Subject: Re: nice detail, robbie...
From: L. Manning Vines (lmanningvines@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Jul 07 2002 - 16:07:07 EDT
Jim said:
<< I think that, though, by the time of Christ there was already a
sense of the canon of Scripture. Christ refered to the division of
the writings you yourself mentioned -- the Law and the Prophets,
or the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. I don't know that the
idea of a canon was as fixed as it is now, but the idea did exist
prior to the time of Christ. >>
I am not entirely convinced of that. If we do say that some sort of
biblical canon existed in the first century C.E., your suggestion that it
might not have been as fixed as it is now needs some elaborating, I think.
The Law certainly would have been more fixed than anything. It is the
oldest, or at least has the oldest strands. And the Torah, even to Jews
today, has a unique position of highest authority within the canon. Most
copies of the Torah remain unpointed (with vowel markings), in fact, whereas
the remainder of the books in the Tanakh are usually pointed. There is
still a tradition of sofrim (scribes) who write the Torah by hand, usually
for use in religious services. Readers in services follow along with a
small stick, usually with an end shaped like a little hand with extended
forefinger, called a yad ("hand") because the letters are too sacred to
touch with the fingers. The Jews in the first century might have made less
a distinction between the written law and the oral law, the latter shortly
became the Talmud, but the law was what was probably most like our canon to
them.
The Bible today is primarily thought of as a Book. If there was something
like a canon in the first century, it would necessarily have been something
more like, say, a literary canon we would have today. It would not
literally be a book, but a list of books, the details of which might be
controversial and loosely-defined. The inclusion of certain books, like
those of the Law, would be certain, but some argument might exist over
others. Canon in the sense of the western literary one is very different
than canon in the sense of the biblical one, and any canon in the first
century would have more closely resembled the former. In the very least,
their canon would be less exclusive than its modern counterpart. It is
certain that even the early Christians took very seriously some books that
are today excluded from the Bible and are considered apocryphal.
I should probably also mention that where English translations of the New
Testament use the word "scripture" or sometimes even "prophecy" (!), the
Greek word so translated is almost always "graphe." This noun comes from
the verb "grapho" which means "to scratch." The noun designates any
representation by means of lines. The same word is used all over, from when
Pilate writes the sign for the cross to when Jesus writes in the dirt. The
closest English word would be something like "scrawling" or "etching," to
maintain the sense of a scratch. This, it seems to me, sheds a slightly
different light on New Testament mentions of scriptures. The Greek seems to
me less like referencing a Bible and more like referencing some stuff that
was written someplace.
The lesson I called the immediate one to be found in the Qumran scrolls is
not something that I take to be unique to the community at Qumran. There is
evidence of efforts to produce standardized texts where many variants exist
at major intellectual centers in antiquity, but before the copyright and
printing press, prior to and away from encounters with these communities of
scholars who seek, then as now, to eliminate inconsistency and to
standardize, I suspect that the example of the Qumran sect is more the rule
than the exception. I suspect that the dynamic or evolving book, the book
composed over years from different strands and different authors and
editors, was much more common. This sort of composition would be impossible
with most of the kinds of art we produce today (I share Scottie's suspicion
of "group art"), but with the sort of narrative found in many ancient texts,
I suspect that it would be much more attainable given a certain genius in
the editing. This would probably have a minimal influence (or none at all)
on the Athenian playwrights or the writers of the New Testament epistles,
but I think it was very significant in the composition of the Hebrew Bible.
I am aggravated by scholarly attempts to pull apart Genesis by the seams,
denying or ignoring the artistic unity, but I still doubt very much that one
man wrote the book as we have it today. There may be no evidence that the
Qumran community had variants of Genesis, because it had somehow already
become so standardized, by I believe that what we see with other books in
Qumran would have been true of Genesis at an earlier time.
-robbie
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