text within the text

Does in "text within the text" the first "text" refer to the words appeared as the dialogues of characters (scrolls) in the images and the second "text" to the main text of the document?

Context:

The representation of scrolls in paintings first appears as an adaptation of Greek and Roman ‘‘Honor Cloths,’’ which were draped behind authors as a sign of their eminence and later were understood as a visual sign for someone being an author. Such later depictions of scrolls as at the eighth century Coptic Church mural in the monastery of Saint Apollo at Bawit, Cairo, shows the Christ child holding a scroll while seated in the lap of Mary and surrounded by the elderly apostles, who all carry books. The scroll, in contrast to the books, represents the original prophetic voice of Christ, which would only later be recorded in the different Gospels of the New Testament. Thus, the idea of the scroll is not a record of past events but a vehicle for an original expression, a way of conveying the first utterance. Laura Kendrick persuasively argues that the motivation behind textual illumination in the medieval era was an effort to embody the‘‘text within the text,’’ that the words on the page were indeed the voice and body of God through his apostles. There were many political, cultural, and spiritual reasons for embodying the text within itself, but one was the need to distinguish it from the classical and pagan way of seeing the texts as disembodied, in a sense lacking a voice that needed to be contained within a reciter.