Documents made up of pages of writing material (usually papyrus, but sometimes vellum) bound together at one edge as in a modern book, in contrast to scolls which are simple long rolls of document. The plural is codices.
The Christian church very early adopted the codex as the the primary vehicle for the transmission of her Scriptures. Codices can be made compact and they pack in twice the amount of writing in the same space since a document could be written on both sides that are immediately and easily available by flipping the page. This also meant reduced cost. The format of the codex permits far greater facility to search for and locate any passage than was possible with scrolls. The codex is also easier to expand, even if the addition was into the middle of an extant book. All these added together helped to make literate culture and literary creativity an important feature of the Christian church from early on.
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