Canon Challenge Widespread Publication Of Ancient Texts Raises Anew Questions About The Scope Of The Bible

During Christianity’s first four centuries, leaders of the faith collected the writings that would authoritatively describe Christ and his church while rejecting others written at the same time. The 27 chosen books, beginning with the Gospel of Matthew and concluding with Revelations, comprise the New Testament.

“In these alone is proclaimed the doctrine of godliness,” declared Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria in 367, credited with first using the word “canon” to describe the Bible’s contents.

But these days, scholarly research and mass market publishing are bringing to the public ancient texts that Athanasius and other early church leaders excluded.

Some are works of popular piety (such as the Infancy Gospel of James, which relates a life of the Virgin Mary). Others are books once condemned as heretical (such as the gnostic Gospel of Thomas, containing 114 sayings attributed to Jesus).

Certainly, their appearance is another sign of how public interest in spirituality has followed scholarly research outside ecclesiastical boundaries. But more important, their growing availability brings to light a disagreement among some scholars over the value of these texts and what they reveal about early Christianity’s development.

Taking a provocative stance, a few scholars even talk about creating a new canon. And at a popular level, publication could, for some, blur the line between what the church considers to be revealed truth and what it does not.

Luke Timothy Johnson, professor of New Testament at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, is concerned about the popular use of the nonbiblical texts.

Some champions of those documents regarded the compiling of the New Testament as a politically motivated suppression of other texts instead of a natural process of defining Christian belief against heresy, he said. It would appeal to a “consumerist consciousness,” Johnson said, allowing an alternative to the New Testament canon.

At a considerable distance from Johnson on this issue stands Robert W. Funk, an independent scholar who has called for the creation of a new canon that would include a wide range of the early writings about Jesus.

“We just need to put some of these things back inside the paradigm,” said Funk, founder of the controversial Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars that has undertaken a new quest for a historical figure of Jesus.

Some of the group’s translations of early documents have been published by Polebridge Press, which Funk also founded. The seminar is also known for “The Five Gospels,” published first in hardcover by Macmillan and now in paperback by HarperCollins, which places the Gospel of Thomas alongside Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Unlike the biblical gospels, Thomas contains no narrative, only sayings attributed to Jesus, some familiar, others decidedly not.

Its origins lie with second-century Christian gnostics who taught that matter was evil, God utterly remote and salvation available only to the few who could attain hidden spiritual knowledge. The early church condemned these beliefs as heretical.

Although church-history scholars knew about Thomas from the writings of the theologians who condemned it, the document remained hidden until 1945, when it was discovered in a trove of gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Two years later archeologists uncovered the Dead Sea Scrolls, 520 ancient Jewish manuscripts in a cave.

“Their publication in a post-World War II world developed a kind of public domain for this stuff that never existed before,” said David M. Scholer, professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary. “That, I think, fed the scholarship by providing more readily available texts as well as this market consciousness of selling books.”

It’s difficult to put this material in context, Scholer said.

“It’s hard to write a popular book to explain a complex historical and theological issue,” he said.

Since the 1970s there has been a shift away from New Testament scholars solely interested in the New Testament, said Ronald Hock, professor of religion at the University of Southern California.

“The distinction between canonical and noncanonical has disappeared, at least among scholars,” Hock said.

This trend parallels a much broader movement in academic circles to examine groups that were considered marginal, such as women and minorities, he said.

Hock’s book, “The Life of Mary and the Birth of Jesus” (Ulysses Press), is his translation and commentary on the Infancy Gospel of James, a second-century document that focuses on Mary.

“At one level, it’s trying to explain why Mary was chosen to be the mother of Jesus,” he said. “It answers that by saying she’s the purest woman around.”

The text tells a Nativity story strikingly different from anything in the New Testament: Mary gives birth to Jesus in a cave, not a manger; Joseph sees the world stand still, as humans and animals freeze in their tracks; and a midwife examines Mary and pronounces her a virgin after the birth.

The story influenced Christian art for centuries, Hock said.

People are open not only to nonbiblical texts but also to discussion of theological questions far beyond Christianity’s conventional bounds, Funk said.

The canon “represents the orthodoxy that won out in the fourth century,” he said, but it can no longer be preserved.

Johnson agrees many scholars interested in recovering “alternative voices” from Christianity’s early days say the canon’s status as divinely inspired is irrelevant.

“The new scholarly orthodoxy is, in the beginning there was diversity,” Johnson added.

Still, he likens the call for a new canon to the deconstructionists’ criticism that classics of Western literature don’t represent any particular truth but are just one interpretation among many. As for the nonbiblical texts, he said they can make enlightening reading.

But he suggested, too, that the church ought to remind Christians which material it regards as authentic to the faith and what is noncanonical, which may be intellectually interesting but lacks religious authority.