Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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Friday, May 17, 2002 On Writing and Writers Mark Byron has a long essay on Biblical completion. He quotes Revelation: I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city, which are written in this book. (Rev 22:18-19, NASB) I always took that passage to refer exclusively to the Book of Revelation and no other. But the ironic thing, of course, is that Revelation has been tampered with. It is clearly not the book it once or originally was. Some Christian had no compunction against messing with it caveat and all. That's the opinion of many scholars and redaction criticism, anyway, for what that's worth. I think the criticism holds up, though. Why? Read the book. It hardly makes sense as it is. Whatever literary schema it had or has, has been compromised and now causes difficulties not just with sense, but structure. The issue of whether the Bible is finished, once and for all, is another debate. A canon is not a canon, of course, unless it is pretty much closed. The classics canon in world literature, for example, is closed unless we find an undiscovered book of Plato or Aristotle's lost section on Comedy of his Poetics. We can still add to the canon, though, from this end of human history if anybody cares to write something extraordinarily great and lasting (like this blog - heh heh). Since I have written new books for the Bible, I like to fancy that the canon may include them someday. I promise an essay on how Scripture gets to be Scripture, someday. posted by Mark Butterworth | 4:07 PM | |
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