Author, Canon, Inspiration

The idea that a book of the Bible is actually written by the guy who says he is writing it (like Paul writing the letters of Paul, or Peter for Peter's letters or John for the three letters of John, for example), is fairly old-fashioned. Modern wisdom has it that the early church was fairly relaxed over the whole issue of people writing as a famous person and really had no problem with the average John Smith adopting the pseudonym of Paul, Peter or John. From here it is then suggested that therefore we shouldn't get too strung up over the issue and just accept that they probably didn't write the books they seem to have written. Some magnanimous souls allow a several books to be accepted as having been written by the person who states they wrote the book, but many allow only a few.

So old fashioned creatures such as I are fairly rare. I think it is actually a fairly important issue and I'm not convinced that the early church was as relaxed about it as modern scholars would want to argue.

This conviction was heightened during the week as I continued to read some introductory material regarding the book of Revelation. I discovered that while the book was readily accepted throughout the early church as Scripture (not the case with all the books of the NT), there was an exception to this. A bishop, Dionysius of Alexandria, wanted to argue that the book of Revelation was not in the canon (in order to stifle a heresy he was battling in his part of the world that appealed to material in Revelation for support). So he set about trying to prove that while the book was inspired it was not written by the Apostle John, and therefore could not be included in the NT. Subsequently, several other bishops around Alexandria rejected the canonicity of Revelation and it wasn't until some time later that it was accepted in that part of the world.

It is important to remember in all of this that Dionysius was not just an ordinary church goer with some funny ideas. He was a bishop. In our day that doesn't mean much. Bishops wear strange clothes and appear to be either trouble makers or completely useless, or earnest men, who might be able to make a difference but on the whole don't. Actually this is probably just a post-60's thing to a certain extent, where yet another authority figure is rejected for no other reason than their being an authority figure.

But in different places Bishops are still remarkably important. In a hostile zone in Africa, I heard of how during a recent civil war the Bishop of the area gathered up his congregations and hid them in the jungle until it was safe to come out. And now that the war has ceased, he is rebuilding the church, physically as well as spiritually. And this fits with how Bishops were in the early church: it was the Bishop who met the barbarians at the gates of Rome, for example, and managed to sue for a limited peace which protected the bulk of the people. Bishops were not just strange people wearing odd hats (in fact, they probably had the good sense not to wear bizzare 'religious' garb), but were (and are) real community leaders and real religious leaders. When a bishop made a decision, it had a serious impact on the people under his care. It doesn't mean they were all good, by any means, but it does mean that they had genuine influence in the life of the church in ways we don't always notice now.

So, a bishop in Alexandria is not to be quickly disregarded. And if, as is the case, his ruling leads to a group of bishops in his area also insisting that the Apostle John did not write Revelation and it is therefore non-cannonical, I think we have reason to question the generally accepted position that the question of who the authors of NT books were did not matter much to the early church. Even if it only mattered to this group of bishops (which I find hard to believe), it renders the accepted position suspect. It means that more needs to be said to confirm this favoured position than a mere assertion. And simply showing that some secular writers thought that pseudonymity was fine is not enough here because church leaders do not necessarily go along with their culture (even today!). Some serious primary source evidence from key church leaders would be a great start. I shall have to go and read more on the issue.

One of the interesting things in the whole discussion with Dionysius was that authorship was elevated even over inspiration. Dionysius was unwilling to dismiss Revelation as not genuinely inspired. Instead, it was on the grounds of questioning whether it was written by the Apostle John that he 'removed' Revelation from the canon. I'm not sure I agree with his ruling (God has been known to use donkeys!), but it does show that he (and his fellow bishops) took authorship seriously. It wasn't enough for a book to be the Word of God to be authorative--it had to be written by a ridgey-didge apostle!

It does give people like me, who are suspicious of this apparent ease the early church had regarding authorship, a growing confidence that the easy dismissal of my position by much of the scholarly world is not based on the substantial and rigorous evidence often assumed in the literature.