A parody of canonicity

In my Old Testament Introduction class, we're talking a lot about canonicity at this point. I struggled with a lot of the data (see the Pannenberg library site for some of the data I'm talking about) because it seemed so subjective. The "human side" of canonicity was bothering me. What I've come to see is that, in the end, either the hand of God must be seen behind the most human of exercises, or we must say that God did not give us a canon. I believe the former.

That said, I set to thinking about the canon and realized I have thought of it in poor terms. I have thought about it like this: 1) Someone was inspired, 2) that person wrote down the revelation, 3) that document is the "autograph," 4) the people of God immediately accepted it as part of the canon, 5) people copied down that original autograph almost 100% accurately, and 6) when the last revelation was given to John in Revelation (or perhaps Jude), the canon was sealed and closed. I don't think that's quite accurate. But instead of giving a boring explanation, I decided that a parody may be more interesting.

A Parody of the Canonization Process

Some time ago, Houghton-Mifflin (not Dunder Mifflin) decided to publish a book of classic children’s stories. There were a few shoe-ins, like Humpty Dumpty, the Three Blind Mice, and Jack and the Beanstalk. But then there were others who were more on the fringe, like Jack and Jill. Some of those in charge of organizing the book didn’t think Jack and Jill should qualify to be in the book. It had an obscure message, and didn’t fit as well with the other stories. Some people accepted Jack and Jill, while others preferred to stick with only the classics. The main question in deciding which stories should get in was this: “Which stories do people generally accept as classic children’s stories?”

After deciding by vote which stories should make it, the committee went to actually put the stories in the book. But they ran into some trouble when they found some discrepancies in the telling of the stories. They arranged a committee to find the true, original telling of the story. With some of the newer stories, it wasn’t too hard. They could find writings and early copies of the stories, and so had a very good idea of what the original story actually was. It still wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty close to the original story. With some of the older stories, however, there was almost no record. As far as they could tell, the story began verbally, with one particularly gifted person making it up to tell to their children one night. The story got around, and soon other parents were telling it. Parents told it and told it until someone wrote it down and copied it. Some of these copies survived, but most of them did not. In the end, it was impossible to tell exactly what the story had originally been.

The committee threw a number of ideas around. They could take all the versions of a given story and combine them, or they could try their best to figure out where the story had changed and remove those parts, or they could just pick one of the versions and go with that. Some people on the committee were especially familiar with one version of the story, and so naturally favored that one. Others were purists and were determined to keep searching until the “original” form could be found. They wanted to search until every word could be validated. Others thought that as long as the story was basically the same as it had always been told, it was fine to publish. All this caused such a stir that some of the committee broke away and contacted Random House publishers to publish their own version of the children’s story book.

After the books had been published for awhile, people generally accepted one or the other for their homes. Children born into homes that used the book from Houghton-Mifflin usually grew up to use that book in their homes as well. Children born in homes that used the Random House book did the same. As more time passed, the versions of the stories contained in the books became the versions.

Some evidence surfaced about 300 years after the books had been published that the story about Humpty Dumpty had been told a little wrong. An early copy of the story had been found in England that said “all the kings forces and all the king’s men couldn’t put humpty together again.” This made more sense than the old way of telling the story, because obviously horses can’t put eggs back together. Horses don’t even have fingers. Some scholars accepted this change to the story, but most people rejected it. “You can’t just change the story” they said. Other changes like this were later discovered, and some of them were actually included in late printings of the books.

One wonders what the original tellers of the stories would have thought if they could see what has become of their stories!

THE END

_____________________________________

Now, this is a long simile; don’t take it too far. It fails to represent the biblical books in a few ways: 1) children’s stories claim only a human author and not a divine author, 2) the stories are make believe, not historical, and 3) the stories are lighthearted, not serious. Beyond those things, I think this story represents the formation of the canon reasonably well.

We tend to think of the formation of the canon in such black and white categories. A given word in the canon is either white (inspired) or black (not inspired). A book is either white (canonical) or black (not canonical). 1 Macabees is either in or out. The book of Proverbs is either all in or all out (even though it’s a compilation). A story in the Bible is white (all true) or black (all false). I think that if we saw how the books were actually written and “canonized,” we would stop seeing such white and black categories. Grisanti’s article (see Pannenberg Library) does this for us, because he lets us see a little – just a little – into the writing/compiling process.