Canon and Canonicity: The Formation and Use of Scripture. Edited by EINAR THOMASSEN.

Abstract

The virtue of balancing the available historical evidence as carefully as possible is crucial in the study of the Christian bipartite canon. This book on canon formation and canonicity, edited by Einar Thomassen, makes a welcome contribution in this regard. The eleven essays included were originally written as part of ‘Highways and Byways’, an interdisciplinary project at the Department of Classics, Russian and Religion at the University of Bergen, Norway. The main concern of the project is to study ‘the Christian idea of “orthodoxy” ’. Following von Harnack’s understanding of the emergence of normative Christian faith—episcopate, rule of faith/creed, and scriptural canon as the regulative ecclesiastical structures—the essays aim at shedding light on ‘some of the many problems involved’ in the establishment of the canon of Scripture as one dimension of orthodoxy. Thomassen’s opening chapter, ‘Some Notes on the Development of Christian Ideas about a Canon’, provides nuanced and creative comments on the Christian canon formation. The commonly sharp distinction made by some scholars between canon as norm and as list is rightly softened. It is pointed out that the category of list or catalogue is not only late, but also rare in comparison with that of normativity: ‘When ancient Christian texts speak about “canonical” books, it is often the normative quality, or the authoritativeness, of certain books that is intended, rather than their inclusion in a particular list of titles’ (p. 9). An interesting observation in this connection—which has been made only by a few scholars—is the obvious connection between these two notions of biblical canonicity, since ‘a list may in itself represent a norm’. As it turns out, this is what is at stake not only in the Christian use of the Greek concept, but also within other domains, such as the drawing of astronomical canon tables: ‘[L]ists and norms are two different things. But in so far as some lists have a normative purpose, there is an area where the two categories overlap’ (p. 10). It therefore also makes perfect sense to view the biblical canon formation as a process. The critical scholarly task, then, may be to provide models for the ‘archaeology of the various layers that contributed to its production’. Thomassen here takes the reader back to the beginning, with ‘the proto-canonical phase’ consisting of: (a) a memory phase—the preservation and/or the invention of a memory about Jesus of Nazareth, out of which ‘a certain number of sayings, to which special authority was accorded, were distilled from the memory about Jesus’; (b) the formation of a ten-letter Pauline epistolary canon written to seven churches (whereas the sayings of Jesus have a revelatory quality, the letters of Paul, in the author’s view, ‘are not divine revelation’); and (c) the formation of extended narratives about Jesus, so-called Gospel writings (including words and deeds; cf. Acts 1:1). A common feature found throughout these layers ‘is the fact that during the first two centuries the words of Jesus possessed a special authority in themselves that can without doubt be called canonical’ (p. 15). The ‘canonization phase’ is discussed under two subheadings, ‘the Idea of a Christian Canon’ and ‘Verification of the Apostolic’. The essay closes with some reflections on canon as tradition and canon as revealed text. Even if not fully convincing, the following two claims are worth pondering further: (a) the view of the apostolic writings as inspired arose from the creation of the two-testament Bible, through the assimilation of the apostolic writings to the already established pattern of prophetically inspired Scripture, and (b) ‘once the Bible as a whole had consolidated its position as a constitutive element of Christian tradition, that position itself secured for it a status as sacred object. In this way, the Bible became a holy book’ (p. 25).