Canon and Scripture

              From the reading of the Constantine Bible by Dungan, there so many things that I thought were interesting, I liked how he clearly mentioned and discussed how the Canon and the scripture have very different meanings. He makes a very good point when he says the Cannon does not cover the same ground as the scripture. This made me ask myself the question of what the differences between Cannon and Scripture, from my point of view I think scripture is just a series of writing that are written for people a specific religious background and the community that is reading the has given their justification stamp. Scripture as we said in class has is authoritative.

           Canon from my point of view is the aspect of the process of communication which involved the selection and ordering of a collection of Israel’s scriptures in order to construct a range of enduring witnesses. And eventually make a bible. Therefore with that being said this brings about the question of whether the difference between Canon and Scripture is one is authority given by God (Scripture) and the other is the decision made by the church on what belongs in the bible (Canon).

          When I go back to think about Canon and Scripture, I read an article by Matt Slick “What is Canon”. In this article the author wonders how these old communities came up with the idea of Scripture or Cannon .It does seems obsolete impose a “Canon” (which is a closed list of book in ancient Israel especially if books were migrating between masses (like Daniel between the Prophets and the Writings).  Equally extreme is to believe that “scripture” has no relationship with the constraining aspect of “canon,” as if to think “scripture” meant a free-flowing stream of religious books that moved (and continue to move) in and out of authoritative status depending on the whim of the community.

                 In the book Dungan insists that canon should not be confused with scripture, as if these terms were synonymous if the terms were simply synonymous. Dungan explains, “As we shall see, a canon results when someone seeks to impose a strict boundary and a smaller a subset of writings or teachings within the larger, slowly evolving.” “Canonization” not a gradual process of collection debate, and consensus-building but the decisive final moment of a process when the canonical boundaries are fixed.