Category: Canon

The New Testament in Flux

On By Dr. David LitwaIn Blog, Canon, Marcion5 Comments

Conservative apologists often boast that the New Testament (NT) is the best preserved and bested attested text from antiquity (over 5000 manuscript witnesses). What they don’t tell you is that none of this matters because not a single one of these manuscripts are original. This means that there is a “dark period” between the time of writing every document of the NT and the time of its actual appearance as a manuscript we possess.

Take, for instance, the Gospel according to Mark. The earliest manuscripts of Mark appear in the early third century (to give it a number, about 220 CE). If you think it was written around 70 CE, then there is 150 year gap in which we do not have any idea what was going on with the text of Mark. We could have ten billion manuscripts of Mark from the third century, but it would not matter, because literally anything in Mark could have been changed in the long, dark period between 70 and 220 CE.

The unsuspecting Christian might ask: why would we suppose there was considerable change in NT texts during the dark period? Answer: Because we see traces of major changes in the manuscripts.

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Rejecting Biblical Violence

On By Dr. David LitwaIn Blog, CanonLeave a comment

It is a noble principle that the Bible never be used to harm others. And it seems useful to train readers to read the Bible nonviolently. More power to the interpreter! Here it is easy to have a relativist attitude about biblical violence: “it is what you make of it” But is it?

It is not just that Christians are misinterpreting their sacred texts by taking them out of context or perverting them to justify violence. “The problem is actual violence at the heart of these texts that can be reasonably cited by people to justify their own recourse to violence.”[1] The patriarchal bias in scripture is widespread and appalling. “God is represented as abuser and killer of children; God is said to command the rape of women and the wholesale destruction of cities, including children and animals. To shrink from making such statements is dishonest.”[2]

John J. Collins admits that much in the Bible is “not worthy of humanity” or of human imitation. “The least that should be expected of any biblical interpreter is honesty, and that requires the recognition” that God’s command to kill people groups, to put them under the “ban,” is morally offensive. Then Collins puts his finger on the deeper problem: “The Bible has contributed to violence in the world precisely because it has been taken to confer a degree of certitude that transcends human discussion and argumentation.”[3]

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Recent Discussions of Canon in German

On By Dr. David LitwaIn Blog, CanonLeave a comment

I recently read the excellent German-language Journal Zeitschrift für Neues Testament. It was running a series of articles on canon, which I’d like to share with you in summary form.

Janet Spittler, “Apokryphe Apostelerzählungen und ihre Funktion in der Geschichte des Christentums: Von den Rändern ins Zentrum,” ZeitNT 26 (51, ʼ23) 55-77.

The article presents a case study which shows in what way apostolic figures—here the apostle John—were remembered in Christian literature from the 2nd century until the Byzantine period and through the western Middle Ages. The apocryphal traditions about John changed over the centuries in form, language, and content, but they show a remarkable consistency. After introducing the Acts of John, the article discusses the metastasis; writing, adaptation, and translation of the apocryphal character of John; the acceptance of apocryphal traditions about John in biblical mss; and Drusiana in art, literature, and biblical mss. The essay concludes that while some elements of the tradition offer insight into the beliefs and practices of “marginal” Christianity, it is more accurate that the different permutations of this and other apocryphal traditions reveal the conceptions of a long series of “Christianities” in which the tradition (and the literary works in which it was inscribed) was adapted, read, and valued.

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