MetaCatholic

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

A few days ago I waded in on the discussion about the pericope adulterae (John 7:53 – 8:11), suggesting that long and continual lectionary use of this story was what gave it a place in the canon, irrespective of the question of original text. For some who interacted and commented this is clearly an odd position for me to take. In the most recent comment Mike asks me about the long ending to Mark.

The honest answer is that I have no idea, but I think it is for the same reasons: long lectionary usage. Does that mean we have to treat it as part of the gospel? I see no reason why we should. It is clear that the church has long read the passages as scripture. It is equally clear that they are not part of the original text. Why is that a problem? Is it because such a view poses too many problems for the priority of scripture over the church?

Update and Clarification: When I said “part of the gospel” I intended to mean “part of the particular gospel narrative in which they have long been found” – a literary judgement, not a theological one.

written by doug

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.

written by doug

I confess myself slightly baffled by this post of Iyov’s on the Septuagint. In particular, I found these two statements highly confusing:

I do not regard the Septuagint as a Jewish book — it has been thoroughly rejected by mainstream Judaism, and enough doubt has been raised about the validity of it as a textual witness to reject reliance of it from a Jewish point of view. It is somewhat offensive to read statements by some Christians asserting the “Jewishness” of a translation that is so reviled by Judaism.

Third, although we cannot read Jewish beliefs directly from the Septuagint, the textual witness of books not in the Hebrew canon at least suggests the outlines of former Jewish stories.

I follow his argument that mainstream rabbinic Judaism came to reject the Septuagint for varied reasons, not least its Christian appropriation. But I don’t fully grasp his point here. In what sense do scholars assert the Jewishness of the LXX except in so far as they insist it provides evidence for Second Temple Judaism, and especially for (at least parts of) the Diaspora. The parts of the LXX that translate the texts of what became the Jewish canon provide evidence both of (at least Hellenistic) Jewish readings, and the textual history of those books. Iyov seems to acknowledge this when he says “it provides a source for helping to interpret obscure passages in Hebrew”. The texts of the LXX which did not get gathered into the rabbinic canon provide evidence of the kind of literature which was read and heard among some Jews of the period, and which, at least in some parts of the Diaspora, and possibly among some groups living in Israel, were probably regarded in some sense as holy. This is far more than suggesting “the outlines of former Jewish stories”. I am not aware of any serious argument that any of these books were produced outside Jewish circles. In what sense, then, is it offensive to say that they were Jewish books?

Saying they were Jewish books is not the same as saying that they are Jewish in the sense of being Judaism’s books today, and I’m intrigued as to what sort of statements Iyov has in mind. He suggests that “One could analogously ask if Protestants are willing to accept all of Luther’s statements as being representative of “Christianity.” Well, I for one am not, but I do not therefore say Luther was not a Christian. It is, however, a false analogy. The LXX’s pre-Christian existence is testimony not only to the work of individual Jewish writers, but to the existence of groups of Jews who valued it as religious literature, if not holy writing, at a time when the bounds of the Scripture were not fully fixed. It is the value placed on them by groups that makes them more than an individual testimony and helps broaden understanding of second Temple Judaism. In that sense, a better analogy might be drawn from those early books that did not make it into the Christian canon, although some groups treated them as canonical for a time – the Shepherd of Hermas, the Epistle of Barnabas or the apocryphal gospels. These are Christian literature, even if some of them later came to be rejected as either non-canonical or even heretical. The later judgement of the Church doesn’t alter the appropriateness of calling them Christian literature, or lessen their value for constructing the history of early Christianity.

Yes, I agree with Iyov that the LXX is (for almost all of the Common Era) seen more appropriately as a Christian book, but I don’t think that alters the appropriateness of calling it Jewish in its historical context. Nor do I think that doing so should be taken in any way as usurping Judaism’s prerogatives of defining its own holy books. So I really don’t get whatever it is that upsets Iyov or what he actually finds offensive. Calling the LXX Jewish seems to me to be a sound historical location of these books in a diverse Second Temple Judaism in which the significant strand that emerged as Rabbinic Judaism was not the only one.

written by doug

I am often surprised by the way in which moral positions are asserted on the basis of either individual verses of scripture, or indeed individual passages. I am also surprised by the ways in which people present biblical morality as a straightforward matter. Any detailed acquaintance with the complexity of the canonical collection of diverse texts shows how much interpretation plays a role. The mix of largely mono-cultural living, sufficiently comprehensive communal scripts for behaviour, and a plausible and persuasive tradition of interpretation once appeared to present a reasonable clarity. In the past the way of knowing and the way of living were largely unified.

One feature of the Reformation was its beginning to unpick the tradition by which Scripture had ben read. At the same time the path of knowledge and the path of behaviour were beginning to divide. The world was expanding its experience of other cultures. The foundations of individual choices over communal scripts were beginning to be laid down.

One feature of the nascent Protestant ethical tradition was a new focus on the Decalogue. That is not to deny the Ten Commandments played a role in Catholic or Jewish tradition, but to note that they now assumed a priority over all other biblical sources for ethics. They also typify the sense that morality is taught by proof-texting, and a direct voice of God in “God’s Word written”. In a wide variety of churches over several centuries, tables of the commandments took pride of place on the east wall, a new iconography of word and commandment to replace the art and symbols of sacraments and saints. The tables themselves represented those tablets brought down from Sinai by Moses with the laws divinely inscribed.

But, like many other texts the Decalogue does not speak for itself. It sits within an edited book among other edited books in a collection. This canonical inter-texuality puts subversive questions, not least by providing two versions of the same “ten” words – Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5: 5-22 . In what follows I want to note some of the main subversions of the text.

First, within the Exodus narrative on its own, the first reference to the ten commandments comes sometime later (Ex 34: 28-9), well after the first two stone tablets have been broken as a sign of Moses anger (Ex 32:19). Of these tablets the text says:

Then Moses turned and went down from the mountain, carrying the two tablets of the covenant in his hands, tablets that were written on both sides, written on the front and on the back.The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved upon the tablets. (Exodus 32:15-16).

But there is little to hint at exactly what the writing is. Between the giving of what we identify as the ten commandments, and this moment, there are many chapters of laws, of which the most recent have been concerned primarily with worship and ritual. There is no mention of the tablets in direct proximity to the Decalogue. That identification is made in Deuteronomy 5:22 but without a specified number – and that number is not entirely obvious. The texts are needed together to identify these commandments as those inscribed on the stone tablets, and to count them as being ten.

Yet if the texts need to be read together to get a list of ten commandments spoken by God and written by God’s own finger, this act of yoking them together highlights differences. The most obvious is a completely different rationale for the sabbath commandment: Exodus roots it in the priestly creation narrative, Deuteronomy in the liberation from Egypt. The ordering of the various provisions against coveting are slightly different, with Deuteronomy adding fields to the list as well. The tradents and scribes of this text seem able to differently retell words written by God himself.

In both cases, even a superficial reading of the text makes clear that it is addressed internally to married male property owners, the leaders and people of substance within the community, and, within the external narrative, to those on a journey towards freedom, where ownership of anything is some way off. The text demands interpretation, even as it stands: it is not “straightforward”.

But it stands also within a larger collection. And even within the collection of the Hebrew Bible it is subverted. The commandment against idolatry in both versions reminds us that:

I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments. (Exodus 20:5-6 cf Deut 5: 9-10)

This is not strict enough for another part of the Deuteronomistic editing team, who wants to be clear that the sinner is punished - God is not going to wait for the next generation

Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who maintains covenant loyalty with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations, and who repays in their own person those who reject him. He does not delay but repays in their own person those who reject him. (Deuteronomy 7:9-10)

Equally it is not fair or just enough for Ezekiel:

The person who sins shall die. A child shall not suffer for the iniquity of a parent, nor a parent suffer for the iniquity of a child; the righteousness of the righteous shall be his own, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be his own. (Ezekiel 18:20)

The earlier divine declaration associated with the revelation of God’s presence to Moses, is particularly criticised by the prophet most focussed on the presence of God with his people. Even within the First Testament, the words portrayed as belonging to God both in speech and writing seem to be up for conversation, criticism and dialogue. God in Ezekiel disagrees with God in Exodus, and even though the final redaction of Exodus most likely post-dates these prophecies the tensions and discordances are preserved in the text on its long journey towards canonicity.

When we move on to the New Testament, the subversion becomes even more noticeable. First, there is the implication of their inadequacy: more needs saying than they say: “You have heard that it was said” says Matthew’s Jesus (5: 21, 27, (31), 33, 38, 43) followed by “But I say to you …”. Included in this intensified recasting of the Law are two of the commandments, against murder and adultery. Despite various attempts to wriggle out of this implication, the most logical explanation of “You have heard” is that this was the way the crowds, the masses, received scripture: by hearing it read. And the most logical interpretation of “it was said” is as a periphrasis for “God said.” Just as in the First Testament subversions, a direct attribution of the commandment to God no more prevents Jesus from adapting it (and raising questions about his authority) than it did the earlier editors of Torah.

Then there are those subversions that either vacate or come close to vacating the law. The stories of Jesus prioritising the eschatological family over his natural family, or the demand to leave mother and father (illustrated most poignantly in the story of Zebedee being left alone in the boat with the day labourers), or the shocking demand to abandon even one’s father’s corpse and let the dead bury their dead: all these, at the very least, put a substantial question mark over a straightforward obedience of the commandment to honour father and mother.

Jesus’ own disputes about sabbath may legitimately be seen as about interpretation, but Paul goes further: “do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths.” (Colossians 2:16). The observance of sabbath was to become a thorny issue in the relationship between Jews and Christians over the next few centuries. But it is a good illustration of how the divide made in later Christian interpretation between moral and ceremonial law fails to be worked out when it comes to the Decalogue, and neither does justice to the nature of Torah’s holistic combining of them, nor to Paul’s dismissal of sabbath law as part of these “ceremonial” laws.

None of this is intended to dismiss the Decalogue. I only seek to illustrate that the intertextual relationships of the canon drive the need for interpretation as a necessary work. Even this basic text of biblical morality is not a simple text, but needs a theological framework in which to read it. Unusually, even within Scripture it is a text described not only as the spoken word of God, but as the written word of God. Yet that does not prevent other scriptures interacting with it in development and criticism, intensification and abolition. Assuming any text can be absolutised by describing it as “God’s Word”, and freed from the demands of theological interpretative work, actually denies what the scriptures themselves do with this particular and cherished text.

written by doug

In a busy week I had book-marked some posts I wanted to come back to, in particular Stephen’s two posts on Childs’ and Brueggemann’s differences. Phil Sumpter has now responded (and has other interesting posts on Childs as well). As if that weren’t enough to digest, John Hobbins has also weighed in with a plea for Christian attentiveness to Jewish exegesis. It seems to me that there are several different issues that are getting blended together in this conversation, but all these posts have very interesting things to say, even if I see rather less difference between Childs and Brueggemann on this.

I find it interesting that the main debate on canonical criticism has come from First Testament scholars: NT scholars seem to me to have been largely indifferent. I presume that this is partly because a main strand in studying early Christianity has been to seek out, elucidate and stress diversity in what is, compared to the First Testament, a fairly tightly unified group of writings. I also suspect it is partly because the First Testament is read primarily as (an admittedly loose) canon, for which the NT writers are providing their own canonical interpretation. The diversity is unified in the interpretative key of Jesus of Nazareth.

One of the significant issues that seems to me to have become more problematic for Christians is precisely to do with the integrity of the First Testament. One of the abiding lessons that I think historical criticism has bequeathed to the doctrine of scripture is a sense of the original location of the human word that conveyed the word of God. That has introduced a level of discomfort with typological, allegorical and prophetic understandings of the First Testament as a collection to be read only and explicitly christologically. I don’t see how Christians can avoid christological readings, but they are, I think, chastened and deepened by paying attention to the question of original location. It is this sense of original location, together with historical editing, that, I think, causes Childs to reach for canonical criticism, and, ironically, which informs Brueggemann’s post-modern brokenness. (Post-modernism is often very modern indeed!)

I note that some of the discussion has focussed on Ecclesiastes, a book whose witness Christians have far too easily domesticated as a praeparatio evangelica, and which like Job is not very well domesticated by its ending. Here the divergent voices are the dominant and discordant voices these books contribute to the canonical symphony, that are not muted by their editing. I want to illustrate a slightly different point with a different pairing of texts.

Therefore thus says the LORD concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city, shoot an arrow there, come before it with a shield, or cast up a siege ramp against it. By the way that he came, by the same he shall return; he shall not come into this city, says the LORD. For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.” (Isaiah 37:33-35)

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: “This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD.” (Jeremiah 7:3-4)

The first text, which belongs with a whole raft of less clearly historically situated oracles about God’s dwelling in Zion in Isaiah, guarantees Sennacherib’s defeat because of God’s choice of Zion as his dwelling. While other parts of Isaiah can be just as lethal in their warnings as any part of Jeremiah, this is one of the characteristic voices of First Isaiah. It is gathered into the collected prophecies (and the deuteronomic history) because of the spectacular nature of its fulfilment – the nearest we come to a non-biblically attested biblical miracle.

And it leaves its mark. The prophets of Jeremiah’s day, who effectively recall this promise of the Zion tradition in Jeremiah’s parody mantra “This is the temple of the Lord” no doubt see themselves faithful to Isaianic tradition and their history. Just as Jerusalem was saved from Assyria because it was the dwelling place of God’s name, so it will be saved from Babylonia. Jeremiah overthrows this tradition with a contradictory word.

At one level, both voices are somewhat constrained and muted within their own collections, yet they still stand, now collected into one canon. It is not then enough for the interpreter to quote the Bible, as though what it says is a single voice, but the interpreter must also read the signs of the times, to discern whether the faithful word of God might be salvation through God’s presence, or salvation through his absence, and whether the word of comfort or the word of warning needs to lead the orchestra of diverse voices.

In doing so, the question of the current location of the interpreter (Brueggemann’s point) is a necessary part of knowing how to hear oneself addressed (Childs’ point). There is more to be said about reading these texts than just this, of course, from a whole raft of temple and Jerusalem texts, through a narrative of desert tent to built, destroyed, rebuilt and re-destroyed temple. But when that is done the canon points beyond itself to various interpretations, Christian and Jewish, about God’s presence and absence and the fidelity of God to his promises and his history with his people. Those are very divergent voices, whose discord is not merely about their separate singing from the same song sheet in different keys, but the attempt by one voice to drown out the other.The Christian song of Zion has often been and often still is destructive of the Jewish song, yet today some of the Jewish songs of Zion are profoundly threatening to the justice upon which Zion is meant to be built and to which it is summoned to bear witness. The canon does not, and cannot, impose harmony on this.

The Christian interpretation will have also to draw into the account the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as temple stories about the dwelling of God with his people, where the destruction of all promises and the keeping of all promises appears to be the same, and presence and absence are most fulfilled in the same body and the same moment.

Only interpreters who know something of where they stand can hope to discern the appropriate melody of the canon for their times, and hear which song they are invited to join in. Only those interpreters who hear the melodies of the canon can hope to discern where they stand. In the end, and at the cross, all the daughters of song are brought low, because the divine discord is where the hope of harmony begins.

written by doug

Debates about canon and canonicity continue and turn into one on the place of Scripture. John Hobbins lists his series in the left (bottom) sidebar of Ancient Hebrew Poetry. Many of my responses to John can be found (in reverse order) through this link. Both of us refer to other blogs and resources, though John’s series is far more exhaustive. Now Kevin Edgecomb has provoked a new response from John, and some of the conversation is continuing in the comments on John’s post.

Kevin’s point that there is a difference in emphasis between referring to canonical books and a canon of books is well-taken. The term canon does shift from the “rule of faith” to the collection of books, but exactly when is hard to tell. Kevin claims that McDonald locates it in 1768 with David Ruhnken, but this is not quite accurate. What McDonald actually says is:

In an annual Easter letter of 367 C.E. … Athanasius made use of the verbal form kanonizomenōn (”canonized”) in reference to a collection of sacred literature that he wanted to distinguish from a collection of apocryphal writings commonly read in the churches of Egypt and elsewhere. This is the earliest use of kanōn for a collection or listing of the church’s Scriptures.
    The word canon was not regularly used in reference to a closed collection of writings until David Ruhnken used it this way in 1768.¹

The point is that while there were rare precedents for the later regular use, the emphasis was on the books the church read as both exercising a salvific function (in the view of Athanasius)  and being in accord with Christian life, faith and practice. The regular emergence of applying the term “canon” to a set collection is in my view less important for how scripture was and is treated than first the binding of this set collection between fixed covers, and then the making of that set collection easily available, so that “the Scriptures” (the holy writings) irrespective of whether the word “canon” is used, comes to both be replaced by and to mean “the Bible” (the holy book). It is the existence of scripture as a book, a particular sort of artefact, that not only allows false oppositions to be made between scripture and tradition, but leads some to believe that there is no holy tradition, because there is (in their mistaken view) immediate access to what lies behind it.

At the heart of John’s response lies this affirmation:

the Church is a creation of the Word proclaimed in its midst, and the Word proclaimed in its midst is identical to the scripture read when the Church assembles and after which, in many traditions, the words “This is the word of the Lord” are pronounced. (his emphasis)

Now there are ways of construing that emphasized word “identical” that I can agree with, and ways in which I couldn’t, in the same way that there are ways I can both agree and disagree with a statement like “the bread of the Eucharist is identical to the Body of Christ.” Before I say more about this sacramental parallel, however, I want to note Kevin’s most recent response:

So, while the biblical books have now become the primary literary expression within the Canon of Faith, they are only a part of that wider entity, and not exclusively its defining element. That lies with God among the people and in the whole, organic, holistic, inexplicable, inexhausible Canon of Faith, often referred to among my Orthodox folk as Tradition. It is God who gives faith, which is strengthened by all the parts of that Tradition, the Canon of Faith, of which the Bible is one glorious luminary.

There are two problems with that, I think. One is the way in which, as John points out, Scripture functions also in Orthodox churches in the Divine Liturgy. Its presence in the liturgy shows the church revering it and attending to it in ways no other writings are attended to. The second problem, which I think myself (as a Western Rite Christian influenced by the Reformation) is a problem for Orthodoxy. The conflation of the “rule of faith” with Holy Tradition, and the locating of Scripture as simply one (significant) part of Holy Tradition, when taken together lead to difficulties in hearing the Word of God as the word that can address the church ab extra, summoning, judging transforming and reforming.

But enough of being negative. I am tentatively beginning to explore whether some of these apparent opposites might be reconciled in considering scripture as sacrament. Most of this is not exactly thought through, but more like  ideas to which I would like to return and explore more fully.

I find helpful the idea (which I think is Schillebeeckx’s – though I may use it differently) that Christ is the primordial sacrament. It is in Christ that the divine is fully present to us in the human, and the human is transformed into the divine. The church celebrates sacraments, and understands herself sacramentally, because of Christ in his incarnation and resurrection. From this bare summary I would suggest the following brief theses about scripture.

1. The nature of scripture as human words is essential to their ability to convey divine words. It is understanding their full humanity as best we can that we will most fully be able to hear the divine Word.
2. Scripture is primarily heard, not read, because the sacrament conveyed is hearing the Word of the Lord addressing humanity, ourselves as object, and not ourselves as subject discovering the Word of the Lord in a book.
3. As Christ was full of the Spirit, and we pray the gift of the Spirit on the elements of bread, wine and water that they may be to us the Body and Blood of the Lord, and the washing away of sins, so it is the work of the Spirit to vivify the words of Scripture that they may become God’s Word for us.
4. Scripture is primarily ecclesial: it belongs to the celebration of Christ’s risen life in the Church for the world. The hearing of the Word of the Lord belongs primarily with those who gather (better, are gathered) together in prayer, in the Spirit, and in encounter with God through Christ. Private reading of Scripture derives from this, and flows into this, but the word of the Lord creates a new people, not simply new persons. Private reading is, if you like, analogous to communion from the reserved sacrament.
5. Scripture, as the sacrament of the Word, may properly have attributed to it the various attributes of God’s Word, communicatio idiomatum, and thus is to be heard as blessing, rebuking, calling, transforming and so on, and may itself be referred to as the Word of God.
6. The Word is properly Christ, and so the Scriptures are fundamentally a vehicle for Christ. The liturgy reflects this in the particular honour it gives to the Gospel as that part of scripture which mediates the incarnate Christ most directly in narratives of his earthly life. The liturgy further testifies to it in the way in which it is completed in the personal encounter with the Lord through his Body in the Holy Communion, the sacrament of his complete self-gift, and in communion with his Body, the Church, the sacrament of his gift of peace, restoration and reconciliation. God does not simply stand over against us in addressing us, but enters our lives.
7. The Word who is Christ, who is met and encountered in the words of scripture, is God’s Word to create and redeem, summoning both creation and new creation into being. So Scripture must be read and listened to for  the Word that can make, unmake and remake the Church. The authority of Christ is truly conveyed through its words as the Church listens to them, and it is Christ’s authority which stands over all Church practice and theology, calls them to account, confirms their truthfulness and corrects their errors.

All this is,as I say, an early reflection, and still fairly inchoate, if not incoherent, in my own mind. I may be barking completely up the wrong tree, but it seemed a good time to chase a squirrel.

1. Lee Martin McDonald The Biblical Canon Hendrikson 2007 p51 – his italics, my bold emphasis [↩]

written by doug

John Hobbins has several posts on the interpretation of the Genesis accounts of the Fall, and moving on to Cain and Abel. They are particularly fascinating on detailed examination of the language. It does seem to me, however, that this would in fact be enhanced by further exploration of its canonical context following the first creation narrative: being fruitful and multiplying is precisely targeted by the pain of obtaining food and bearing children, and having dominion marred by enmity between serpent and human.

Some of this ties in with the questions raised by Kevin Wilson about source criticism. The interpretative task does both: the examination of the particular textual strand, and the ever-increasing circles of its contexts. Doing this properly may expose tensions between sources and redactions, but always needs self-awareness that with but a few exceptions (such as Mark’s Gospel) the sources themselves are but an interpretative construct from a final text. 

Equally, in all sorts of ways, one cannot stop with the canonical text. Whatever claims are made about the authority of the canonical text, subsequent readings of it (which include poetic and artistic representations of the narrative) are themselves implicated in its meaning(s). The Augustinian interpretation of Paul’s interpretation of Adam’s sin was and is for many the authoritative meaning of the text.

The importance of canon, perhaps, is not in that it provides a final form of the text, or a uniform synchronic text collected out of a multiform diachronic variety of texts, but that it points to the texts as located in a reading community that turns to them in both diversity and uniformity, as those texts which the community authorises to author its conversation and its life.

written by doug

Over on Apocryphicity Tony Chartrand-Burke has two excellent posts listing his top ten faulty arguments in anti-apocrypha apologetics: Arguments 1-5 and Arguments 6-10. I think all his points are well made, but the one that caught my eye was his seventh:

7. Neglect of the “orthodox apocrypha.” The apologists focus their energy primarily on the gospels that are in the public eye—such as, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Judas. Rarely are the “orthodox apocrypha”—i.e., non-Gnostic apocryphal texts such as the infancy gospels, the Pilate cycle, and Marian apocrypha—discussed, but when they are they are mischaracterized as Gnostic (as if all rejected literature must have been Gnostic; see Komoszewski et al, Reinventing Jesus, p. 154). The problem with this is that all apocryphal literature thus appears to be written by Gnostics who, as noted previously, are trying to supplant canonical texts with their own bizarre takes on Jesus’ role and teachings. However, the orthodox apocrypha are so named because their views of Jesus, his family, and the apostles are not so different from the canonical texts and quite self-consciously attempt to supplement, not replace, the canonical texts. It is a shame to see this literature neglected, particularly since, unlikely the Gnostic texts, have enjoyed a long history of transmission and have influenced both eastern and western culture.

The lesson I would draw from this is slightly different. A number of those promoting apocrypha study seem sometimes to talk more than they should in terms of power. The apocryphal texts, by which they mean primarily the unorthodox ones, were suppressed as the catholic Christians gained power. In more popular thinking this then becomes the basis of conspiracy theories to suppress “real” Christianity ion favour of it catholic corruption. However, neither the more academic nor more popular theories take sufficient account of why certain orthodox books failed to gain acceptance within the emerging canon of catholic Christianity. Examples can be drawn not simply from orthodox apocrypha, but from early patristic writings.

I suggest that explaining canonical formation simply in terms of power, and competing streams of Christianity is an oversimplification of what happened, and the existence of orthodox books on the margin of the canon, as well as orthodox apocrypha, need to be taken as much into account by the historian specializing in early Christian diversity, as the unorthodox writings do by those who would simply draw a straight and uncomplicated line from Paul to Nicea.

written by doug

This month, April DeConick has had one series of posts, and begun another on the status of the Nag Hammadi texts in scholarship. Both are worth reading, together with the range of reactions. Scholarship, of course, does not exist in a vacuum, which is also why I contended earlier that it was primarily the uses made of the texts that led to problems, not their existence.

 On the Amazon UK site, there are two lay reviews of Meyer and Robinson’s The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The Definitive International Edition which go some way to illustrating the problems of the non-scholarly context. Here’s the first:

This is not in harmony with any of the Gospels, there is only one writing in this that seemed to hold with the Truth and that is a very small letter writings of Melchizedek. I only read in samples, I decided I needed to dispose of this book as I sensed it was NOT healthy to even have it in my home. I am thankful that I bought it just so that I could warn Christians to stay away.

This view of “unsound texts” as contagious does, it seems to me, have its academic equivalent, which is nowhere so naively expressed as this, but does believe that undue attention to these texts endangers claims to the historicity of orthodoxy. Hence “lateness” is used to stigmatise them, and put them largely beyond use. In one sense they do belong more with the study of the second century on, than with the study of the first. Equally, one has to ask what it was about the early Christian gospel that generated these competing readings, and so with careful use they may be illuminating of the first century.

The second review is the polar opposite of the first:

The ancient texts were found buried in Egyptian soil in the year 1945, and they gave a better view to origins of Christianity. The gnostic view. In place of blind faith the inner knowledge of oneself (=gnosis) is seen to be the key factor in one’s religious experience.  The Nag Hammadi texts were not included in the Bible for some hazy reasons/irrationalities, and one can see that the Bible is missing many points of view. It takes some patience to read the Nag Hammadi texts too, but the new views to existing concepts are definetely worth it. — The jealous God of Moses’n'Israel was not good at all, true Jesus was not crucified, the world is seen as a mere illusion, Holy Spirit is associated with thought/thinking, Jesus with knowledge of truth, God with true love, etc…

The claim here is in one sense that of conspiracy theory, and again it has its academic counterparts. Hidden texts are equated with hidden truth: if someone concealed it, it must be because it is true (and therefore dangerous to those who hold power).  In academic terms, the view is that only with these texts does real primitive Christianity come fully into focus, as we better appreciate the range of Christian options before orthodoxy suppressed some of them. For some, therefore, there is no orthodox (or mainline, or catholic) Christianity before the third century, and orthodoxy is a creation of ecclesial power.

Here, I want to voice a moderate scepticism. Yes, these texts show us something of some groups speaking in their own voice, whereas before we had them speaking only as the orthodox ventriloquist’s heterodox dummy. That is very valuable. But what we know about the existence and spread of the groups is still largely dependent on the same sources as before their discovery. All else is reconstruction. It is possible to reconstruct a history in which they were always perceived as a minority group within a larger but still diverse catholic Christianity, and it is possible to reconstruct a history in which there was no mainstream catholic Christianity but simply different competing groups.

The long burial and late rediscovery of these texts has decontextualised them enough to make such reconstructions problematic, so that all sorts of history may be deduced from them, hiding in the interstices of a limited public record. My own view is that these texts may usefully and valuably flesh out and modify the previously existing picture of a developing catholic Christianity, but they don’t, in fact, either threaten it or destroy it. They are not, after all, simply to be weighed against canonical scripture (as is sometimes implied), but a range of writing through the Apostolic Fathers, Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Tatian and more that already gave us a diverse picture, bearing witness to the emerging canon of scripture, and with a clear thread of catholic continuity and development.

written by doug