When we think about the Bible, we tend to picture it as words — an unchanging, directly accessible, unmediated sacred text. Words stand at the heart of scripture but, as I argue in my recent book, Words Are Not Enough for thinking about what the Bible is and how all its features coalesce to influence our interpretations.
The Bible has never been some ideal text floating in our minds, waiting for the right person to snatch them out of thin air and arrange them perfectly in a printed book. When we look at the manuscripts of the New Testament, for example, it is clear that the text of the Bible is always something that is contextualized and physical.
As handmade objects each manuscript is unique and offers new possibilities for interpretation. No two copies are the same. This reality extends not only to the changing texts of the New Testament, but also to a rich and ubiquitous variety of features that are generally hidden in plain sight, both in our modern printed Bibles and in the manuscripts: paratexts.
Paratexts, the Bible, and Changing Scriptures
A term first coined by literary theorist Gérard Genette in 1980s, paratexts refer to all features of a book beyond the main text itself.
The paratextuality of our contemporary print culture is vast and mostly taken for granted. In the case of a modern book, you might find blurbs on the back cover, the author’s biographical information, legal text about copyright, forewords, prefaces, tables of contents, title pages, cover art, and dedications. Each of these items contextualizes the book: you learn about the person who wrote it, the time at which they did so, who published it, why you should buy it, what’s in the book, how it’s structured, and what the author thinks is important about it.
More commonplace items too are paratextual, including page numbers, chapter titles, subtitles, footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies, and indexes. These features organize the text, breaking it down into segments and creating new sets of information. Paratexts help us to find our way through a book, think about the author and their intentions, and see the larger literary world that a work inhabits.
The Bible Is More Than Words
The same is true of the Bible. When you pick up a modern Bible today, you encounter paratexts common to all printed cultures — page numbers, legal frontmatter, and indexes. You also find paratexts specific to modern Bible publishing, many of which have ancient and medieval precursors in the manuscripts: chapter and verse divisions, section headings, prefaces of various kinds, maps of the Roman world, cross-references to quotations or parallel passages, or perhaps red text for the words of Jesus. None of these are part of original text of the Bible.
The Bible is more than words because paratexts always impinge upon the ways we read, shaping the connections we make across the Bible, how we perceive its narrative structure, and what each passage is about. Paratexts and sacred texts are inseparable. Without paratexts there is no Bible as we know it.
Paratexts are also meaningful. They create very different reading experiences even when the translation is precisely the same. For example, if we read the apocalyptic discourse in Mark 13 from The Jewish Annotated New Testament, our attention is drawn to the passage’s connection to the eschatological thought world of Jewish scripture in the form of extended scholarly footnotes. If we read the same passage in The Green Bible, we might focus on the consequences for creation because texts about famine and cosmic disorder are printed in green ink. Both use the NRSV translation but frame our experience with the text in divergent ways.
Mapping Paratexts Across Manuscripts
Paratexts are the parts of Bible that modern editors and booksellers play with the most, repackaging existing translations for new audiences: teen life application Bibles, women’s study Bibles, big beefy family Bibles, American patriotic Bibles, and any other niche audience you can dream up. Bibles are big business for publishers, and making new paratexts is a path to selling copies without messing with the text.
Although not oriented toward selling copies, something similar happens in the manuscripts of the New Testament. From our earliest copies, paratexts have been a non-negotiable part of scripture. They are the products of tradition, the residues of people grappling with their holy texts and quotidian realities of their daily lives.
The great variety of paratexts and their many iterations is not evidence of the corruption of the Bible, but of its vitality. The things that we care for most intensely are the things that change the most.
In my book, I start to map the many paratexts that appear in the New Testament’s 5,600 Greek manuscripts, produced from the second to the twentieth century. I explore titles, cross-reference systems, the plenitude of prefaces, and traces of use, like corrections, writing practices, prayers, and doodles.
But here I want to explore two examples, both of which are held at the Chester Beatty in Dublin, Ireland, that illustrate the omnipresence of paratexts from the very beginning and their development as these sacred traditions passed from generation to generation.
The Earliest Copy of Paul’s Letters
The first manuscript is the earliest copy of Paul’s letters, known as Chester Beatty Biblical Papyrus II or P46. Part of a collection of papyrus codices acquired in the early 1930s, P46 was produced in the third century AD, about 200 years after Paul’s death. But even at this early stage, paratexts were already an ingrained part of the tradition.
Consider folio 38 (Fig. 1), the page where Hebrews ends and 1 Corinthians begins. If you’ve never looked at a papyrus before, you might notice some characteristic features. There is no punctuation, no paragraph breaks, or word divisions. The margins are orderly, but there’s no visual way to see where one word or sentence ends and another begins. You might also notice a few words, like in lines 1 and 5, with a horizontal bar over the letters. This indicates a nomen sacrum or sacred name, an abbreviation of particular words characteristic of early Christian manuscript production. In this case, the words Jesus (line 1) and Christ (line 5) are abbreviated.
In addition to these features, a restrained set of paratexts exists. To start, there is a page number (οα or 71) in the top margin, a feature that helpfully enables us to reconstruct what else may have been in the codex when it was first made. The most obvious paratext, though, is the title to 1 Corinthians (literally “To Corinthians 1”). It is easy to spot because it is center justified, has blank space around it, and is divided from the end of Hebrews by a paragraphos or long line that extends into the left margin. Finally, above the title there is a stichoi notation, a counting of the lines of text for Hebrews written by a later hand. It reads “700 lines,” telling readers and future scribes how long the preceding work ought to be.
These paratexts aid readers in locating their place within the codex, in visualizing the length of works, and in dividing between the works that comprise the New Testament. None of these features were written by Paul. Even the title to 1 Corinthians was contrived by some unknown later editor who labelled the letters so that readers could distinguish between Paul’s works and understand the letters within a larger story about Paul’s biography and activity. While paratexts exist in P46, they are relatively restrained — the text is the main thing.
A Byzantine Gospel Book
Another example is known as CBL W 139 or GA 2604, a deluxe twelfth-century Gospel book brimming with paratexts. There are multiple prefaces, cross-references tables, lists of liturgical readings, chapter lists, lists of Hebrew words in each Gospel, illuminations, and more. Paratexts exist not only before the text of the Gospels themselves but are integral to each page of the codex.
Take a look at folio 176v (Fig. 2), a page that contains Mark 15:43–16:2. The biblical text is situated in the center of the page, framed by smaller text in the upper, lower, and outer margins. Between the smaller outer text and the main text are a series of numbers and abbreviations. Even before we get to these features, the main text of this manuscript differs in obvious ways from P46: there are accents, punctuation, word breaks, and paragraphs, marked by larger letters in the left margin. Even if we ignore the paratexts, the reading experience has drastically changed due to changes in the way the text is structured.
The main difference between these manuscripts though is the oppressive paratextuality of W 139. The most obvious paratext is the text in the margins, which is significantly longer than the main text! Scholars call these texts catenae (“chains”) because they are commentary extracted from early Christian writings and arranged in a string around the biblical texts they comment upon. In this case, there are two sections: the little beta (the Greek letter Β) in the far-left margin denotes the second commentary section, and the little beta above the last line of main text shows readers what text the catena comments upon. In this case, it’s a note about the chronology of Easter morning, smoothing the apparent differences between the Gospels.
There is also a series of numbers in the margin between the main text and catenae: 228/1, 229/1, 230/8, and 231/1. These numbers are part of the Eusebian canon system, a common feature that divides the Gospels into sequential sections (the first number) and locates them on one of ten tables for cross-reference (the second number).
In a period before the introduction of the chapters and verses we see in Bibles today, the Eusebian system was the main way that people divided the texts of the Gospels. In this case, most sections appear on Table 1 (passages shared by all four Gospels), but section 230 appears on Table 8, passages shared by only Mark and Luke. If you were to flip to Table 8 at the start of the codex, you can find the parallel passage in Luke.
The paratexts on this page do some heavy lifting. They help readers to puzzle out interpretive problems that arise when you compare the timeline of Easter morning across the Gospels and to flip back and forth between parallel passages, among other things. They create a network for reading that cannot be easily duplicated in our modern Bibles.
Conclusion: Paratexts and People
Paratexts allow us to do things with the Bible, pushing us to think about our sacred texts in new ways. They not only create new potentials for interpretation and scriptural reading, but they reflect the ideas of past readers and become inseparable parts of the sacred tradition more broadly.
Some paratexts can be traced to famous thinkers like Eusebius of Caesarea, who was responsible for the canon table system in the Gospels. But other times, the people who made paratexts, produced manuscripts, or read these artifacts are anonymous.
When we think carefully about paratexts and the large frameworks that define our Bible reading, we participate in a longer history of scriptural conversations. We commune with the many thousands of Jewish and Christian hidden figures who made it possible for us to hold an entire Bible printed between two covers today. Their obscure work, reflected in part in the tradition’s rich paratextuality, is ironically what allows us to think about the Bible as just words.
But once you look under the hood, you can’t unlearn the fact that, when it comes to engaging with the Bible, words are not enough.
This article just scratches the surface of our Biblical paratexts. Go deeper into the many ways these features have influenced our understanding of — and relationship with — the Bible throughout history in Dr. Allen’s groundbreaking book, Words Are Not Enough: Paratexts, Manuscripts, and the Real New Testament.
