Gide. I'm Gary Stevens. And welcome to the second series of the History in the Bible podcast.

More of the history in more of the books in all the Bibles.

Episode 2.22. Battle for the New Testament, Part 2, Against Marcian.

In the last episode, I left the Jesus clubs of the Roman Empire with no library of sacred books, apart from the Old Testament.

A man called Marcian was the first to assemble a sacred library strictly for these clubs.

The whole idea of a canon only became a huge issue because of a technological development,

the invention of the book or codex. Before some Roman soul invented the thing we call a book, all writing intended to endure

was inscribed in scrolls. When you see the word book in ancient Greek or Latin or Hebrew, they mean a scroll, not the thing we call a book.

If you wanted to read a portion from the middle of the prophet Isaiah, say, you had to unroll the scroll and unroll and unroll.

When you had finished, you rolled the whole thing back up.

You needed a very large table and much patience.

If you wanted to move between different sections of Isaiah,

you would spend most of your time unrolling and rolling.

Since sticky notes had yet to be invented,

there was no way to bookmark a portion of the scroll.

You noted a passage of interest,

then unroll, roll, unroll,

to move to the next passage.

A big work like Isaiah was made of several scrolls, kept in a box or basket.

In a library in Alexandria, Isaiah might have been divided into four scrolls.

In a library in Jerusalem, three. A scholar from out of town,

wishing to read Isaiah could have spent hours unrolling and rolling to find a passage.

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