Abstract
Early in 367 CE Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, issued a “festal epistle” to the churches under his care. In it, he set the date for Easter that year and by extension the dates for the rest of the Christian festivals. That letter is most widely remembered, however, for its inclusion of an inventory of the 27 books of the New Testament that is the first mention of the canonical list as it has been used ever since. It also features the earliest use of a form of the Greek word for “canon” applied to that list.1 Commenting on the books he has identified, the bishop asserts that “these are the springs of salvation, so that someone who thirsts might be satisfied by the words they contain. In these books alone the teaching of piety is proclaimed. Let no one add to or subtract from them.”2 Athanasius’ letter provides information about one point in the long, complex, and politically charged processes through which various Christian communities struggled to arrive at consensus on a set of authoritative scriptures. In a broader sense, the letter is particularly interesting for its clear articulation of one of the principle goals of canon formation: limitation. Athanasius stresses that the books that he lists, alone, are the “springs of salvation.” To underline his point, the bishop provides a warning, “Let no one add to or subtract from them.”3
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Notes
On the polemical context of Athanasius’ letter, see David Brakke, “Canon Formation and Social Conflict in Fourth-Century Egypt: Athanasius of Alexandria’s Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter,” Harvard Theological Review 87 (1994): 395–419.
Athanasius, Letter XXXIX.6; I follow the translation in David Brakke, Athanasius and Asceticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1998), pp. 329–330.
See Gerald T. Shepherd, “Canon,” in Lindsay Jones, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 2004), p. 1407.
Frederick M. Denny and Rodney L. Taylor, “Introduction,” in Denny & Taylor eds., The Holy Book in Comparative Perspective (Columbia, NY: University of South Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 6–7.
Jonathan Z. Smith, “Sacred Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon,” in Imagining Religion: Prom Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 40.
Miriam Levering, “Introduction,” in Miriam Levering ed., Rethinking Scripture: Essays from a Comparative Perspective (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), p. 13.
See Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 357, note 33.
On the pejorative uses of the term, see Catherine Wessinger, How the Millennium Comes Violently (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2000), pp. 3–6.
Martin Gardner, Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), p. 387.
See Eugene V Gallagher, “Sectarianism,” in Peter Clarke and Peter Beyer, eds., The World’s Religions: Continuities and Transformations, 2nd ed., (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 610–623.
For a classic statement of this competitive situation, see Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969)
and also Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985).
Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston, MA: The First Church of Christ, Scientist, 1994), p. vii.
For an accessible overview see Robert L. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 2nd ed., (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003);
for a case study of a particular example of polemic against Christianity see Eugene V Gallagher, Divine Man or Magician? Origen and Celsus on Jesus (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982), SBLDS 64.
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© 2014 Eugene V. Gallagher
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Gallagher, E.V. (2014). Introduction: Canons, Scriptures, and New Religions. In: Reading and Writing Scripture in New Religious Movements. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137434838_1
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