Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Is Authority Based on Location?

An article found on Aleteia written by Phillip Jenkins called "The Other Lost Scriptures" compliments many ideas formed in Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times by Sidnie White Crawford. The overall theme of "The Other Lost Scriptures" is to remind the reader that things, even scriptures, can be found in unusual places and still retain a sense of authority. For example, Jenkins refers to the "otherwise unknown pseudo-biblical book 2 (Slavonic) Enoch, or the Book of the Secrets of Enoch" as being found at random, but because they were found, more pieces of the Biblical puzzle fall in place. The significance of said texts is that they were recently rediscovered in unusual places-- old medieval libraries and religious houses in Europe, and should still be held with authority. Because historians believe "2 Enoch was probably written in Greek and was then translated into other languages, the vast majority of what we know comes from these Slavonic texts. It survives in both longer and shorter versions, and the longer has clearly been adapted for Christian purposes. The shorter, older version takes us back to a work written by an Alexandrian Jew somewhere around the 1st century AD—roughly the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls." With that being said, these texts that were just recently rediscovered could have been deemed important and authoritative had they been found all together in a Judaeo cave by archaeologists who were specifically looking for something of the sort, but instead, there is hostility in rendering them significant.  

Similar to the entire theme of Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times, "The Other Lost Scriptures" highlights the inconsistencies between what we have determined as authoritative and important, versus those which we have rendered useless. Even with the evidence that supports the usage of the scriptures referenced in the article, based upon where they were discovered and by whom, they do not receive credibility.

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