Corpus-Paul

[Licia Kuenning <Licia AT compuserve.com>]

> I wonder, now that the rejoinder has been made, whether
> further pursuit of this topic--at least in the direction it
> appears to be going, namely, towards the question of
> inerrancy and whether there was divine direction behind
> the eventual recognition of only 27 books as the canon
> of the NT--is something that we want to engage in. It will,
> I fear, take us well beyond the scope of C-P. So I ask that
> *if* it is felt that questions of Pauline authorship and canon
> still need to be raised,  participants limit themselves to some
> historical and not doctrinal aspect of these questions.

I accept Jeff's point that we are here to discuss the Pauline
corpus historically rather than theologically--though the
boundary does get a little fuzzy when we're talking about the
Bible; and of course the reason there is so much interest in
these writings is because they are theologically important to
a great many people.

The canon is a tradition (or several traditions): there is
nothing in any of the canonical books that says "Thou shalt
delineate a canon, and thou shalt call it the Word of God."
But I am one who has never quite been able to see what is
wrong with tradition.  Are we the first generation of people to
know anything?  Granted that those who put together the canon
had their biases and limitations, and they didn't even have
Windows 98, still they were temporally and culturally much
closer to the authors of the writings in question than we are.
Why shouldn't their judgment of what was authentic be worth
something?

Licia Kuenning
cat lover

Licia AT compuserve.com
kuenning-licia AT voicenet.com