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Archive for the ‘Canon’ Category

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Canon Formation

In Bloomsbury, Canon, Catholic Epistles, Darian R. Lockett, Letter collections, Levi Baker, W. Edward Glenny on May 6, 2024 at 3:49 pm

2024.05.04 | W. Edward Glenny and Darian R. Lockett, eds. Canon Formation: Tracing the Role of Sub-Collections in the Biblical Canon. London: T & T Clark, 2023.

Review by Levi Baker, William Tennent School of Theology.

Over the past two decades there has been increasing interest in the sub-collections that comprise the Jewish and Christian biblical canons. Yet these technical studies often feel like insider conversations and remain largely inaccessible to broader biblical scholarship. A single-volume work addressing the sub-collections across the Christian Bible has been sorely needed.

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The Oldest Gospel and the Formation of the Canonical Gospels

In Canon, Jordan Almanzar, Marcion, Matthias Klinghardt, New Testament, Peeters, Synoptic Gospels, Synoptic theories on December 23, 2022 at 12:21 pm

2022.12.13 | Matthias Klinghardt. The Oldest Gospel and the Formation of the Canonical Gospels. Biblical Tools and Studies 41; Leuven: Peeters, 2021.

Review by Jordan Almanzar, Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts.

Matthias Klinghardt’s study, The Oldest Gospel and the Formation of the Canonical Gospels, is a two-volume work in which he proposes Marcion’s Evangelion as the key to explaining origins of the canonical Gospels. The work was inspired by a certain disharmony Klinghardt sees in 19th-century scholarship existing between two discourses that largely took place in Germany: 1) the so-called synoptic problem and 2) the relationship of Marcion’s Evangelion to canonical Luke. These discourses developed simultaneously yet independently of one another, and Klinghardt seeks to not only bring them together, but to display the results of doing so.

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The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity

In Canon, Eva MROCZEK, Hebrew Bible, Oxford University Press, Scribal culture, Second Temple, Shelby Bennet on December 11, 2019 at 11:56 pm

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2019.12.17 | Eva Mroczek. The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. pp xi+269. ISBN: 9780190886080.

Review by Shelby Bennett, Trinity Western University.

Eva Mroczek makes a powerful contribution to re-thinking a central concept in Judaism and Christianity: “canon.” She explores and challenges the role and purpose of those who composed sacred texts that fall both inside and outside the covers of modern biblical collections. The book places the reader in the Second Temple period’s literary culture and illuminates a world teeming with scripture, but without a Bible.

The first chapter introduces a dominant theme of the book: the impact of a post-printing press “book” culture on our understanding of the Jewish literary culture that produced the Old Testament and Hebrew Bible. Mroczek argues that anachronistic concepts of canon and “book” still shape biblical scholarship today despite awareness of the issue. Read the rest of this entry »


Letters from the Pillar Apostles

In 1 Peter, 2 Peter, Canon, Catholic Epistles, Darian LOCKETT, James, Johannine Epistles, Jude, Kelsie Rodenbiker, Pickwick, review on July 18, 2017 at 5:32 pm

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2017.07.15 | Darian R. Lockett. Letters from the Pillar Apostles: The Formation of the Catholic Epistles as a Canonical Collection. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2017. ISBN: 9781620327562.

Reviewed by Kelsie Rodenbiker, Durham University, UK.

In Letters from the Pillar Apostles, Lockett is concerned to establish the early legitimacy of the Catholic Epistles (CE) as a historically and hermeneutically plausible canonical collection and thus an equal New Testament (NT) sub-corpus alongside the fourfold Gospel and Pauline epistles (pp. xvii, xviii). Noting an oft-assumed discontinuity, Lockett states, “[r]ather than emphasizing composition (usually associated with the historical-critical approach) or canonization (associated with subsequent, ecclesial, and theological judgments) at the expense of the other, this project considers both in dialectical relationship” in order to demonstrate “that the process of editing, collecting, and arranging of these seven texts is neither anachronistic to their meaning nor antagonistic to their very composition” (p. xvi). Read the rest of this entry »