(03) The First Manuscripts

The First Manuscripts

We do not have original copies of the Gospels or Epistles. At the time of Christ, you had to be of quite high intelligence, and needed a lot of practice, to be able to read, to make sense of the page. You see it was a mass of letters all the same size and all run together. Strange as it sounds to us, they had not yet thought of Capital letters, punctuation marks, or even spaces between the words. For informal notes, people wrote with a sharpened stick on a block of wax. To erase and start over, you wiped it with the palm of your hand. For permanent work they used papyrus, which was expensive, brittle and could hardly be folded, and crumbled away after a couple of centuries. A "volume" was a long, rolled-up sheet. They were already experimenting with oblong sheets glued into a "codex" - what we think of as a book - but only a few sheets could be used for one "codex". Also, nobody ever read silently! The first person known who achieved this remarkable feat was St Ambrose of Milan in the Fourth Century. St Augustine remarks, as if with a whistle of praise: "He actually reads without moving his lips!"

Nevertheless, a system of shorthand had been invented, and skilled scribes could take dictation at normal talking speed. Many speeches and sermons from these ancient days were preserved in this way.

The style of handwriting evolved quite rapidly, which allows us to date a manuscript within a very few years.