Retroengineering the canon of Scripture

(Posted on behalf of Steve.)

In his classic monograph on The Character of Physical Law, Richard Feynman makes the following observation (pp. 45-47):

This is a good illustration of the relation of mathematics to physics...Mathematics, then, is a way of going from one set of statements to another...In fact the total amount that a physicist knows is very little. He has only to remember the rules to get him from one place to another and he is all right, because all the various statements about equal times, the force being in the direction of the radius, and so on, are all interconnected by reasoning.

Now an interesting question comes up. Is there a place to begin to deduce the whole works? Is there some particular pattern or order in nature by which we can understand that one set of statements is more fundamental and one set of statements more consequential?

It is like a bridge with lots of members, and it is over-connected; if pieces have dropped out you can reconnect it another way…What I have called the Babylonian idea is to say, "I happen to know this, and I happen to know that, and maybe I know that; and I work everything out from there. Tomorrow I may forget that this is true, but remember that something else is true, so I can reconstruct it all again. I am never quite sure of where I am supposed to begin or where I am supposed to end. I just remember enough all of the time so that as the memory fades and some of the pieces fall out I can put the thing back together again every day."

This is analogous to the way in which we can retroengineer the canon of Scripture from the intertextuality of Scripture.

Catholic apologists typically treat the Bible as a random collection of books, lacking inner unity. As such, only the Magisterium could canonize the Bible, for unity must be imposed by an extraneous source on this otherwise disparate and arbitrary collection of books.

On a related note, Catholic apologists also say that sola Scriptura undermines the Protestant canon, for Scripture itself doesn’t furnish a table of contents.

However, modern studies on the intertextuality of Scripture increasingly document the internal unity of Scripture. And, of course, the unity of Scripture figures in the canonicity of Scripture, as an interconnected set of books.

Here is one example (PDF).