T.C. Skeat and the Problem of Fiber Orientation in Codicological Reconstruction

Abstract

Towards the end of his long life T.C. Skeat attempted to bolster a theory he had advanced several years earlier: that Christians adopted the codex around 100 CE because it could hold the four gospels in a format that set them apart from heterodox rivals. While conceding that without any fragments of an early second-century, four-gospel codex the theory remained conjectural, he now claimed to have proved that P⁶⁴+⁶⁷7 and P⁴ came from a four-gospel, single-quire codex whose ancestors "must go back well into the second century." Throughout his article Skeat avoids any mention of recto or verso while asserting that they are "terms which cause hopeless confusion when used in connection with a papyrus codex, since to papyrologists they inevitably suggest the sides with horizontal and vertical fibers respectively, which is irrelevant and confusing [in] ... the case of a codex." While it is true that confusion can easily result from trying to account for fiber orientation in codicological reconstructions, or from the different traditional and papyrological meanings of recto and verso, this methodological dictum is misleading. Analysis of fiber direction is an essential part of codicology and when ignored the inevitable result is inaccurate conclusions.