The Book: a History of the Bible

Commonweal, Sept 27, 2002 by Lawrence S. Cunningham

Christopher De Hamel Phaidon, $39.95, 352 pp.

A few years ago I gave Harry Gamble's Books and Readers in the Early Church (1995) an enthusiastic review here. Gamble studied the actual process of the production of books--especially, biblical texts--in early Christianity. This lavishly illustrated and highly informative work by the librarian of Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University, Christopher De Hamel, is a continuation of Gamble's work. With 237 illustrations and a well-written text, this volume is both a joy to read and handle, thanks to the excellent production one expects from Phaidon, and it is very reasonably priced.

De Hamel has not written a book about the meaning of the Bible or its interpretation; he has written a study of how the Bible was produced. Indeed, the modern concept of "Bible" itself has a history: not until Saint Jerome's Vulgate can we talk about a Bible as a single entity. Ancient communities might have possessed a codex of the New Testament, a Psalter, or a collection of Paul's writings, but to possess the entire book was rare. As De Hamel notes, it was not uncommon to call an entire Bible a bibliotheca--a "library." Monasteries might possess one or even two, but the funds needed for production were significant. It was not uncommon for people to donate sums for a few pages of a Bible for a monastery in memory of family members, the way that congregants today might donate the cost of a brick or a pew for the building of a church.

The production of Bibles was a byproduct of liturgical need. When the mendicant friars arose in the thirteenth century, there was a need for more portable books, to accompany the wandering preachers in their work. Students in medieval universities also required books--of a different sort from those needed in religious communities.

To get some sense of what went into book production, consider the Bibles first printed by Gutenberg in the fifteenth century. Using movable type he printed them on paper (oddly, De Hamel never discusses when paper became common in this process) and on animal skin parchment. For a single parchment edition, 160 animal skins were required. A press run of twenty-five exemplars, then, used four thousand skins. By contrast, the 1522 press run of Martin Luther's New Testament was three thousand paper copies. A Gutenberg Bible sold for 100 guilders; Luther's New Testament sold for .5 to 1.5 guilders. Printing was one factor in the rapid spread of the new ideas coming from the Reformers.

De Hamel pays careful attention to manuscript copying. Some early codices of biblical commentaries put rubrics to the words of Scripture, but not always uniformly. Neither chapter nor verse appears in the early codices, but the use of a diple (like a sideways letter "v") indicated breaks in the manuscript. Reading itself was a skill, since the typical manuscript did not punctuate or have paragraph breaks. Copying inevitably brought errors into the text, although generally the errors were minor.

The most notable exception to the generally minor problems, however, is the episode of the woman taken in adultery found in John's Gospel. It does not appear in the oldest and best Greek codices, and a few place it in Luke. The question is, of course, whether the episode is authentic at all.

This volume ends with a chapter on modern discoveries that affect the biblical tradition: the Qumran discoveries and the deposits of manuscripts of Gnostic materials found in Egypt. When the famous Isaiah scroll was found at Qumran it brought the manuscript tradition back a millennium (the oldest previously known manuscript is dated circa a.d. 1000). Israeli children can read the text as easily as a schoolbook when they visit the Museum of the Book in Jerusalem. That fact alone is witness to the fidelity with which scribes have kept the sacred books in essential order.

In the course of his survey, De Hamel pays attention to the transmission of the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin biblical tradition and the move to vernacular editions, and there is a fine chapter on missionary attempts to translate the Bible into various languages. In sum: an excellent, well-illustrated, and readable book well worth the price.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.