Tuvo the wizard king

[William Cloud Hicklin]

just like in the Bible where there are plenty of stories etc that don't figure into the official book, but were confirmed by later scholars as being deliberately left out of the Bible canon for political reasons,

For example?

[Mithalwen]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

For example?

The apocrypha?

I think that fay and fey have different origins. Fey (which can also mean having second sight as well as doomed),is Scots from AS/Icelandic/OHG.

Fay is just an anglicised spelling Fee - the french for Fairy. They are homophones not polysemic.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

OT for a moment: the Apocrypha's history was quite the reverse- these were 'extra' books included in the Alexandrine Jewish (Greek) Old Testament, the Septuagint, which the Jews rejected in the 1st Century, none of them having been written in Hebrew, and all postdating the 'end of prophecy.' The Christian world universally accepted these books as canonical until the Reformation, when Protestants set them apart in their own section- by the 19th century they were usually omitted entirely from Protestant bibles. Whereas they remain a part of Catholic and Orthodox bibles to this very day, so one can hardly claim they've been 'suppressed!'

[Mithalwen]

Thank you...for the enlightenment. I was raised Anglican so it isn't something I have much experience of ... though I can hardly deny that the Church of England had a somewhat political start.... ... So not the apocrypha but more the DaVinci code conspiracy theory lark...

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Reading The Da Vinci Code as a source of Church history is about like reading the Bible as a science text.....

[Eäralda Halatiriva]

for example:

The Testament of Solomon
The Zohar (The Book of Splendor)
The Alphabet of Ben-Sira
Joseph and Aseneth
The Septuagint
Bel and the Dragon
The Acts of Peter
The Acts of Paul and Thecla
Mar Saba letter and The Secret Gospel of Mark
The Gospel of Judas

or, even better:

The Book of Adam and Eve
Book of Jubilees
Book of Enoch
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas
Proto-Gospel of James
The Gnostic Scriptures of Nag Hammadi
The Gospel of Mary
The Gospel of Nicodemus
The Apocalypse of Peter
Second Apocalypse of Peter

so you See, not all of us blindly accept the political maneuverings of the Mannish Councils of Nicea

some of us Elves, in fact, know that All Men Seek the Power of the One, and there hearts are so...easily corrupted...and as to the reading of Science as Text...well, that hairline distinction is between a 'factual' Truth (e.g. orthodox Sciences) and a 'fictional' Truth (e.g. a self-evident work like the Da Vinci Code) in which form of the organization of collective Thought shall prevail over the larger population to the detriment of the other form (sounds a bit like Sauron, or Melkor, init?)


you've pointed out some of these Books, but in that you have made my point - some group in their political meandering have chosen this over that doctrine for political effects, and protection of some status-quo. obviously, Middle-Earth was not unaffected by this reality.

ps - then there is the issue of the Writing of the Legenderium in Biblical-style medieval and Renaissance English, giving it a similar topographical and homological similarity and thus authority

[William Cloud Hicklin]

so you See, not all of us blindly accept the political maneuverings of the Mannish Councils of Nicea

As if Nicea were remotely relevant to the Canon. The damnable Dan Brown again. The Manichaeans, Marcionites and Gnostics had been rejected long before: Nicaea was convened to settle the Arian/Athanasian conflict over the Trinity.

The Canon was already established in its essence by the time of Irenaeus. The NT Canon was assembled very slowly, and analysis of the scriptues quoted by the Patristic Fathers lays out a pretty clear outline of what was a slow process of accretion, not rejection. First the Pauline epistles, followed by the Synoptic Gospels; John and the pastoral epistles took longer to gain general acceptance. Revelation wasn't accepted until rather late.

None of the Fathers ever relied on or considered the Gnostic pseudo-gospels to be canonical or authoritative. The only books from the Early Church which didn't make the cut were the Didache and Hermas' Shepherd. The Didache because it is simply a compression of the Synoptics into a synthetic text; Hermas because he had no apostolic authority (all the books of the NT canon were supposed to have been written by or under the supervision of an apostle: the chain of 'eyewitnesses' was considered crucial. In fact the earliest writers hold up "this is what John told me" as superior to any written text.).

As to the OT, the Christians had really nothing to do with it: first the (Jewish) Alexandrian Canon, and later the (Jewish) Jamnia Canon.

(Incidentally, Enoch and Jubilees are considered canonical by the Ethiopian Church)

[Mithalwen]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Reading The Da Vinci Code as a source of Church history is about like reading the Bible as a science text.....

Quite.... personally I read it as comedy (DVC not the bible...) but I was aware that some people take it rather more seriously. However coincidentally I bought at the weekend "The Bible, the Biography" by Karen Armstrong which given her history, I imagine may be rather more reliable . I haven't got very far yet but the concept of a canon within a canon might have application to Tolkien's work.

by the by I do wonder which early spindoctor managed to get the Song of Songs to make the cut... though I am very glad it did...

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Unfortunately we have very little direct evidence of the formation of the Old Testament canon. The oldest extand manuscripts are those from Qumran near the Dead Sea, which only give a partial picture of a dissident sect's library, and only in the 1st Century CE. (Aside from the Dead Sea scrolls, the earliest surviving Hebrew scriptures are medieval, the Masoretic texts).

We do have various copies and part-copies, mostly Christian, in Greek and Syriac; but, again, these are removed from the originals by a very wide span of years. What we do know is that the Septuagint (3rd-1st c. BCE) included a number of books which were excluded from the 'Palestinian canon', the Jewish and Protestant Old Testaments; but when the ketuvim "Writings" were selected the Song made the cut. Why? Who knows? Why is Ecclesiastes in and Ecclesiasticus out?

It does seem to be the case that the concept of a definitive Canon was not yet fixed; the New Testament authors (all of them originally Jews) quote from Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, additions to Daniel (The Prayer of Azarias, the Song of the Three Children, Susanna and Bel and the Dragon), additions to Esther, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, 3 Maccabees, 4 Maccabees, 1 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasses, and Psalm 151.