The Camel Bible-Canonized By Committee

Earlier I wrote:


...."Jesus of Nazareth (hereinafter JoN) was a character in a novel, of sorts, written in the manner of Atlas Shrugged or The Turner Diaries (I'd say Hunter, Pierce's later and far better novel, but it's far less famous) as a broadside against Pharasaism and Sadducceesm. Pharasaism, of course, is in essence nothing more than Ur-Talmudism: the Talmud is the congealed legalism already present in the Jewish intellectualism, but not then so codified....."


I want to go in some detail on this.

The Gospel of Mark-probably in a much larger form, "Secret Mark", lost to us now, and likely a fairly salacious document-is the core of what became a major literary franchise over centuries. It is that broadside, a work which like many pieces of literature that are fiction, intended to make a point, that rival factions or pretenders wrote Matthew and Luke from. Each had Mark but neither knew of the other. The Gospel of John is a work of fantasy, nothing more or less, and many faith-holding Christians of unquestionable piety but relaxed orthodoxy have advocated it be simply decanonized. (You may remember the unorthodox TV preacher Gene Scott, for one.) It does not meet the Sesame Street test: it does not belong with the other three. Likewise the Book of Revelation is of even greater dubiousness.

Zindler addresses this fairly well: the most obvious thing is of course the two genealogies of JoN, which divert substantially.

Any of the major science fiction TV shows have generated a volume of books, short stories, comic books, animated shorts, and other texts and materials that expand on their "canon"-always in different ways. If the volume of them is big enough, they generate their own "consensus of extension" that the official franchise cannot contradict too badly when they go forward. On the other hand, there are missteps that are "excised from the canon" from time to time. Star Wars, for example, simply ignored the embarrassing "Christmas special", which George Lucas has never quite lived down.

http://www.starwarsholidayspecial.com/

In the case of Christianity, the canon has been constant for a long time. But the fact is, at one time it was different, and it is the arbitrary judgment of man in committee and nothing else.