The contrast between Judaism, the religion of the scroll, and Christianity, the religion of the book, would have been evident in their liturgies when the codex of scripture was used as a performed chanted text. The surviving fragments of early biblical texts have a set of consistent abbreviations singling out sacred words, the most frequent being the especially reverenced name ‘Jesus’. One would have to be specially informed to know how to interpret these abbreviations (known as sacred terms, nomina sacra), for they do not occur in other literary works (see Plate 1).
