The Circulation of the Bible

In A.D. 303 the emperor Diocletian decided to attack Christianity. Unwilling at first to have individual Christians put to death simply ‘for the name’, he devised means of sapping at the foundations of their corporate life in the Church; he forbade them to meet for worship and ordered that all church buildings should be destroyed, all church plate confiscated, and all liturgical books and copies of the Scriptures burned. Though the deacon Hermes of Heraclea might be confident that even if all copies of the Scriptures should disappear, Christians would be able to rewrite them from memory and to compose even more books to the honour of Christ, the more reflective must have been aware that the preservation of the authentic Bible text was necessary to the life and faith of the Church. Bibles were not quite like sacred vessels, which the generosity of the faithful could easily provide when peace came. Hence the moral problem of surrendering them was a difficult one, and in some parts of the Church, notably in Latin Africa, to hand over (tradere, betray) the Scriptures was regarded as an offence almost equivalent to the more obvious forms of apostasy. It is from Africa that we have a little—tantalizingly little—evidence about procedure. Magistrates were looking for corporate church property, not for private possessions. At Cirta, for example, when the Curator of the city went to the cathedral church and demanded the books, one very large codex was produced.