Tradition and the Canon of Scripture lyrics

Let us look at those Scriptures which provide a corrective to unwritten tradition a standard or “canon” by which it may be tested. In other words, we must consider the relation between our general subject of Christian tradition and the “canon” of Scripture. When we speak of the “canon” of Scripture we use the word in a different sense from that of “rule” or “standard”; the “canon” of Scripture is originally the “list” of books recognized by the church as her sacred writings, a use of the word first attested, it appears, in Athanasius.1 But inevitably, because of the close relation between Scripture and the rule of faith, something of the sense of authority has come to be attached in common usage to the terms “canon” and “canonical” when they refer to the books of the Bible.

This is an area in which the most biblicist and anti-traditionalist Christian communities rely perforce upon tradition, a tradition which in fact is more essential the more biblicist a community it is. For the more essential the more biblicist a community is, the more dependent it is for its authority on sola scriptura, and the more necessary it is to define sola scriptura. In other words, the more Christians aim at being “people of one book,” the more important it is for them to know the limits of that one book.



 Delimiting The Canon

There are some churches in which the limits of the canon are laid down by authority; their members (formally, at any rate) accept these limits because their church has defined them. This is true, for instance, of the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England, and those churches which adhere to the Westminster Confession of Faith. But what of churches which do not have the canon of Scripture delimited for them in this way? (I write now of my own heritage.) On what authority (say) do we accept the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, as commonly reckoned, either rejecting the Apocrypha altogether or else relegating them to an inferior or “deuterocanonical” status? “We accept these thirty-nine books,” it may be said, “because they make up the Hebrew Bible which our Lord and the apostles acknowledged.” True there seems to have been common ground between our Lord and the Jewish scribes of His day on the content of Scripture, however much they differed on its interpretation and application. We may be sure that He and they accepted the threefold corpus of Law, Prophets, and Writings as it was known from the second century B.C. if not earlier.2 But, in view of the fact that the precise limits of the third group, the “Writings,” do not appear to have been fixed by Jewish authority until the last quarter of the first century A.D., can we be quite sure that our Lord accepted (say) Ecclesiastes or Esther? lf, as the argument from silence might suggest, Esther was unknown as a canonical book to the Qumran community; would it be surprising to discover that it was similarly unknown in our Lord’s circle? Yet we accept Ecclesiastes and Esther as part of Holy Scripture. Why? Not, in our case, because ecclesiastical authority so directs us stubborn individualists as many of us are. If ecclesiastical authority did so direct us, that in itself might stimulate us to refuse the direction. No, we accept them, l suppose, because we have “received” them as included in Holy Writ, in other words, because of our tradition. Our tradition is not inviolably sacrosanct, but unless strong reason is shown for rejecting something that we so receive, like the canonicity of these books, we go along with it.

Take an example of another kind: the Book of Enoch.4 We do not accept this book as canonical. It is not so accepted either by western Catholicism (the rock from which we were hewn) or by eastern Orthodoxy, although it is part of the Bible of the Monophysite Ethiopic church. Yet it is quoted, and quoted as authoritative, by a New Testament writer5. We cannot dismiss Jude’s Enoch quotation as on a level with Paul’s quotations from Menander6 or Epimenides7; Jude quotes from the Book of Enoch as other New Testament writers quote the Hebrew prophets, treating the words as a divine oracles8. No doubt it would put too great a strain on our intellectual agility to defend the divine inspiration of the whole Book of Enoch, even if other parts of it have influenced thought and language elsewhere in the New Testament.9 But it is not because of the difficulty of defending the inspiration of the Book of Enoch that we do not accept it; it is primarily because our tradition does not recognize it: we have not "received" it. Certainly, if valid arguments were forthcoming for the acceptance of this book, we might revise our tradition and accept it; otherwise, we go along with our tradition.

However, Jude’s quotation of a passage from the Book of Enoch as a divine oracle might prompt the query whether the Letter of Jude itself should be accepted as canonical. It was one the “disputed” books in the early church,10 and Luther put it among the four New Testament books to which he accorded a lower canonical status than the other twenty-three.11 But this raises the problem of the New Testament canon, a knottier problem than that of the Old Testament canon. Apart from such questions as might be raised about “marginal” books like Eccesiastes and Esther, the Christian biblicist can properly say that he accepts the Old Testament not on the authority of ecclesiastical tradition but on that of our Lord and the apostles. He has no such short answer to the question of the New Testament canon. These, then, are some of the questions which arise when this subject is under consideration.


The Old Testament Canon

The earliest Christians, as we have seen, found their sacred writings ready at hand in the books of the Hebrew Bible, either in their original text or in the Greek version. The acceptance of the Old Testament was indubitably something which they “received from the Lord” by example as well as by instruction. For, to reproduce a purple passage from a distinguished Old Testament scholar of a past generation:
"For us its supreme sanction is that which it received from Christ Himself. It was the Bible of His education and the Bible of His ministry. He took for granted its fundamental doctrines about creation, about man and about righteousness; about God’s Providence of the world and His purposes of grace through Israel. He accepted its history as the preparation for Himself, and taught His disciples to find Him in it. He used it to justify His mission and to illuminate the mystery of His Cross. He drew from it many of the examples and most of the categories of His gospel. He reinforced the essence of its law and restored many of its ideals. But, above all, He fed His own soul with its contents, and the great crises of His life sustained Himself upon it as upon the living and sovereign Word of God. These are the highest external proofs -- if indeed we can call them external-- for the abiding validity of the Old Testament in the life and doctrine of Christ’s Church. What was indispensable to the Redeemer must always be indispensable to the redeemed.12"

In the apostolic age there is no sign that Christians felt the need of a New Testament in the sense of a collection of writings. They had the sacred writings which their Lord used and fulfilled, writings which not only conveyed the way of “salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” but which also, being divinely inspired, were “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.13” These writings, until well into the second century, constituted the church’s Bible, read, of course, through Christian spectacles. From them the apostles of the first century and the apologists of the second century drew their basic texts as they proclaimed and defended the gospel; the reading of them was sufficient to convince a number of educated pagans of the truth of Christianity.14

One thing which does not seem to have greatly concerned those early Christians was the precise delimitation of their Bible. Actually, there was no particular reason why they should be greatly concerned; they were all agreed about its main contents. It is commonly supposed that the threefold division of the Hebrew Bible corresponds to three stages in the growth of the Hebrew canon.15 The Law and the Prophets were firmly established as well-defined bodies of canonical literature long before the Christian era, and so were most of the “Writings.” The grandson of Jesus ben Sira tells how his grandfather, at the beginning of the second century B.C., was a student of “the law and the prophets and the other books of our fathers.16” Our Lord apparently knew His Bible as beginning with Genesis and ending with Chronicles,17 as the Hebrew Bible traditionally does and He is recorded as speaking of “everything that is written in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms.” Since the Psalter is the first book of the “Writings,” it has sometimes been thought that “the psalms” here might indicate the whole group of doc*ments which it introduces, but this is uncertain. This third group was not authoritatively “closed” until after the catastrophe of A.D. 70, when the rabbis of Jamnia, Yochanan ben Zakkai and his colleagues, undertook the reconstitution of the Jewish polity on a religious basis. But although the “Writings" had remained open until then, so that they could freely discuss the admission of fresh doc*ments or the eviction of others, their final decision seems to have been the confirmation of traditional practice.18 Josephus, writing towards the end of the first century, treats the whole canon of Hebrew scripture as closed and reckons its contents to be twenty-two books in all (a total designed to coincide with the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet).19

Christians, however, and particularly Gentile Christians, would not feel bound by the decrees of Jamnia. The rank and file who used the Greek version might include among their sacred books works which were closely associated with those of whose canonicity there was no doubt, although the better informed made a distinction in theory, at least, between those which were part of the Hebrew Bible and those which were not. Here and there in the New Testament we find introduced by a formula which normally indicates a Scripture quotation something which cannot be identified in any Old Testament text known to us (or, for the matter of that, in any other text known to us).20 Jude not only quotes from the Book of Enoch,21 but also alludes to an incident which was probably recorded in the Assumption of Moses.22 It is striking, however, that from “the Books commonly called Apocrypha” no quotation appears to be made by any New Testament writer.23