Separated by 20 centuries

A few months ago, a professor at my old school shared a link to a free book (not free anymore though, unfortunately) called The Scribes. It is a historical fiction novel about textual criticism. I was skeptical that anything involving textual criticism could be exciting enough to write a piece of fiction about it, but I started reading and immediately was engaged.

It’s a story of two 3^rd-century scribes in Rome who notice discrepancies between the codex they are copying and a codex from Alexandria. They embark on an epic quest through the ancient Mediterranean world to solve the mystery of the differences in the two texts. They have many adventures and encounter a number of characters that would be familiar to students of the Early Church Age.

The writing is a little rough in some spots, but the story pushes you forward. He does not “Americanize” the characters (a flaw all too common in historical fiction), he treats each view of Christianity in the time period with appropriate respect, and drenches the reader with buckets of information of the era. It’s an immersive experience.

What hooked me was the beginning. The main character, Justin, begins to prepare a codex for writing. He takes sheets of papyrus and folds them together, creating “quires”. He then writes the gospel of Mark with a reed pen and ink, later binding all the quires together to form a codex.

I thought to myself, “Awesome! I have papyrus, a bamboo pen, and ink! Close enough!” I had known that the New Testament was written on papyrus, but I didn’t know that it was almost exclusively written on papyrus for the first few centuries after Christ, and I certainly wasn’t aware that a reed pen was used. I started researching and found many photos of the different papyrus fragments that have been discovered. It was exhilarating, because while these were not the originals, they were removed from the originals by a space of a hundred or two hundred years (or, if the rumors are true about the oldest papyrus found, a few decades!).

Another thing that got me excited was researching the oldest confirmed papyrus, the P52 fragment. The Wikipedia article describes this document as not having been written by a “practised scribe”. That is, the letters are not uniform, there is a bit of sloppiness, and the text is quite large in comparison to other texts. I thought, “This is great! An amateur scribe like me wrote the entire book of John!” I felt a kinship with that scribe. We both have a love for the scriptures that can’t be contained, even if we haven’t gone through years of training as a scribe.

What followed was an incredible journey that I will go over in the space of the next few weeks. Stay tuned!