Posts tagged as:

canon

Is “the Bible alone” an oxymoron?

February 23, 2010

I felt it was about time for a controversial question. Occasionally one will come across an otherwise well-thought out post which insists that “the Bible alone” is, or should be, the basis for – well, pretty much everything genuinely Christian, but especially doctrine and ethics. It has a reasonable pedigree in the Reformation. But does [...]

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A fragmentation too far?

January 15, 2010

I had a conversation last week with a really pleasant and very interesting specialist in philosophy and theology about the Christian use of the codex, Irenaeus and the canonisation of the fourfold gospel. I was fascinated to find that neither he, nor the other two systematics guys around the table, ever seemed to have heard [...]

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Canon formation: an unworthy thought?

November 4, 2009

It seems to me that there is no clear evidence proving that the current canon of the Hebrew Bible / Protestant Old Testament was finalised by the first century. All the evidence is open to diverse interpretation, but even within the pages of the New Testament we have evidence that at least one Jewish believer [...]

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Claude and the Canon: how much would you hide historical complexity from beginners?

October 26, 2009

Claude Mariottini writes what is clearly a (very) introductory post for people who know less than little about the Christian – well, Protestant – Old Testament canon.
Along the way he makes these statements

In antiquity, the Jewish people called the whole collection known today as the Old Testament by the three divisions of which the Bible [...]

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How can NIV be a bible for “the whole church”?

September 22, 2009

Peter Kirk offers a helpful analysis of the FAQ about the N2IV. As I remarked in the comments on Peter’s post, there seems to me to be an inescapable conflict between the answer to 21:

The Committee on Bible Translation has no plans at the present to produce a translation of the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books

and [...]

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Does the Bible call “apocrypha” scripture?

September 22, 2009

Obviously, the Bible does not refer to the Bible, and any “biblical doctrine” (whatever exactly one of those is) of scripture is at best an inferential extrapolation. Those whose only authority is the Bible, however, are obliged not only to make the move, but to make it as strong a case as possible. The real [...]

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A fuzzy-edged Bible: which canon and whose apocrypha?

September 10, 2009

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)
The sixth article is on scripture, but before dealing with it, it is worth noting the order in which things come. We reach the discussion of scripture already having expressed commitments to the faith of the Church in the Triune God. [...]

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Hey, Jim, I think I’ve found a dilettante

August 7, 2009

Sometimes Google News finds me articles I can’t resist taking a look at from places I’ve never heard of. Today it threw up an article from Blanco County, Texas (sorry, never heard of it before) on the formation of the canon. On the one hand, I applaud getting something on this topic into a local [...]

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Interpretation or interruption? Canon and conversation.

July 22, 2009

I really liked this post by Daniel Kirk on Christian reading of the Bible. I think I might have said not too dissimilar things in the past (although possibly not as well). So it was interesting that, seeing it said by someone else, my reaction was more of a “Yes, but …”. There are clearly [...]

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The crashing of Sinaiticus on the Ehrman line

July 6, 2009

It seems that the codex sinaiticus website has crashed under all the publicity. Shame. Mind you, the way it’s getting written up is almost guaranteed to have people flocking to it. I think it’s great that these images are available. Unfortunately the BBC decided to link to an earlier magazine article when news of this [...]

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