Corpus-Paul

["Jim Hester" <hester AT jasper.uor.edu>]

I want to comment on the following from Christopher Hutson:

> If the canon means
> anything, surely it is something that is imposed on you and not
> something you yourself create.  I'm not sure why, theologically, YOUR
> humble opinion should matter.  The canon is the canon, not because you
> say so or I say so, but because it is.  It isn't up to me to decide
> what to put in or take out.  The canon is fixed.

I guess I need to know just what canon we are talking about.  Christian
scripture?  Hebrew Scripture?  The Jewish Bible; the Orthodox Bible; the
Catholic Bible; the Protestant Bible?  It seems to me that the very
designation of "canon" is theological, driven by traditional choices, and
anything but "fixed".  Dom Crossan has made the argument that the "canon"
became fixed because Constantine ordered a number of copies of "scripture"
be produced by the authorities of the church.  Funk has made the even more
interesting suggestion that the content of the Bible was fixed by advent of
the printing press!  In fact, Bob argues that it is time, as a result of the
findings of modern schoarlship and in order to meet the needs of a
multi-cultural church, to open the canon.

If the Jesus Seminar has taught us anything, it is that we must consider
authentic Jesus traditions to be found in more than the "canonical" gospels.
If Robbin's socio-rhetorical criticism has taught us anything, it is that we
cannot privilege the texts in the NT canon but must analyze early Christian
traditions by going beyond them to aspects of the multifaceted cultures of
the Greco-Roman world of the first and second centuries.

Considerations of canon for NT scholarship are largely irrelevant, or so it
seems to me!

---------------------
Jim Hester
736 Buckingham Drive
Redlands, CA  92374
(909) 792-0533
hester AT uor.edu
"Let the games begin!"

----------
>From: Christopher Hutson <crhutson AT salisbury.net>
>To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
>Subject: Pauline authorship and Canon
>Date: Tue, May 4, 1999, 6:57 AM
>

> If the canon means
> anything, surely it is something that is imposed on you and not
> something you yourself create.  I'm not sure why, theologically, YOUR
> humble opinion should matter.  The canon is the canon, not because you
> say so or I say so, but because it is.  It isn't up to me to decide
> what to put in or take out.  The canon is fixed.