Why the Bible is Open Canon Scripture

The term canon can represent anything that constitutes a rule, norm or standard (Lea, 70). Church leaders perhaps as early as the first century had a challenge ahead of them in identifying the proper canon of the New Testament, so according to Lea each book included in the New Testament canon had to match the beliefs the church accepted as correct and acceptable, demonstrate somewhat direct apostolic origin, and show universality in being accepted by a large geographic portion of the church (Lea, 71-72). Overall, in early Christianity many more works existed than the canon of today that had been used by churches (Lea, 72).

Lea indicates that 1 Corinthians 15:1-4 demonstrates the utilization of the Old Testament, oral teachings regarding Jesus work and ministry, and direct prophetic revelation, and also Lea indicates that growth of a canon was demonstrated by early Christian writers (Lea, 73). In A.D. 140 the Canon of Marcion appeared with only a few written works, in A.D. 170 the Muratorian Canon was more complete but still did not mention certain New Testament books known of today, in A.D. 367 the Festal Letter of Athanasius accepted all the New Testament canon, and in A.D. 397 the Third Council of Carthage made the New Testament canon agreed upon by church leaders as received (Lea, 73). Overall, although the New Testament canon took centuries to receive, what is important to note is that the New Testament was received in full by the early church once the Apostles reached their initial expected audience with their writings, but the canon took several centuries to be fully discovered and recognized by all Christians.

Textual Criticism of the New Testament uses the tools of identifying Greek manuscripts according to the material that they had been written on to identify the time of the writing (Lea, 76). Translations in Latin and Syriac existed two hundred years prior to the Greek New Testament versions, and translating them back into Greek can help scholars identify Greek manuscripts (by comparison) (Lea, 77). Textual students can use quotations from Church fathers and lectionaries to identify the dating of manuscripts (Lea, 77). Overall, several reliable tools thus exist for dating manuscripts of the New Testament by putting together something like a jigsaw puzzle of interrelated pieces in order to find the appropriate date of a text.

Establishing an authoritative list of New Testament works would have ideally been important because false teaching could otherwise make havoc. If a canon is a rule to measure everything else from, then establishing other writings as equally important as the works of the apostles would cause a canon that would be part apostolic and part non apostolic. Overall, canon thus needed to be centralized upon official works in order that all Christian truth would not fall into question.

Divine inspiration and apostolic utterance should have been the most important criteria for deciding the New Testament canon out of the criteria mentioned by Lea. Popular apostolic inspired messages however are the only messages that made their way into the New Testament (this is perhaps why the New Testament does not contain tithing tracts). Some would thus argue that works that had not been as popular should also be considered as part of bible canon, but the problem is that deciding what enters the official canon today would suppose that people of today would have more insight about the scripture than people closer to the time of the apostles and this is clearly not the case for the most part.

By all means I would encourage people to open the canon of the Bible such that the received Word of God that Christians generally accept today be central to every part of a person's understanding and belief system, so the inspiration of the message of the gospel may continue to live as something that is not dead. In fact the Apostle John concludes his gospel by expecting nothing less than this when he says, "Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written." - John 21:25 (NIV) The Greek term for book in John 21:25 is the word that we get the term bible from as bible is a near literal transliteration from the Greek. Overall, I would have to carefully inform people that see the Bible as a completely closed canon that in John 1 the word of God is defined as Jesus Christ, and we should thus not suppose to contain Jesus (the word of God) into only a book because the Bible according to John 21:25 clearly would be opposed to such an idea.

Since Jesus is the word of God and has risen from the dead, then we should not suppose that the Christian Bible is a full tomb that we will find the body of Jesus within. Jesus arising from the dead means that he is still alive today, and this means that he is still doing things and working at things. Just because Jesus sits on David's throne at the right hand of the Father does not mean that he is lazy because he 'sits around on a throne all day', but instead he works hard all the time like any respectable king would work. As a result of all the good things that Jesus continues to do, all the bibles in the entire world could not contain all the good things that he had done and continues to do. Overall, I would thus use the term bible to describe the open part of the canon of God's continued work, and I would use the word Bible (capitalized) to describe the received canon of scripture that Christians felt had been the most important and thus worth saving and reproducing.

In the end if every Bible had been thrown into a fire all around the world at the same time, then Jesus would still exist and would be alive and the trinity would be completely unharmed. The point is that the Bible is nothing more than a tool, a window, or an instrument of sorts for bringing about the Word of God (Jesus) into personal experience. Overall, with the advancements of technology and science if people really believe the Bible to be salvation in itself and the Word of God exclusive of everything else, then why not tattoo the entire bible onto the human body as a measure of atonement or engineer DNA sequences to correspond to Bible verses in order make the promise of John 3:16 more secure by modifying the human body to match belief in Christ.

Bibliography:

Lea, Thomas, and David Alan Black. The New Testament: Its Background and Message, 2nd ed. Nashville, Tennessee: H&B Academic, 2003.