Is Canon a Fallacy?

            In Dungan’s first chapter, he examines the definition of scripture, and goes over what canon means to a religious collection of works.  This discussion struck me, and added to the discussions that we have had in class this semester.  The idea of a real set canon seems fundamentally false. 

            Works seen as authoritative and necessary for a tradition tend to change dramatically over the course of history, from the Upanishad example that Dungan offers (2), to the collections of texts that Christianity looks to.  In the Christian tradition, authority has been granted to a slew of books, their acceptance shifting with politics and society, from Gnostic texts and those works now labeled the Apocrypha, to the modern Christian Bible.  Even now, the Bible is not a solid canon: the hundreds of translations shift the meaning of each line just enough to notice, there are comic book and illustrated Bibles, and some books that are accepted by certain sects and dismissed by others.  Each of these versions and additions to the Biblical canon hold their own authority, and are accepted as canon to their own people.  While canon could be seen as an individually determined sort of thing, that rather defeats the purpose of setting it out.

            It seems to me that canon is not something that can really and truly be determined.  Instead, scripture is the determining identifier; scripture is an ever-changing, developing set of sacred works that people turn to.  Instead of setting out deceptively distinct borders around ‘canonical’ texts, it seems that scripture is a much more accurate descriptor for sacred texts in the past and today.