Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts.

• Author: Holmes, Michael W.
• Position: Review

By HARRY Y. GAMBLE. New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1995. Pp. xii + 337. $32.50.

In contrast to the countless books devoted to the study of the content of ancient Christian writings, Gamble's study surveys what is termed the "bibliographic substructure" (p. x) of early Christian documents: the manufacture, circulation, collection, and use of books in the early church during the first five centuries of the Christian era, along with their social and institutional context and implications. Despite the obvious importance of this subject for the history and the texts of early Christianity, it had never received the attention it deserved until this work, an outstanding contribution that is remarkable for its breadth and excellence.

The initial chapter focuses on three issues: early Christian literacy, the extent to which early Christianity was a textual movement, and the relation of Christian literature to its larger social context. While granting that perhaps only ten percent of early Christians were literate, Gamble emphasizes the correlation between literacy and leadership and shows that from its earliest days Christianity was a profoundly text-oriented movement. In discussing the scope and character of Christian literature (involving such issues as Hochliteatur vs. Kleinliteratur, form and genre, and level of language), Gamble offers important and necessary correctives to the views of Overbeck, Deissmann, Dibelius, and others, and to the overemphasis in form-criticism on orality at the expense of attention to textuality.

The second chapter covers the physical realia of ancient hooks, especially their manufacture and inscription. Included in the discussion is a survey of two widely debated topics: the nomina sacra and Christianity's remarkably early adoption of the codex (to the virtual exclusion of the roll) as the preferred book format. Gamble rejects the theories that link the adoption of the codex to the gospels (Roberts; Skeat), proposing instead that it is "nearly certain that the codex was introduced into Christian usage as the vehicle of a primitive" ten-letter, seven-church "edition of the corpus Paulinum" (p. 63). Readers need not adopt Gamble's solution to recognize this hypothesis as an important contribution to the ongoing debate.

Chapter three investigates the publication and circulation of books in antiquity...