Scriptio Continua

Early Greek manuscripts were written without word breaks or spaces between the words. This is consistent with writing in many different languages today. Word spaces are not a universal feature of writing or advanced literacy in society. Neither are word breaks a feature which emerged with the printing press.

The evolution of features of writing and writing systems are not unidirectional as Tim Bulkely comments,

The changes in chunking and in extra textual cues have not at all been unidirectional, and are fascinating to track.

In order to provide some context for Tim's remark, I offer these two images. The first is the Cuthbert Gospel, more information here, a 7th century Latin text in the style of the Lindisfarne Gospels. In this Latin text, there are word spaces as well as line spacing which reflects phrasing in the text.

The second is the Khitrovo Gospel, 14th century. In this text, there are no word breaks although there are punctuation marks and other diacritics. It is evident, however, that the lack of word spacing does not reflect a need to conserve paper. It is difficult to draw conclusions about the function of literacy in a society by the presence or absence of word spacing. However, it is safe to assume that as a particular style developed, it became an identifying feature of writing for that culture or subculture.

Note. I had orginally found this image of the Khitrovo Gospel on this site. However, it is no longer there, but I have retained a copy of this image since 2005.

Early Christian Literacy

I attended a lecture by Larry Hurtado at Regent College last night, and enjoyed hearing a lot about early Christian literacy. I only wish I had access to the images he used for his presentation. However, I have found a couple of examples of what he was talking about. On a post of his dating back to last August he writes,

There is a constellation of features that mark off early Christian manuscripts in the book-culture of the time. I have proposed that these comprise our earliest evidence of an emerging early Christian “visual and material culture”. Some of these manuscripts are dated as early as the late second century CE, making them perhaps the earliest (and certainly among the earliest) physical artifacts of early Christianity.

The early Christian preference for the codex, the curious scribal devices known as “nomina sacra”, the various features that comprise what appear to be “readers’ aids” (e.g., early forms of punctuation, wide line-spacing, use of spaces to mark off sense-units) all are noteworthy features of early Christian book-production.

The only example I can provide at the moment is this image from the first page of the Gospel of John in P66 about 200 CE. Here we can see wide line spacing, and several high dots, the first in line 2 after ὁ λόγος and the second is in line 3 before the καὶ. There is also a blank space in line 7 marking off a sense unit between verse 5 and verse 6 beginning Ἐγένετο ἄνθρωπος. There is a diaresis over the "I" at the beginning of John's name, Ἰωάννης, in line 9 ad in line 2 there is a nomen sacrum for God, a theta and sigma with a line above.

PS Click on the image to enlarge it. Right click to open it in its own window.