Paul: "How well are they holding up?"
Timothy: "Quite well, quite well, the eldest deacon passed away but they have some good young leaders, I think we're OK in Nicopolis, but..."
Paul: "But?"
Timothy: "Well, they heard about yr letters to Colossae and Laodicea, and they're wondering if phaps you'd send them a letter, too."
Paul: "What's the problem? False teachers? Angry synagogue? Has that lunatic Apollonius of Tyana been nosing around?"
Timothy: "No, no, nothing like that, they're doing quite well, a solid bunch, they'd, ah, just like to get a letter from you."
Paul: "For pity's sake, Timothy, I'm broke, I'm in prison, I'm only halfway through writing this letter to Corinth, which is taking way more time than I imagined and by the way Corinth is a mess. I've rec'd a dozen letters from churches around Asia that I haven't even had a chance to read, and there's some talk of chopping off my head next week...."
Timothy: "Quite, quite, I entirely understand, but the folks in Nicopolis are feeling a bit left out, they're wondering what Colossae has that they don't have. It's a bigger church in Nicopolis, you know."
Paul: "Aaargh! Fine! Fine! I'll write a letter to Nicopolis, _sheesh_...."
--
I think Paul's correspondence was wide and deep, and some of it was a function of office. A lot of the resulting letters were probably partial restatements of the letters we have, which would slightly tend against later collection and conservation.
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lazz (anonymous) says…
I had a point?
I didn't mean to have a point.
Hey, "Potatoes to Hoe" would be a good name for a band.
So would "Serfs to Harass"
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davidryan (David Ryan) says…
Minor hypothesis: when the first messages in the new medium which increased general bandwith (the codices) tell the true story of the annointed Son of God, perhaps people didn't feel compelled to emulate Paul and write codices for themselves.
Also, the non-Christians wouldn't likely have seen the codices, especially early on when to be a Christian actually resulted in persecution; so, not seeing them, not having the perspective we have 2K years later, the non-Christians wouldn't even have known, it can be surmised, that a new medium with increased bandwith had even been created.
Lastly, implicit in early Christianity was a rejection of all things pagan (the title of a radio show?)-including pagan-style (read Greek) education. So it's not surprising, to me, that there was "a media revolution and no one" came. There was no general impulse (I'm hypothesizing) to see Paul's example as one to be emulated-as students, say, emulated Plato by writing their own dialogues.
As I suggest above, if the first message in the new medium is the authorative true story of the Son of God on Earth-if all ultimate final truth has been revealed-what impulse to try out the new medium for yourself?
If the medium is the message, and the message was the ultimate universal truth, then the medium is holy as well-hence "scripture." One doesn't blithely dabble in writing scripture for oneself: it's already been written for you. All you need to do is hear it read to you.
So, the lack of participation in this media revolution seems, to me, entirely predictable, given the meaning of the texts that announced and demonstrated that new media revolution.
Which is to suggest that sometimes popology must indeed intersect with the content of the texts it studies. The meaning of texts can warrant certain material practices and foreclose other material practices. My question would be: what was it, in the meaning of the texts at issue, that resulted in the material practice of participating in the new media revolution being foreclosed? I'd suggest that it was the authorative nature of Paul's message itself.
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davidryan (David Ryan) says…
Which is to say, if the early Christians were the first online, they were using "push" technology, not, say, blogs.
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quinno (Patrick Quinn) says…
Explain to this techno-ignoramus this "push technology," please.
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lazz (anonymous) says…
Damn, that would be a great band name --- The Techno Ignoramuses
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davidryan (David Ryan) says…
Here's WikiPedia on Push Technology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_tec...
Basically, it was the old-school media model: authoratively distributing information from a central location-say, a newspaper, or a media company-to clients: the direction is 1-way: from the authoritative source to the media consumer.
Contrast that with blogs, where the erstwhile consumer is now the media producer.
My hypothesis is that early Christians were pure media consumers, not media producers.
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thetomdotdot (anonymous) says…
Funny, I thought that RSS was the current manifestation of Push. Neither the article on Push nor the article on RSS mentions the relationship. Probably so obvious that no-one mentions it.
Kinda like Jesus being married?
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davidryan (David Ryan) says…
RSS isn't the current manifestation of "Push."
The media consumer subscribes to a feed, and their RSS reader goes and fetches the latest content in that feed.
Your RSS reader pulls content periodically from the server, rather than the server pushing content to your application.
The element of volition is on the side of the RSS reader, not the media pusher.
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quinno (Patrick Quinn) says…
I'm pleased you've jumped in David, esp given that you heard all this stuff at three o'clock in the morning back at the Pad.
"Which is to suggest that sometimes popology must indeed intersect with the content of the texts it studies."
Nope, can't go along w/ that, content is content is content, through the popological lens it's all the same. Imminent eschatology is a reasonable explanation for _Christian_ hesitation to command bandwidth, but only in the first few decades. p46, the first extant Pauline codex, dates 200 CE; surely by then we're well out of the imminent parousia window. In addition--
"Lastly, implicit in early Christianity was a rejection of all things pagan (the title of a radio show?)-including pagan-style (read Greek) education. So it's not surprising, to me, that there was "a media revolution and no one" came. There was no general impulse (I'm hypothesizing) to see Paul's example as one to be emulated-as students, say, emulated Plato by writing their own dialogues.."
Hmmm... Human interaction w/ media is largely content-neutral. The fact that the vast majority of early adopters of online technology were 16-year-old boys, and that they loaded the net w/ porn, didn't substantially alter acceptance of the Digital Age. The utility of codices is self-evident when compared to scrolls, and is demonstrated by the fact that codices supplanted scrolls by the fifth century. It seems to me that _anyone_ w/ a message to propogate in the first/second centuries would think about adopting the Christian model. In any single case we can postulate a constraint--thus the imperial cult might well have concluded that it was smarter to build big temples than to publish documents--but it's difficult to imagine that _all_ content-providers would ignore the model.
"Also, the non-Christians wouldn't likely have seen the codices... the non-Christians wouldn't even have known, it can be surmised, that a new medium with increased bandwith had even been created."
Remember that we're not really talking about the whole Empire--we're talking about the one million literate imperial subjects. W/in that relatively small group, I think knowledge of the codex prolly spread reasonably quickly, esp given tony credentials like Caesar's documentary adaptation in Gaul.
I concede that the scroll had attached to it a high level of respectability and that culturally conservative writers would've stuck w/ it long after they should've, but I see little evidence that the other side of the equation made much of a splash--Roman bandwidth, in the form of roads and post, were available to scroll-publishers, as well. Yet there is little evidence of a growing documentary popular culture _of any kind_ in the early centuries of the common era.
I remain puzzled.
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ladylaw (Terry Bush) says…
Quinno and Bill, let me first say I bow to you both. Such intelligent inciteful discussions rarely occur, in person let alone on a blog. Secondly, I would like to see you both turn these discussions into a book. Finally, since I am being "bossy", I think the book should take the form of PQ's above example of how the discussion before writing the letters went. That kind of "guess work" and extrapolation will be ridiculed by the elitist intelligencia guarding all things wise - but it truly would help "normal" humans come to terms with the very real world in which historical events - even the writing of what became the Bible - came to happen. I think it would be a best seller, I kid you not!
Carry on!
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quinno (Patrick Quinn) says…
hey LL--
Thanks so much for reading along and posting. I have a popology book in the works that will focus mostly on post-printing press applications of the theory, but frankly at the moment this is more interesting.
I think Bill and I could turn this into a book-length biblical commentary pretty easily, but (like Bill) I'm not sure how long its legs would be. Nevertheless, I'm game if Dr. Hoyt is! The great advantage to making up yr theory as you go along is that credentials are the first thing to go out the window.
Have you by any chance had an opp'ty to look into the cloister walk? i really think you'd like it.
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quinno (Patrick Quinn) says…
I should note that David was the first popology audience, and has heard all of these speculations (plus a whole lot more) in the course of a series of late-night conversations over more than a year. To the degree the theory possesses any intellectual coherence at all, it's because of his vy acute criticisms and questions in the early days. (Any shortcomings in coherence are entirely my own.)
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lazz (anonymous) says…
So that's what happened to David. I was wondering.
You know what else would be a good name for a band -- "The Element of Volition"
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davidryan (David Ryan) says…
Lazz,"The Elements of Volition" is an album from the late '60s by the pre-punk phenom "Media Pusher."
I've got it on vinyl.
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thetomdotdot (anonymous) says…
Oops, I was wrong.
From the wikipedia Push article History Section - "Push Technology became the acronym -- RSS, or really simple syndication."
Apparently, if you care to look under the hood, you will find lively and riveting discussion of the difference between push and pull.
Push:
"Col 4:16: When this letter is read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans; and you, for your part read my letter that is coming from Laodicea."
Pull:
Getting out of bed and going to church in order to be there when the letter is read.
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lazz (anonymous) says…
Media Pusher flat rocked. Wasn't Marshall McCluhan on bass?
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El_Borak (Bill Hoyt) says…
Thanks, Lazz. Now everytime I see a strange phrase, I'm like "that would be a good name for a band." The latest? "Consternation over Adad", from the Gilgamesh Epic, which itself could be one. Bah!
LL: Thanks for the vote O confidence. You'll be happy to know I'm in the process of applying to start on that history degree I never got - and if I ever teach it, it'll be in this style. Names and dates mean squat by themselves, but you can understand history if you can understand why people acted the way they did in it. Names and dates naturally follow when we are interested in those who wore those names on those dates.
As far as the book, I'm happy to write whatever PQ wants, but with 7 kids at home it's not exactly a time priority, you know? Besides, most of my commentary is not knowledge so much as it is informed speculation.
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quinno (Patrick Quinn) says…
Buddy, this whole exercise is informed speculation.
(At least, I hope so....)
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greyhawk (anonymous) says…
Messrs Quinn and Hoyt have indeed raised the level of discourse with these blogs. I've enjoyed reading and am looking forward to future installments.
One comment about the slow adoption curve for codices...perhaps material costs were a factor since we're talking animal skins, involving both the loss of future benefit from the animal and a fairly significant investment of skilled labor to turn the skin into a writing surface. Admittedly, parchment was also used for scrolls but I just don't see an explosion in the availability of materials to exploit the bandwith.
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quinno (Patrick Quinn) says…
greyhawk--
Thanks for reading! You make a good point about animal skins as a high-cost resource, but w/ respect to the early codices we're talking about, it prolly applies mostly to the bindings--the "covers"--rather than to the pages, since most of the early fragments that have survived are on papyri pages.
The early church switched to parchment or vellum as soon as it could afford to, which provided a boon for later researchers, since over centuries parchment holds up far better than papyri. (Years ago I saw the Book of Kells in the library of Trinity College in Dublin, and the script has held up remarkably well.) Jump ahead three centuries to the post-Constantine era and I think yr right on the money. When the early Church switched to parchment/vellum, they bought into higher costs and prolly reduced their rate of book production. This is yet another area where I'm sure scholarly data exists (but I can't find it).
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lazz (anonymous) says…
Right Bill, exactly, that's the beauty of it. Heard a great one on the radio this morning: "Low Budget Fighters"
I expect that band would ROCK.
Whereas, say, "Parchment/Vellum" would probably not. A three-piece string thing, with a crappy celloist.
"Informed Speculation" -- I dunno. Toss up. could be kind of a cool, David Byrne/Stevie Nicks/Wayne Coyne kinda troupe, or maybe they'll be a bunch of literature profs with time to kill on Thursday nights, ya know?
Just another way of looking at the world, I suppose.
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