MetaCatholic

Halden attempts to plot ecclesiologies on a simple matrix. I found this a fascinating set of descriptions. What raises a question mark for me, however, is that I know my ecclesiology is high because it is strong, and that the two are interrelated. I wonder if this means that for the others there is a dominant component in the pairings also? Perhaps those who hold to different ecclesiologies could reflect on which their dominant trait is also.

written by doug

The rather grammatically challenged (what’s wrong with the Vocative?) kratistos Theophilos blog says this about the apocrypha.

The Palestinian Jews rejected the Septuagint because it deviated from the Jewish text. It contained extra books such as the Old Testament Apocrypha which the Jews rejected.

That in the course of the second century Jewish and Christian canons diverged is not in question. But this kind of statement, which my own impressions suggest is far from unusual, begs a number of questions.

• We know the views of early rabbinic Judaism, which may or may not be the same as generic Palestinian Judaism.
• We know comparatively little of the Diaspora canon: though it seems reasonable to associate the Septuagint with Egyptian Judaism, we cannot be sure about the extent of the scripture collections used elsewhere.
• The extent we can speak of the Septuagint as some kind of unified collection of texts is unclear.
• The factors which influence the rabbinic decisions are also unclear, but would seem to be traditional, linguistic and about definition in elation to the Jesus movement.
• Palestinian Jews couldn’t reject an “Old Testament Apocrypha”, since they didn’t have an Old Testament (as opposed to a Bible) nor, therefore, an intertestamental period, and there was no early unified collection of books that could be identified as Apocrypha.
• Apocrypha in its modern sense is really a late term to identify the books that were in the generally accepted Christian canon, but not accepted as scripture by Judaism.

Too many discussions seem to presuppose the clearly defined existence of the Apocrypha in debates about the status of these books. While the books exist, and their canonicity is debated, the sense of them as a collection is a very late development. The whole point is that they are varied books, and what is being debated is whether they belong to the church’s collection.

written by doug