The Greek polis culture’s demand for accuracy is something that I think we can identify with in our modern time period. It is easy to want every aspect of life to be clear cut and precise, yet not everything can be viewed mathematically. In the article “Canon: Process, Not Product?”, Brennan Beed begins by challenging this black and white idea of things being either inside or outside a canon. She compares it to the political border between Canada and the United States. It’s a pretty arbitrary border that was decided upon a while ago for reasons that were important at the time. A border wasn’t decided upon based on any real differences between the people living there.
As we’ve learned from reading Constantine’s Bible, Constantine used his power to impose the type of Christianity he viewed as correct - Catholicism - and influence what texts would be part of the bible. Being in such a position of power, he was able to shape early Christianity in a significant way. Going back to the comparison of the biblical canon to the border between Canada and the US, it seems that both came about basically because someone said so. Of course we know it is not that painfully simple, but that is essentially what it comes down to.
Even though a biblical canon was imposed, Beed states that “Every community, it is clear, has a canon-within-the-canon, a part-of-the-canon-that-is-ok-to-ignore, and an extra-canonical-canon”. We have discussed this idea in class, and I feel that it definitely holds true. While some books are in our bibles and some aren’t, communities and individuals still make decisions about what they find personally authoritative and what they do not. Therefore, the idea of canon is not so black and white.
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