Biblical revolutions

Greek Bibles from Late Antiquity have rightly dominated scholarly interest. Pandects such as the Codex Vaticanus, perhaps a creation sponsored by the emperor Constantine from the Eusebian scriptorium of Caesarea, or the newly reunited – in virtual form – Codex Sinaiticus, stand like milestones in the history of the transmission of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, first accomplished at Alexandria and known as the Septuagint. These ancient manuscripts of the complete Old and New Testaments stood at the forefront of innovation in the history of the book, themselves marking, or at least greatly contributing to, the transition from scroll to codex. While the practical advantages played a part in the transition, it has been suggested that the particularly Christian interest in making use of the codex from an early period also reflected an ideological stance, aimed at visibly underlining the independence acquired by the Greek Christian scriptures with respect to their Jewish antecedents, which were traditionally written on parchment scrolls.

The relation to its Jewish urtext, culturally part of an ongoing ‘dialogue with Judaism’, in Pelikan's phrase, remained a key aspect of the history of the Greek Bible in the Middle Ages. At the same time, the imperial patronage presumed for the early Bibles has been read symbolically as preparing the way for the extraordinary sponsorship of ‘imperial’ Bibles during the period.