Examining the Canon...but not a cannon

Do you remember the bruhaha when Disney bought Star Wars?  When they did, they declared the old Star Wars Expanded Universe as “Legends.”  They couldn’t obviously destroy all of these old works but they could, and did, declare that NONE of those earlier works was “canon.” But what exactly does that mean?  The word "canon" emerges from both Hebrew and Greek thought in which the word literally means "rule," as a ruler, something a person could measure a thing with.  Well from there the word then was extended to mean “a sanctioned or accepted group or body of related works.”

What this has to do with the Bible is a person could agree that individually, the 66 different manuscripts have strong historical support about their existence and their writing, that they were written when stated (not hundreds of years later).  And yet, this same person could challenge WHY these specific 66 books were included in the collection we call "Bible." When I'm in a hotel and there's a Bible left there by The Gideons, why does that book have those books and not some other books?  Why not more?  Why not less?

And the concern is sometimes raised, perhaps most famously in recent times by the book and movie The Da Vince Code," that a secret, exclusive group of people picked these books hundreds of years later. What if they excluded other historical works that would tell a different or more complex picture of this person called Jesus?

In episode 4 we will examine first the concept of the canon and then we will investigate what the process was by Jewish thinkers to establish the canonical writings for their Scriptures.  The Christians do, later, have their own impression about these books, but as we shall see, in large measure the Christians simply followed the direction of the Jewish community. Of course that shouldn't surprise us because the first Christians were Jewish.