Date: Mon Apr 10 2006 - 02:42:40 EDT
At 11:59 PM 4/8/2006, Pim van Meurs wrote:
>......Why are we so reluctant to accept the Gospel of Judas when
>other Gospels suffer from similar contradictions and conflicts? What
>makes one 'better' than the other? And invoking the Holy Spirit
>explains nothing since we have no reasons to know if/why the Holy
>Spirit was even involved in the works by the Church Fathers.
@ FYI ~ Janice
..wasn't the process of deciding what books were to be included in
the bible rather BOGUS?!
http://www.christian-thinktank.com/canonout.html
I get many questions about the process of how certain books got
included or excluded from inclusion in the 'canon'--the list of
'official' books sanctioned by the various Jewish and Christian
authorities. This issue is very simple in its structure, but can be
complex in its details. One typical letter looks like this:
From what I've studied, the Biblical cannon was compiled by
comparing scripture with scripture and "proving the scriptures". But
it has always baffled me HOW the original compilers of the canon
decided which books were to be included in the canonical list. I know
that the Apocrypha (sp?) was not included because of many of the
immoral stories and many of the contradictory passages. One of the
ways books were included was if a book was quoted in any other book,
correct? Then how come some of the Apocryphal books are not included
in the Bible, even though they are quoted in our current Bible. (I
cannot remember the exact reference, but I remember reading it.) I
think the whole idea of the canon has confused me somewhat, and I
would like to be able to know for myself AND give an answer to others.
or another, perhaps less sympathetic version:
My question deals with The Naj Hammadi texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls,
and other texts that may once have been canon in the early days of
Christianity. Clearly, somewhere around 300-400 a.d. someone or some
group decided what was going to be the "official canon" of the
Church, and correspondingly, what would not. Now some of these early
texts state an acceptance of many beliefs not part of modern
Christianity (reincarnation, a rejection of ca church hierarchy, etc.).
How do you justify and rationalize this censorship and how (in the
absence of any notes that explain the rationale) do you feel about
practicing a religion that seems to the interested outsider to be one
of the better examples of a created church for political purposes?
Often, the issue of the canon IS PORTRAYED AS a group of official
religious leaders, with a pile of possible 'candidate' books in front
of them at some big meeting/council, trying to decide which ones they
should say are 'inspired' and which ones they should 'condemn' or
'censor'. Such a portrayal is a substantial misunderstanding of the
historical process...
At its highest level of abstraction, this canonization process is a
special case of the more general process of determining whether a
prophetic voice was from God or not. So, 2 Peter 2.1 gives us a
simple statement of it: But there were also false prophets among the
people, just as there will be false teachers among you. Just as there
were false prophets throughout the OT period, so too were there false
prophets during the NT time. Since some of these 'false prophets' and
'false teachers' WROTE THEIR STUFF DOWN, the process of analyzing the
written works are going to be extensions of the overall discernment process.
The issue is more complex than this, of course, since many of the
'candidate' works APPEAR to be non-prophetic genres--wisdom
literature (in the OT), historical literature (e.g. Chronicles,
gospels, acts of XX), and epistolary lit (in the NT). But since this
process is an extension of validation of a prophetic voice, one of
the key indicators will naturally be linkage to some 'known',
previously-authenticated prophetic voice.
In other words, in the OT, not only might there be false prophets
(giving false oracles, false direction, and false interpretations of
Israel's past), there might also be false sages (giving advice
against YHWH or giving false interpretations of Israel's past), and
false priests/scribes (giving false interpretations and applications
of the Law). In the NT, there might likewise be false apostles, false
prophets, false teachers. The community must have a way (and the
prerogative) to determine what defined/delineated a 'message' for them.
This is ENTIRELY a natural process, from a sociological and
historical standpoint. EVERY community defined by a shared
belief-system, such as a political movement, scientific paradigm
community, goal-defined secondary group, philosophical research
program, or religious tradition, has a defined core of beliefs and
values. The group, largely through discussion and interaction, can
detect when a position advanced within the group is NOT in conformity
to the group's identifying traits. In large organizational behavior
(one of my professional areas of responsibility) this shows up as
'culture clash' or "organizational dissonance". It is generally the
organization as a whole that 'senses' when a member is
acting/evangelizing 'outside the paradigm', but it is often the
leadership and officials of the organization that make this explicit
and take action.
In the case of a political movement, some "leader" will judge
something as being at cross-philosophy with the "founding ideals". In
a scientific community, the offending scientist's ideas will be
judged as being 'fringe' or not in keeping with the methodology
(read: "assumptions"!) of the core research team. In a goal-defined
secondary group, the idea to expand the horizon to include 'save the
snails' may be determined to be outside the core-focus of a more
specifically 'save the whales' organization. A philosophical research
program may decide that allowing phenomenological data as equal in
importance to conclusions reached through the predicate calculus is
simply 'beyond the pale'. And a religious tradition may decide that
ascribing divinity to hamsters is not a legitimate extension of the
core belief system.
In each of these cases, some 'position' --either generated from
within or being encountered from outsiders--is evaluated in terms of
its 'goodness of fit' with the defining characteristics and goals of
the community. It is important to recognize certain characteristics
of this process:
* The people who most 'embody' the beliefs/values of the
organization are generally the earliest 'detectors' of dissonance.
This MIGHT be the official leadership (administrative), but often is
rather the visionaries, lay leaders, or spokespeople for the group.
* In most groups it is the leadership--official OR
un-official--that surfaces the issue for the whole. It often raises
the issue among both the leadership and the membership, in different settings.
* "Heretical" positions--endogenous or exogenous--tend to
factionalize the group by creating sub-groups that do NOT share all
of the defining structure of the whole. [Trivial differences do not
typically destroy a whole, unless the group has become dysfunctional
and semi-dead.]
* Such sub-groups either 'take over' the whole (if their new
beliefs are more compelling that the old beliefs), provoke a
synthesis with the 'old' (if the positions can be so integrated), but
often they simply 'emigrate' and start their own school or colony of
adherents.
* The main group--now the wiser and changed--will tend to
identify 'what happened', by articulating the differences in position
with a finer level of precision than before, and the main carriers of
those differences (e.g. individuals, books, ritual). The group
behavior will be modified to exclude such influences, and the process
then repeats.
This process is a very, very widespread and natural one, and although
I have greatly simplified it in the schema above, it should be
readily apparent that some of these dimensions will apply to our question.
[The potential for abuse, aberrant praxis, dysfunction, and
sub-optimization should be very obvious, ranging from domineering
leadership, exogenous censorship, and inquisition-like actions. And,
it is interesting that the current ferment in the social/sociological
dimensions of philosophy of science concerns this. The 'sociology of
science' theme developed by Kuhn has developed into the social
constructionism views of science, with accusations of
'marginalization' or 'oppression' of dissenting or 'heretical'
paradigmatic positions!]
So, the questions we need to address in approaching this problem are
basically these:
* How were the people supposed to judge a prophetic voice--oral
or written?
* How were the people supposed to decide on range of
applicability of an accepted work? In other words, what prophetic
messages would have near universal relevance (a mark of
'inspiration', such as a 'general epistle') versus a work only of
relevance/authority for a specific, local community (e.g. lost
epistle to Laodicea)?
* How were the people supposed to decide on 'gap filler'
documents? In other words, how were they supposed to evaluate
'candidate' works that filled in the 'summarized periods' in Jesus'
life, such as childhood periods?
* And finally, what sense are we to make of the phenomena of
citations? When Jude alludes to an apocryphal work, or the OT cites
the Book of Jasher, or Paul cites Meander, what are we to conclude
about their views of those books, relative to 'inspiration'?
As you can see from this very brief characterization of the problem,
the MAIN issue will be how to judge the authenticity of ANY prophetic
voice...and it is to this issue that we will first turn.
Accordingly, this study will divide into several sections:
* <http://www.christian-thinktank.com/canon01.html>General
considerations on how this process would 'look' given Christian
understandings of scripture, providence, history, sovereignty. In
other words, how close would the actual historical process 'look
like' what the evangelical would PREDICT the process should look
like? [A basic theory-prediction model].
* <http://www.christian-thinktank.com/canon02.html>The Epistemic
issue--how to get the process started? Where do we get the initial
criteria?!...The OT model of judging revelation: The pre-Mosaic backdrop.
* <http://www.christian-thinktank.com/canon03.html>The OT model
of judging revelation: The Mosaic setup and launch
* <http://www.christian-thinktank.com/canon04.html>The OT model
of judging revelation: The People fail to perform under the Mosaic system
* <http://www.christian-thinktank.com/canon05.html>The OT model
of judging revelation: The promise of an alternate route to the
Abrahamic blessings--New hearts, New Covenant, New Moses.
* The OT model of judging revelation:
<http://www.christian-thinktank.com/canon06.html>The "OT in the OT"
phenomena--where did the OT authors 'see' God's words?
* The OT model of judging revelation: At the "close" of the OT period.
* The Intertestamental period: The explosions of writing and the
"individualistic" implications
* The Intertestamental period: Shared Texts versus Shared Beliefs
* The Intertestamental period: The phenomena--where did the
Intertstl authors 'see' God's words?
* The NT period: Jesus and the locus of revelation
* The NT period: Jesus the last OT prophet
* The NT period: Jesus, the New Covenant, the New Sinai, the New
Moses, and the first NT prophet
* The NT period: The Apostolic band--the witness community and
first generation
* The NT period: The Community--the organism of shared experience
and belief
* The NT period: The Community--her roots in the Jewish
'literary' community
* The NT period: Information flow in the early church
* Post-NT: the extension of the process to a 'canon' of the OT
* Post-NT: the extension of the process to a 'canon' of the NT
* Retrospect--looking back on the process
This subject can be very, very detailed, and there are TONS of books
that give that detail...I hope rather to focus on the logic of the
process--how it was entirely reasonable, non-abusive, necessary, with
adequate precedent, and not such "a big deal" after all...
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