Greek word · G3200
μεμβράνα
membrana
parchment
Parchment: animal skin scraped, stretched and dried to make a writing surface. In first-century Latin usage membranae often meant parchment notebooks, sheets folded and stitched into small books. They were used for notes, drafts, accounts, and compact pocket copies of literary works.
Appears once in the Greek New Testament. ·
What it means
From G. Abbott-Smith, A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament (1922), via STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0).
In depth
From the study of 2 Timothy 4:13
- Range of meaning
Parchment: animal skin scraped, stretched and dried to make a writing surface. In first-century Latin usage membranae often meant parchment notebooks, sheets folded and stitched into small books. They were used for notes, drafts, accounts, and compact pocket copies of literary works.
- Against the English
'Parchments' (KJV, NIV, ESV, NASB, BSB, WEB) is accurate but leaves the contents vague. NLT's 'papers' makes them sound like loose modern paperwork and loses the material.
- How it drifted
Modern readers tend to hear 'parchments' as old documents in general, or assume they were scripture scrolls. The Latin word points most naturally to notebook-style parchment, an early codex.
- Used elsewhere in the period
The word appears only here in the New Testament and is a straight Latin loan. Quintilian (Institutes 10.3.31) recommends membranae for writing drafts. Martial (Epigrams 1.2; 14.184–192) advertises pocket editions of Homer, Virgil, Cicero, Livy and Ovid 'in parchment' with small pages, which shows the form was being used for literary texts in Rome around Paul's time.
Where it appears
2 Timothy · 1
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2 Timothy 4:13 μεμβράνας.¶ parchments.
When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments.
Here: A Latin loanword (membrana) for prepared animal skin. In Roman usage it often meant parchment notebooks, an early form of the bound page-book (the codex), used for notes, drafts or pocket copies of texts.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.