Canon revisited

In this post I'll discuss some aspects of the Catholic/Protestant debate over the canon. 

1. What, exactly, is the nature of the Catholic claim? Is it an ontological claim regarding the nature of Scripture? Is the claim that there's no intrinsic difference between what counts as Scripture and what doesn't? Is it that an ecumenical council could just as well vote the Gospel of John out of the canon and vote the Gospel of Thomas into the canon? Does it come down to raw, arbitrary ecclesiastical authority? 

2. Is it an epistemological argument regarding the certainty or uncertainty of the canon? Catholic apologists appeal to the "infallible church" as a shortcut. But does that work, or does that just push the same questions back a step? Consider Karl Keating's spiral argument:

On the first level we argue to the reliability of the Bible insofar as it is history. From that we conclude that an infallible Church was founded. And then we take the word of that infallible Church that the Bible is inspired. This is not a circular argument because the final conclusion (the Bible is inspired) is not simply a restatement of its initial finding (the Bible is historically reliable), and its initial finding (the Bible is historically reliable) is in no way based on the final conclusion (the Bible is inspired). What we have demonstrated is that without the existence of the Church, we could never know whether the Bible is inspired.

This seems to be a Catholic version of an argument by John Warwick Montgomery. There are some basic problems with Keating's argument:

i) It takes the canon for granted as a starting-point rather than end-point. You can only argue for and from the reliability of Scripture if you know where to find Scripture.

ii) Even if his argument was successful, it yields probability rather than certainty because the conclusion can't be more certain than what's feeding into the conclusion. Even if the Bible bears witness to an infallible church, the Bible that does that, in Keating's argument, is a fallible Bible. At best, that's a fallible testimony to an infallible church.  

iii) Protestants find Catholic prooftexts for the infallible church of Rome specious. 

But in that event, the Catholic church doesn't offer certainty on the canon. It doesn't solve the problem it poses for itself. It doesn't provide a superior alternative to the epistemic situation of Protestants. 

3. The OT Apocrypha is an arbitrarily selective corpus. There's no essential difference between the OT Apocrypha and the OT pseudepigrapha. It's the same kind of intertestamental literature. It's just the inertia of unreflective tradition that differentiates the OT Apocrypha from the OT pseudepigrapha. What makes Tobit or Bel and the Dragon more fitting candidates for canonicity than 1 Enoch, the Assumption/Testament of Moses, or the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs? It's just a historical accident that Trent canonized some intertestamental books rather than others. 

If the Vatican was starting from scratch, based on the assumptions of the historical-critical method, which is mainstream in contemporary Catholic scholarship, are we to believe they'd come up with the same list? Books were canonized based on traditional authorship, which is routinely rejected by mainstream Catholic scholarship. By contemporary Catholic standards, they were canonized under false pretenses.  

4. Of course, critical scholars regard Daniel as a pseudepigraphal work from the intertestamental period. However, the status of Daniel is inseparable from the NT. From a NT perspective, the inspiration of Daniel is nonnegotiable, given how the prophecies of Daniel figure in NT eschatology. 

5. Debates over the canon are often artificial because it depends on the availability of viable alternative candidates. But there's little else to choose from. Ironically, both OT and NT pseudepigrapha bear witness to the termination of the OT and NT canon. The use of pseudonymity is a wedge tactic to reopen the canon by backdating newer compositions to OT and NT times. 

6. Consider the "apostolic fathers", viz. Papias, 1 Clement, The Didache, The Epistle of Barnabas, The Epistle of Polycarp, The Shepherd of Hermas, the letters of Ignatius. Are they candidates for canonicity? Unless continuous public revelation is the norm, resulting in an open-ended canon, there may well be some writings after the termination of the canon by contemporaries of the waning apostolic age. 

From a Jewish perspective, the interestamental period is a misnomer. Public revelation and canonical inspiration simply ended with some postexilic books. There's nothing else on the horizon. And that's analogous to the interadventual age. 

7. Catholic apologists appeal to the (allegedly) larger canon of the LXX. But was there ever a monolithic LXX? As Peter Williams, Warden of Tyndale House, has noted:

I'm not against the idea of a unity of a corpus of pre-Christian Greek translations. My point is that this needs to be demonstrated rather than assumed. I currently have not seen any compelling reason to suppose that a first century Christian (for instance) would have certainly thought that the Greek version of Isaiah used in his or her synagogue was part of a unified translation corpus with the Pentateuch.

http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2015/05/why-pete-williams-does-not-believe-in.html?showComment=1479127123327#c7731979635102780395

8. Suppose for argument's sake that the Protestant canon might mistakenly include a book that ought to be excluded or exclude a book that ought to be included. Suppose it isn't possible to be certain. But if we're mistaken through no fault of our own, because the evidence is inconclusive, is that something we should fret over? Unless God is going to punish Christians for unavoidable mistakes, how is that our responsibility? 

The NT has a very large core canon. Hardly any NT books are open to serious dispute. Likewise, the OT has a very large core canon. 

9. Because the Jews were the original recipients of Yahweh's revelation, that made them informal custodians of the OT. Those are the books they copied. Those are the books they stored in the tabernacle, temple, synagogues. They'd also know which books originate during the intertestamental period. 

Appealing to Jewish testimony isn't an argument from authority. The appeal is de facto rather than de jure.

To take a comparison, consider family correspondence. Grown children may save letters that relatives wrote to them. To that extent they become custodians of family correspondence. When they die, their children may inherit that correspondence. So there was an informal chain of custody, where this material was passed down through family members. Where relatives become de facto custodians of family correspondence, simply by saving letters as well as inheriting their personal effects. That's ordinary providence at work. 

We can think of the Jewish witness to the OT along similar lines. As the original recipients, they were in possession of the books. They became the de facto custodians. It was copied from one generation to the next. All they have to do is to hang onto the documents. Transmit the documents to the next generation, through transcription and catechesis. And, of course, we'd expect special providence to be in play regarding the OT scriptures. 

10. It's evangelical scholars rather than Catholic scholars who move the heavy mental lumber in defending the historicity and authenticity of the Bible. To take some fairly recent examples:

Stephen Dempster, “The Old Testament Canon, Josephus and Cognitive Environment,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, ed. D. A. Carson, (Zondervan, 2016), 321-361.

Simon Gathercole, “The Titles of the Gospels in the Earliest New Testament Manuscripts”, ZNW 104.1 (2013), pp. 33-76.

C. E. Hill, Who Chose the Gospels? (Oxford 2012).

Timothy J. Stone, The Compilational History of the Megilloth: Canon, Contoured Intertextuality and Meaning in the Writings (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013).