Collecting a Canon

            Reading about the formation of the bible as we know it today, the versions, translations and controversy that surround the process make it clear that there was nothing particularly smooth about bringing the different scriptures together into a single book. This is no surprise.  The apocryphal works of scripture are not unknown, and the issues regarding translation are easy to find.  The interesting point for me, however, is that, initially, there was no intent to compile the different texts into a single piece.

 The texts found in the bible were not originally written as books, but were handwritten on scrolls of parchment, each scroll comprised of the skins of numerous animals.  A scroll large enough to fit the entirety of the bible would be utterly impractically large, extraordinarily expensive, and require countless hides to fabricate.  Scrolls did not facilitate any sort of cross-referencing, as they were tedious to roll through, so having multiple texts in a single scroll would not be useful.  Even when codices became more popular in the early Christian circles, a codex with all the books of the modern bible as extraordinarily rare. The issue with the parchment would still stand, the text becoming unwieldy and heavy.  The oldest surviving copy of the Vulgate Bible dates to the eighth century, and is impractical: at thirteen inches wide and seven inches thick, it weighs seventy five pounds (Beal 119). 

All the fuss around the canon and apocryphal texts has been going on for hundreds of years, but the initial followers and composers of the writings themselves had no intention of the texts being brought together to form a single work.  Such emphasis is put on canon and non-canon, when the intent was initially just scripture.