Showing posts with label Apocrypha-lypso. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Apocrypha-lypso. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Apocrypha-lypso: The Post-Game Show

Scripture cannot be broken,” declared the Lord Jesus. He meant the Old Testament, of course; the New Testament had yet to be written. Today, his words legitimately apply to our entire Bible, but we must be careful not to hurl around the word “scripture” too casually, or to knowingly go beyond what the Lord Jesus intended when he made this powerful and sweeping claim.

My goal in examining the Apocrypha at length was not merely to provide light entertainment by snidely dissing books other people have found spiritually helpful. At the outset, I expressed the hope that the exercise would help us better define what it is about the canonical Old Testament that “distinguishes it from all the other religious writings, folktales, stories and myths with which human history is replete,” and I trust we’ve made good on that to some extent.

Nevertheless, it’s sometimes useful to spell these things out rather than expecting people to read between the lines.

Monday, October 08, 2018

Apocrypha-lypso (12)

Throughout this series we’ve been examining ancient books that some non-Protestant Christians feel have been wrongly excluded from our Bibles. I’ve read, summarized and critiqued eleven of the most popular claimants to date, but there are plenty more out there, enough to keep me at it well into the next decade.

Tempting as that may be, I won’t go down that road for several reasons: (1) the further down into the Apocryphal jungle you travel, the feebler and less substantive the contestants become, such that anyone reading them with the least discernment starts to feel like the exercise of critiquing them is something akin to clubbing baby seals on the beach, as opposed to putting up a valiant defence against plausible error; (2) I promised to do a 12-part series, and I plan to keep that pledge; and (3) the reasons for excluding books from the canon begin to repeat themselves.

We wouldn’t want that. After all, figuring out which qualities make the canon the canon is pretty much the point of the exercise, right?

Monday, October 01, 2018

Apocrypha-lypso (11)

Obsessive music fans know that every artist or band has a “canon” made up of albums recognized by fans, critics and record labels as official releases.

Once an artist becomes established, however, opportunists commonly flood the market with rough takes on familiar tunes, rejected songs from album sessions, cover versions played once for a lark, and bootleg live tracks of questionable sound quality. While these new offerings usually contain a few rare gems and often provide insight into an artist’s work process, they generally do not compare favorably to music released exactly as the performer intended.

The Book of Jubilees might well be called “Outtakes from Genesis”. At least, that’s what it reads like.

Monday, September 24, 2018

Apocrypha-lypso (10)

In this series, we have been examining ancient books which Protestants almost universally exclude from our Old Testament canon.

So far, our Apocryphal entries have self-disqualified for five or six different reasons, including but not limited to historical inaccuracy and theological inconsistency (God is not a son of man, that he should change his mind). After all, if the Bible is God’s word, it seems obvious that documents for which inspiration is claimed must show some fundamental consistency with the accepted canon of scripture.

But today’s entry is neither historically dodgy nor theologically at odds with the rest of the Bible. It is one of our more credible contestants to date.

Monday, September 17, 2018

Apocrypha-lypso (9)

I once came across an online critic of the gospels who attempted to demonstrate his Bible savvy by pointing out that one gospel records a miraculous feeding of 5,000 while another tells of only 4,000 being fed.

“Aha! Contradiction!” cried the elated skeptic, hoping for one of those “gotcha” moments we all enjoy from time to time.

Of course if you’re familiar with either the books of Matthew or Mark, you’ll recall that they each contain references to both feedings. Worse (for the critic at least), Mark records a conversation between Jesus and his disciples that explicitly compares the two events right down to counting the post-dinner leftovers. Jesus fed huge crowds of hungry men, women and children on at least two occasions. Two careful writers noted it.

Monday, September 10, 2018

Apocrypha-lypso (8)

“One of these things things not like the others
  One of these things just doesn’t belong ...”
— Sesame Street

Ah, the relics of my misspent youth.

I hated school. Hated it with the burning rage of a thousand suns, or one of those other overwrought metaphors my kids use.

I loathed it so passionately that in order to avoid it, I spent an inordinate amount of time home “sick”, usually on the pullout couch. Daytime TV just doesn’t get much better than muppet Ernie and the “One of These Things” song.

And once in a blue moon there’s even a spiritual application ...

Monday, September 03, 2018

Apocrypha-lypso (7)

Even if you have grown up with email rather than snail mail as your primary means of personal communication, you are probably aware some bits of correspondence have more value than others.

The criteria change depending on your current needs. When you are feeling lonely, a love letter from your spouse probably means more to you than an old “Honey-Do” list. On a cold February night at 3 a.m., instructions about how to restart your silent furnace mean more than a list of upcoming summer concerts.

All these bits of correspondence may be equally factual. Accuracy is not the issue. The question is whether or not they contain something that really matters, and that matters to you.

Monday, August 27, 2018

Apocrypha-lypso (6)

The Old Testament is home to more than a few really long books.

Jeremiah (33,000+ words), Genesis, Psalms and Ezekiel stand out from the crowd. Exodus, Isaiah and Numbers form a second tier. At just shy of 20,000 words, Luke is the longest NT book, well down the list. And as far as apocryphal writings go, Ecclesiasticus weighs in at a staggering 26,741 words, longer than all but five canonical books.

“When words are many, transgression is not lacking,” wrote King Solomon. We rightly make an exception to that rule when we know a writer was carried along by the Holy Spirit.

The question is, was Joshua ben Sira “carried along”, or was he just unusually verbose?

Monday, August 20, 2018

Apocrypha-lypso (5)

In 2017, Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld published a work of fiction entitled Hitler in Hell, in which he speculates about what Adolf Hitler might have thought of things like the post-WWII development of Western society, the internet, feminism and the eternal destiny of dogs. In the same book, van Creveld also provides one of the most perceptive and comprehensive military overviews of WWII I have ever read.

It’s a clever device: packaging a truthful historic account in a form sure to be a good deal more widely read than a college textbook.

Who knows, maybe today’s candidate for biblical canonicity was written with similar aims in view.

Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Apocrypha-lypso (4)

This week, our journey through ancient Hebrew and Greek literature produces what looks like a first among our candidates for Old Testament canonicity: a letter.

The New Testament is full of letters. Acts and Luke are early candidates, and once we hit Romans, almost everything else is too. The Old Testament preserves a few missives to or from various dignitaries in its books of history, but to the best of my knowledge the book-length letter is a New Testament phenomenon.

Monday, August 06, 2018

Apocrypha-lypso (3)

As we have seen repeatedly in the first two installments of this series, the standard Protestant Old Testament is not the only version of the Bible out there. Other versions exist, most of which contain a wider and more varied selection of religious books than our own Bibles.

For Catholics and those in Orthodox churches, no consideration of the relative value of the Apocryphal or Deutero-canonical texts is necessary. Their episcopate takes a position on their behalf and says to them, in effect, “Here’s your Bible.”

Protestants, on the other hand, have no central governing body to decide such issues, and I have yet to come across any local church’s statement of faith that addresses the canonicity or non-canonicity of these “extra” books. Which means it’s up to us to either evaluate them for ourselves, or else opt to put our trust in the folks who made decisions about such things in years past.

Monday, July 30, 2018

Apocrypha-lypso (2)

One day when cleaning your parents’ attic, you discover what appears to be your grandfather’s journal. You pore over it enthusiastically. It’s full of fascinating details you never heard from your parents about Grandpa’s travels, working life and relationship with his siblings.

But something about the journal is fishy. The child who sounds exactly like your father is named Carl rather than Clark, the account makes him out to be a cartographer rather than a stenographer, and the family home is a decaying mansion in New Iberia rather than a turn-of-the-century Boston townhome. Turning to the inside front cover of the journal, you discover what you are reading is actually your grandfather’s long-abandoned attempt at writing a novel.

You might feel something like me, immersed in the Book of Judith. Great story, but the details are all wrong.

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Apocrypha-lypso (1)

In my mid-teens, I finished Tolkien.

I mean completely finished him: Lord of the Rings, Hobbit, Silmarillion, all done and dusted, multiple times even. And the man was dead. There were no more books coming. Imagine my despair. Then my cousin put me on to Terry Brooks’ Shannara series. “Aha,” I thought to myself, “perhaps there is a solution.” So I read Sword.

I may never recover. In those early years of his career, Brooks was nothing like Stephen R. Donaldson, who cobbled together Tolkienesque tropes with originality and genius. No, Brooks was a straight-up knock-off J.R.R. wannabe hack. He may have improved since, but I never went back. I have had bigger disappointments, but none at such a tender age.

I feel like that about the Apocrypha.