The Party To End All Parties was a success, and is now in the past. It was Anne (my wife)’s fortieth, held in the vineyards of the Yarra Valley, on a beautiful sunny spring day, and a random assortmen of our friends – mainly church people, because we’re new in Melbourne and don’t know many people yet, but also other people we’ve met in the last few years. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and everyone seemed t be talking to people, and a good time was had by all. Even me, wearing my host hat, had a pretty good time.

The other exciting news in my week is that my contract might be coming to an end, so I might have to get a fulltime job (!The horror!) But perhaps not. More on this as events unfold.

At Cafechurch, I did a session about the Canon, which as I think I mentioned, I had spent a fair amount of time researching. Here is an edited version of parts of what I said.

Before I began my research into the formation of the Canon, I had this sort of picture in my head, of some Imperial messenger, dressed in black, cloak billowing in a manner both dramatic and menacing, galloping past the camera, bearing an order from the dreaded Emperor Constantine to decide what was in and what was out of the Bible.

The real story is a lot less dramatic than my half imagined tale of Constantinian oppression, or some dreary lecture about the arbitrary misuse of authority.

A lot less dramatic, but a lot more interesting. There were no great, menacing councils, Constantine wasn’t involved until far too late to influence things much. Instead, it is a story of the church. Of books being valued by our unknown, unsung ancestors in the faith the best part of two thousand years ago, of the gradual emergence of the canon, already very close to how we have it, probably by the beginning of the 2^nd Century.

We don’t know all the details by any stretch of the imagination – Christians weren’t important people at the beginning. They weren’t writers or thinkers. They were, for the most part, slaves, women, and the urban poor, caught up in the dynamic life of the thing they knew only as The Way.  So we don’t know all that much about the immediately post apostolic period, and only from the dawn of the 2^nd century do things begin to come into focus, in the writings of the people we now know as the church fathers.

One of the most interesting factors was Marcion. He was born in about 100AD and brought up as a Christian. He was a big fan of the religion of love and grace presented by Jesus and by Paul. But the vengeful God of the OT? Not so much. So he embarked on a radical solution. He claimed that the OT God was completely different to the God of Jesus – a secondary figure of the sort known as a demiurge. So he axed the OT, and went through the bits of the NT he had available to him (mainly Paul and at least one Gospel, though possibly more), and expurgated all the Jewish bits out of it.

A nice easy solution he presumably thought. But it met with the strongest objection from the orthodox church, who said, on the contrary: We don’t want to remove the complicated bits which we don’t understand out of the Bible – we don’t have some idiological barrow to push, except for “Christ, and him crucified”  and now exalted above all. We aren’t interested in taking out the embarassing bits where the Jebusites are to be laid waste unto, nor where Peter betrays Jesus, nor all the other odd things which make us shift uncomfortably in our seats.

And I think that’s admirable: As, I think it was John Smith the God Squad guy said, if God had wanted us to have a clear, easy to digest pamphlet, he could presumably have arranged that. But he didn’t, and we have the Bible, with all its differences of emphasis, inconsistencies, Divine mixed with human elements… all of it.

Which reassures me that, far from some remote figure manipulating events from a distance, God is mixed up in this with us.

It also reassures me that, even though the scriptures are complex, and sometimes distressing, what they are not is a put up job, thought up by imperial bureaucrat  to solidify imperial rule, with Constantine’s stamp. Apart from anything else, Constantine wasn’t putting his fiat on anything at all  until  around a century after things were pretty nailed down. The Council of Nicaea  in 325 had other fish to fry.

Another thing I realised in the process of my research is that, far from being a problem for Orthodox Christianity, the presence of so many apocryphal gospels and Gnostic writings and so on is evidence of its power. Jesus fell onto the world like a nuclear bomb, and the power of his life was such that it radiated to the whole world, and all sorts of people got hold of little bits of it, and ran with it.

It testifies to the life of the Good News that so many people were so excited about it, without any sort of hierarchical power behind it, without even really understanding it, they all ran around like excited children, clutching their bit of truth.

The church emerges from this as rather chaotic, but full of life, and of good sense, and refusing to take the easy way out of things.

I really recommend looking into it. Start with The Canon of Scripture by FF Bruce

Enough. There is other stuff I could say about this, but I am beginning to suspect my posts might be a litte on the long side.