INTRODUCTION the Present Volume Is the Product of an Ongoing

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INTRODUCTION the Present Volume Is the Product of an Ongoing INTRODUCTION The present volume is the product of an ongoing collaboration between the Institut Romand des Sciences Bibliques of the University of Lausanne, the Centre for Biblical Studies in the University of Manchester, and the Department of Biblical Studies in the University of Sheffield. Researchers from these three institutions meet on a regular basis to pool their expertise and to explore together a topical issue in the field of Biblical Studies. Seminars have been held on such diverse subjects as Luke’s Literary Achieve- ment, Jews and Christians in the First Century, the Book of Jeremiah and its Reception, Narrativity in the Bible, Intertextuality. Magic in the Bibli- cal World, Scriptural Historiography, and the Figure of Moses. The theme of the colloquium whose papers are here published was the Canon of Scripture. Interest in the canon of Scripture has burgeoned in recent years. For a variety of reasons the old certainties as to how canonisation occurred have been challenged by new evidence and by new critical perspectives. The very concepts of ‘canon’ and ‘canonisation’ have been problematised. It was felt the time was ripe for a fresh exploration of the issues. Philip Davies (‘How to Get Into the Canon and Stay There. Or: the Philosophy of an Acquisitive Society’) draws an important distinction between primary and secondary canonization. The former is determined by the choice of the elite, literate class: it is basically what they choose to read, value and have copied. The latter is determined by religious authori- ties who confirm the democratic choice, and draw up lists of texts which can serve as the basis of education and national culture. The religious authorities are constrained by popular choice: there is no point in them trying to canonize a text that has not already been accepted by the reading public. But since these texts are not always to the authorities’ liking (in the case of the Hebrew Bible the crucial authority was that of the Hasmoneans) the process of confirming their canonicity may lead to them being to a degree rewritten. Davies explores this process with particular reference to Ruth, Qoheleth, Esther and Song of Songs. 5 pirsb0408.doc zb 25/01/07 page 6 THE CANON OF SCRIPTURE IN JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION (PIRSB 4) From a close analysis of the final chapter of the Pentateuch, Thomas Römer (‘La mort de Moïse (Deut 34) et la naissance de la première partie du canon biblique’) challenges Martin Noth’s influential theory of a ‘deutero- nomistic history’ running from Deuteronomy through to Kings, and argues for the re-enstatement of the older notion of a Hexateuch (Genesis- Joshua): ‘l’idée d’un Hexateuque n’est pas simplement une invention de l’exégèse du XIXe siècle, mais … un “projet Hexateuque” a bel et bien existé au moment où il s’agissait de publier, à l’époque perse, les traditions “officielles” du judaïsme’. He suggests that a minority coalition of Deutero- nomists and priests wanted to replace the Pentateuch with a Hexateuch, and he finds evidence of their work in a number of verses in Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy and Joshua which seem to make sense only in the context of the larger work. At stake were two conflicting views of where the centre of nascent Judaism lay: in the land (the Hexateuch) or in the Torah (the Pentateuch). The Pentateuchal model prevailed, partly because its rival would have raised in minds of the imperial power the spectre of Jewish political independence, but more because it offered for Judaism a centre without borders. ‘En optant pour la Torah, les intellectuels juifs de l’époque perse ont fait le bon choix. Le judaïsme sera marqué tout au long de son histoire par une existence en diaspora, et pour la diaspora c’est la Torah, en tant que “patrie portative”, … qui va se substituer au pays’. Albert de Pury (‘The Ketubim, a Canon within the Biblical Canon’) argues that the third part of the Hebrew Bible, the Ketubim, should be considered as a systematic collection of literary works, an anthology of anthologies put together in its final form by (proto-)Pharisees in the middle of the 2nd century BCE. The process must have started already in the second half of the third century, possibly as an answer to the literary canons of Greek schools. Besides the Psalter, which for some time or in some circles could have claimed for itself alone the status of the third division of the Hebrew Bible, others thought of assembling a collection of ‘Humanistic Ketubim’ (Job, Proverbs, Song of Songs, Qoheleth) the aim of which was to provide Jewish readers with books that were completely universal in outlook and that deliberately refrained from any reference to the national or religious traditions of Israel. When the Pharisees took up this project they did so in a spirit much closer to that of Ben Sira, providing the former Humanistic Ketubim with a frame (Prov 1-9, 30-31 and Qoh 12,12-14) which brought them back into the fold of traditional Jewish piety and inserted them into a collection of other more community-oriented texts. Philip Alexander (‘The Formation of the Biblical Canon in Rabbinic Judaism’) challenges the standard view that the Rabbinic canon of the 6 pirsb0408.doc zb 25/01/07 page INTRODUCTION 7 Hebrew Bible was finally closed at the so-called Academy of Yavneh in the first century CE. From a close re-analysis of the Rabbinic evidence he argues that closure finally came in the late second century CE, and that its context was the Jewish-Christian debate and the emergence of the Christian canon. Paradoxically, though in growing conflict with emergent Rabbinic Judaism, elements within the Church laid great store by the Hebraica veritas, and increasingly saw the Synagogue as the faithful preserver of the God’s word in its original language. George Brooke, (‘“Canon” in the Light of the Qumran Scrolls’) surveys the contribution of Qumran to the history of the Hebrew canon. He discusses the question of terminology (preferring ‘scripture’ to ‘Bible’, and ‘texts revered as especially sacred and authoritative’ to ‘canon’ when speak- ing of the Scrolls); explicit statements in the Scrolls about the ‘canon’ (pointing out that these more often imply a bipartite rather than a tripartite collection); the physical evidence for collecting different books into the same scroll (the fact that Deuteronomy always seems to have been free- standing may support the theory of a Tetrateuch); the implications for the canonic process of the fluidity of the text at Qumran and the existence of excerpted and re-written forms of a book; the status of works such as Jubilees and the Temple Scroll. On all these topics he stresses that, although the material is rich, its meaning is far from clear. In the end, on the question of whether or not their was a canon of scripture in Second Termple Judaism he comes down to a position somewhere on the spectrum between Beckwith, who holds that the tripartite canon was already more or less fixed in the second century BCE, and Ulrich, who holds that a canon in any meaningful sense is only discernible at some point in the new millen- nium. Jean-Daniel Kaestli (‘La formation et la structure du canon biblique: que peut apporter l’étude de la Septante ?’) demonstrates that the study of the Greek Bible has much to contribute to our understanding of canon- formation in early Judaism. He argues that the very existence of a Greek translation and the nature of that translation are an indication of the authority given to a writing or collection of writings. The fact that the Pentateuch was the first to be translated, and under royal auspices, is a clear sign of its status and importance. The fact that the translations of the Ketubim were scattered over a long period (Qoheleth may be as late as the second century CE) is hard to reconcile with a Hasmonean closure of the third division of the Hebrew canon. The fact that the translations of Daniel (Papyrus 967) Chronicles and Esdras are probably as early as the 2nd century BCE, close in time to 1-4 Reigns, and show affinities to these books, 7 pirsb0408.doc zb 25/01/07 page 8 THE CANON OF SCRIPTURE IN JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION (PIRSB 4) suggests that they were already then among the Prophets, where Josephus was later to place them, and not, as in the Rabbinic canon, among the Writings. This suggests that, contrary to the common view, the fourfold division of the Greek Bible may well be as old as the threefold division of the Hebrew Bible. Loveday Alexander (‘Canon and Exegesis in the Medical Schools of Antiquity’) shows that ‘canon’ is ‘not exclusively or even primarily a bi- blical concept’ but pervades the culture of the late antique Graeco-Roman world. She discusses how within the medical schools the Corpus Hippo- craticum functioned as a canonic text that was continually re-appropriated in a fast-developing world of medical practice, a re-appropriation that had to be more than dry philology or antiquarian glossing but a relevant ‘per- formance’ of the text. She analyses in depth three commentators on it – Apollonius of Citium, Erotian and (above all) Galen. Though she only hints at the relevance of this analysis for the study of the Biblical canon, she proposes it suggests that the modern concept of a canon ‘as a definitive list of authoritative texts, promulgated by an authoritative body at a particular point in time’ is ‘an anachronistic chimaera, read back into antiquity from an era of centralized government in both church and state’.
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