You said: "Some liberal scholar/theologians actually claim that the New Testament has just been enhanced by the discovery of this gospel that the manipulative church censored out of its cannon."
Who, exactly?
(This is my field and I haven't seen any comments like that.)
I do know that Elaine Pagels and Karen King said:
"Many people have asked what we should do about these other gospels. Should we reopen the canon to include some of these long-rejected books? We think that doing so is not useful — and is beside the point. Church leaders established the canon at a specific and crucial time in history and for a specific purpose: to endorse a list of books "approved" for reading in public worship in order to unify the movement under their leadership. Certainly the canon has helped to do just that, since even today people who belong to an enormous range of churches — Methodist, Pentecostal, Baptist, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Seventh Day Adventist, Episcopal, to name only a few — all draw upon the same collection of New Testament books, and read them in worship. Gospels like this one, then do not belong in the canon — nor, we think, do they belong in the trash. Instead, they belong where we have placed them here: within the history of Christianity."
Get my ebook, "The Apocryphal Jesus," here
1 comment:
You said: "Some liberal scholar/theologians actually claim that the New Testament has just been enhanced by the discovery of this gospel that the manipulative church censored out of its cannon."
Who, exactly?
(This is my field and I haven't seen any comments like that.)
I do know that Elaine Pagels and Karen King said:
"Many people have asked what we should do about these other gospels. Should we reopen the canon to include some of these long-rejected books? We think that doing so is not useful — and is beside the point. Church leaders established the canon at a specific and crucial time in history and for a specific purpose: to endorse a list of books "approved" for reading in public worship in order to unify the movement under their leadership. Certainly the canon has helped to do just that, since even today people who belong to an enormous range of churches — Methodist, Pentecostal, Baptist, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Seventh Day Adventist, Episcopal, to name only a few — all draw upon the same collection of New Testament books, and read them in worship. Gospels like this one, then do not belong in the canon — nor, we think, do they belong in the trash. Instead, they belong where we have placed them here: within the history of Christianity."
- _Reading Judas_, (hardcover) p. 103.
Yours,
Kushana
www.KushanasBibleQuestionPage.com
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