I’ve had the opportunity to teach about canon formation on a number of occasions and these soundbites of mine always raise a few eyebrows:

–the church had to become catholic (universal in canon and creed) before it could possibly survive to become anything else
–scripture is like sausage;everbody loves it, but they don’t like watching it being made

Recently, upon the recommend of one of your Blog posts, I looked up the info for the TNIV. Today’s commercialisation of the Bible is just astounding – so many trendy renditions. All this dressing up just to have to coax people to open the covers — it’s kinda like dousing Brussels sprouts in a ton of cheese sauce to force a kid like me to eat them! I’m just as spoiled, though, because I was so bummed not to find the Study Bible version (I found out it will be available Sept 2006.) I guess that one is too scary to be popular?

It is so amazing that you are doing this series, because one of the recent books that has had such a profound affect on me is Brian Moynahan’s ‘If God Spare My Life: William Tyndale, the English Bible and Sir Thomas More – a Story of Martyrdom and Betrayal’ (Little, Brown). We have come such a long way from the Bible smuggling times of Tyndale’s days. One of the most painful stories I have ever read has to do with Tyndale’s journey to Hamburg, where he hoped to complete his work on the Septuagint. His disastrous shipwreck on the Dutch coast cost him, among most of his resources and precious funds, his just-completed translation of Deuteronomy. Of all books to have to duplicate and do over again – the thought just exhausts me!

The TNIV might be, in our day and time, a vast improvement over Tyndale’s hard spiritual graft of a lifetime. I am sad that when, as a child in the C of C, I asked questions like ‘Where did my Bible come from? If Jesus spoke Aramaic, then why can I read this in English?’ no one told me the stories of such early erudite Believers as Wycliffe or Tyndale. They were certainly not popular or considered successful in their time. Indeed, for all Tyndale’s arduous work, Sir Thomas More would condemn him as ‘a hell-hound in the kennel of the devil’. With More’s obsession for making Tyndales’s life the thorniest of trials, Tyndale’s passion for communicating the personality of Jesus to the English masses could only be buoyed by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Sorry to write so much … this stuff is just so exciting! Awaiting the B-I-B-L-E #5.

My mom bought me NT Wright’s book The Last Word. I just started reading it and it is excellent. I think his statement that the Bible is an extension of the authority of God in the world today is quite compelling. It leads me to believe that the scriptures are not some static collection of facts about God. They are a part of the living and active voice of God in today’s church. This view of scripture cuts both ways, the liberal viewpoint that the scriptures are a flawed collection of ancient texts that must be re-evaluated and the conservative viewpoint that the scriptures hold authority within themselves as prooftexts. I can’t wait to read more.

I too appreciate your series on the Bible, and in some strange way your above comment makes a lot of sense to me. Maybe it’s because this view of scripture is REAL and relational rather than some fragile pattern that we must fearfully tiptoe around as we hold our breath hoping we got it all right.

Recently, upon the recommend of one of your Blog posts, I looked up the info for the TNIV. We do not have the myriad of ‘Bible bookstores’ or Christian mega-stores in the UK even remotely like the one my husband and I walked through in Abilene last year on a trip to see my folks. So I had to go to the Amazon to acquire it. Today’s commercialisation of the Bible is just astounding – so many trendy renditions. All this dressing up just to have to coax people to open the covers — it’s kinda like dousing Brussels sprouts in a ton of cheese sauce to force a kid like me to eat them! I’m just as spoiled, though, because I was so bummed not to find the Study Bible version (I found out it will be available Sept 2006.) I guess that one is too scary to be popular?

It is so amazing that you are doing this series, because one of the recent books that has had such a profound affect on me is Brian Moynahan’s ‘If God Spare My Life: William Tyndale, the English Bible and Sir Thomas More – a Story of Martyrdom and Betrayal’ (Little, Brown). We have come such a long way from the Bible smuggling times of Tyndale’s days. One of the most painful stories I have ever read has to do with Tyndale’s journey to Hamburg, where he hoped to complete his work on the Septuagint. His disastrous shipwreck on the Dutch coast cost him, among most of his resources and precious funds, his just-completed translation of Deuteronomy. Of all books to have to duplicate and do over again – the thought just exhausts me!

The TNIV might be, in our day and time, a vast improvement over Tyndale’s hard spiritual graft of a lifetime. I am sad that when, as a child in the C of C, I asked questions like ‘Where did my Bible come from? If Jesus spoke Aramaic, then why can I read this in English?’ no one told me the stories of such early erudite Believers as Wycliffe or Tyndale. They were certainly not popular or considered successful in their time. Indeed, for all Tyndale’s arduous work, Sir Thomas More would condemn him as ‘a hell-hound in the kennel of the devil’. With More’s obsession for making Tyndales’s life the thorniest of trials, Tyndale’s passion for communicating the personality of Jesus to the English masses could only be buoyed by the power of the Holy Spirit.
,

Sorry to write so much … this stuff is just so exciting! Awaiting the B-I-B-L-E #5.

Recently, upon the recommend of one of your Blog posts, I looked up the info for the TNIV. We do not have the myriad of ‘Bible bookstores’ or Christian mega-stores in the UK even remotely like the one my husband and I walked through in Abilene last year on a trip to see my folks. So I had to go to the Amazon to acquire it. Today’s commercialisation of the Bible is just astounding – so many trendy renditions. All this dressing up just to have to coax people to delve into the covers — it’s kinda like dousing Brussels sprouts in a ton of cheese sauce to force a kid like me to eat them! I’m just as spoiled, though, because I was so bummed not to find the Study Bible version (I found out it will be available Sept 2006.) I guess that one is too scary to be popular?

It is so amazing that you are doing this series, because one of the recent books that has had such a profound affect on me is Brian Moynahan’s ‘If God Spare My Life: William Tyndale, the English Bible and Sir Thomas More – a Story of Martyrdom and Betrayal’ (Little, Brown). We have come such a long way from the Bible smuggling times of Tyndale’s days. One of the most painful stories I have ever read has to do with Tyndale’s journey to Hamburg, where he hoped to complete his work on the Septuagint. His disastrous shipwreck on the Dutch coast cost him, among most of his precious resources and funds, his just-completed translation of Deuteronomy. Of all the books to have to duplicate and do over again – the thought just exhausts me!

The TNIV might be, in our day and time, a vast improvement over Tyndale’s hard spiritual graft of a lifetime. I am sad that when, as a child in the C of C, I asked questions like ‘Where did my Bible come from? If Jesus spoke Aramaic, then why can I read this in English?’ no one told me the stories of such early erudite Believers as Wycliffe or Tyndale. They were models who were not popular or considered successful in their time. Indeed, for all Tyndale’s arduous work, Sir Thomas More would condemn him as ‘a hell-hound in the kennel of the devil’. With More’s obsession for making Tyndales’s life the thorniest of trials, Tyndale’s passion for communicating the personality of Jesus to the English masses could only be buoyed by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Sorry to write so much … this stuff is just so exciting! Awaiting the B-I-B-L-E #5.

For those interested in digging deeper, I’d recommend John Barton’s How the Bible Came to Be as a good starting point, with Lee McDonald’s The Formation of Christian Biblical Canon: Revised and Expanded Edition and then The Canon Debate, edited by Lee McDonald and James Sanders, as next steps.

It’s also worth reminding ourselves that just as the Bible didn’t roll off the press as a single volume, when single-volume editions of the Bible were achieved, they weren’t all the same. In ancient times, churches in different parts of the Mediterranean world went in two different directions on the contents of the Old Testament (tending toward a shorter 39-book canon and a longer 46-book canon), and even these were not the only options. Today, the Protestant Bible, Roman Catholic Bible, Eastern Orthodox Bible, Ethiopian Orthodox Bible, and perhaps others are not all the same (in terms of the table of contents, the question of which books are in and which books are out). Educating ourselves about the processes by which this state of affairs came to be should help us resist any temptation to shake Revelation 22:19 in other people’s faces.

Thank you for this series.

Trust me — I understand, my friend. I went through a real crisis during my graduate studies — especially studying the synoptics in Greek. Old safeguards like “inerrancy” didn’t protect me.

But scripture is what it is. It’s best not to build on foundations that are themselves shaky!

You’ve listened to my preaching for years, and you know that I believe scripture is formative in the life of the church. What you may not know is that I find the Bible even more insightful, more integrative, more authoritative than I did before I began thinking about these things.

DU