Ancient Wisdom Today » Canon http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org Ancient Wisdom Today: seeking to understand the past to make sense of the present Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:09:17 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 God’s Word in Many Other Words http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/2009/01/02/gods-word-in-many-other-words/ http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/2009/01/02/gods-word-in-many-other-words/#comments Fri, 02 Jan 2009 14:40:12 +0000 Maer http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/?p=53 In my last post we saw a few things James Kugel had to say about the importance of the Sefarim Chitzonim (The Outside Books) for how later rabbis came to interpret the Bible. I have become more and more interested in the Apocrypha and Pseudopigrapha, and the little I have read has been incredibly helpful. A friend of mine who recently took a course at Gordon-Conwell in early Judaism had to read quite a bit of Second Temple writings, specially the ones from Qumran. He seems to be a bit disappointed because of the lack of coherence that he found in them. One of my projects for this year is to start reading more of these books and draw my own conclusions. I might even blog some thoughts about them.

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]]> http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/2009/01/02/gods-word-in-many-other-words/feed/ 0 A High View of Scripture? http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/2008/06/02/a-high-view-of-scripture/ http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/2008/06/02/a-high-view-of-scripture/#comments Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:04:47 +0000 Maer http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/?p=18 Allert, Craig D. A High View of Scripture? The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academy, 2007.

This book is about the formation of the New Testament canon. The author does a great job describing the Evangelical movement to set the context of the debates about the authority, inspiration, canonicity and inerrancy of the bible. He basically talks about how the bible came to be formed and looks at the merits of three different theories: 1) the NT was a spontaneous occurrence, 2) the NT was formed in the second century and 3) the NT was formed in the fourth century (p. 41). The differences in these theories can be attributed to the way historical evidence is interpreted (p. 87). The rest of the book analyzes these three theories and concludes that, while we can talk about Scriptures being recognized as authoritative in the first and second centuries, it is anachronistic to talk about a canon in this period. Even in the fourth century, despite the list of Athanasius in the West and Carthage in the East, there was still a lot of fluidity.

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