I’ve often wondered the degree to which the “curating” image is a projection from the text-abundance conditions that we take for granted into a period of substantially greater text-scarcity.

In terms of the average wage of a day laborer, paper in the 1st century CE was expensive. That is why, after all, scraping the ink off of paper to re-use it was a thing.

The “carefully curated collection” might have been just what a faith community or perhaps a few literate members of a faith community was able to cobble together, between texts that another community thought was important enough to copy and distribute and texts that the small minority of members able to copy texts themselves could obtain by visiting communities that possessed them and making a copy.