Feb 25
Canonical and apocryphal carnivals
I see that, faute de mieux, Tyler Williams (whom we welcome back after a blogging hiatus) has declared my unofficial December carnival to be the official one for that month. I am honoured to have my warblings so accounted among the canon, and, indeed, have now felt obliged to put my name forward for an official entry.
But it has made me muse on the whole process of canonisation. My posting wasn’t written as a carnival, so I felt free to ignore whole swathes of stuff. Yet it did much of the same thing, and freely borrowed from the format (in so far as there is one). It drew quite heavy traffic, and got linked to widely in the way that carnivals do, as one post spoke to another and cyberspace was filled with the knowledge of the blog. It functioned as a carnival, despite its lack of an imprimatur.
It seems to me that the set of circumstances leading to this has been almost entirely haphazard. I can’t help feeling that we tend to resist the idea of any such coincidental chains of occurrences when it comes to the process of forming the scriptural canon. Nonetheless the way books drifted in and out of favour suggest that it was hardly organised. Perhaps we need to ask why Christians generally tend not to like the idea of God working with haphazard and random means.
February 25th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Well, I thought that it had been agreed conclusively by all that your “unofficial” carnival was it for December. I guess the Tylerian sanction is nice (if late), but the Biblioblogging community had already authorized your text!
February 25th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
I guess it depends on whether the community needs a pope
February 25th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
I’ve decided to bestow upon you the highly prestigious ‘E for Excellent’ award. Presumably this will add to your canonical status…