Monday, January 08, 2018

The canon and the New York Times

THE ANXIOUS BENCH: What Athanasius Decided. Philip Jenkins:
The New York Times recently published a wonderful article entitled A Fragile Biblical Text Gets a Virtual Read, concerning the application of modern digital technology to reading an ancient Egyptian codex that includes the Book of Acts. The article itself is fascinating and informative, and the methodologies described are enormously promising. But I do have to quibble with its author, Nicholas Wade, for one remark.

[...]
I noted the Times article here with some links. The remark referred to above has to do with Athanasias's comments on the biblical canon in his Paschal Letter. You can read Professor Jenkins's whole blog post yourself, but he concludes:
Athanasius had his opinions, and they deserve full respect. But in matters of canon, they settled nothing. If his list prefigures the post-Luther Bible, that is mainly a matter of coincidence.
Indeed.

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