I've been listening to Bart Ehrman's podcasts about the Bible, provocatively entitled Misquoting Jesus. Prof Ehrman has forgotten more about the New Testament than I am ever likely to know, and I have learned a lot from them. His explanation of how the "lost chapter" of Mark's Gospel was discovered; and why it is very probably a forgery is great fun.
But occassionally, his language wrankles slightly. Ehrman has a tendency to refer to the apocryphal gospels -- the Christian texts by people other than Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and sometimes Paul -- as "books which never made it into the Bible."
Which is literally true. Oliver Twist is a book that never made it into the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and Sailor on the Seas of Fate is generally excluded from the Harry Potter series. But there is a danger that a listener could infer that Judas and Thomas and Peter and that huge body of second and third century fan-fic might have become of the Bible.
I suppose there could have been a world where "the Bible" never stopped growing: where books written by the disciples of the disciples of the disciples had the same status as the big Four (or sometimes Five). Maybe the Sermons of John Wesley and the Broadcast of C.S Lewis might have been canonised as part of the Twenty Eighth Testament. Don't the Quakers have something like that -- a collection of "testimonies" that each generation adds to?
But the phrase "never-made-it-into" plays into the story that Once Upon a Time (TM) there was a big pile of books, all equally valid or equally invalid, and then one day an unruly mob armed with surprise, fear, nice red uniforms and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope unexpectedly burst in and arbitrarily deleted the ones they happen not to like.
Ehrman, obviously, doesn't remotely believe this story. He is clear and interesting and helpful about where the canon actually came from. The catholic church didn't have an official list of all the books that were definitively in the Bible until as late as the sixteenth century. But everyone who called themselves a Christian had been working from the same list for about thirteen centuries before that. The 1546 decree only came about because Martin Luther was making noises about excluding James and Revelation.
But I think it's the story Richard Dawkins and Dan Brown and the journalists who got excited about the Gospel of Mary hoax believe in. Thomas and Mark are "the same kind of thing" and only random chance or inquisitorial suppression put one between big black leather covers and relegated the other to the Loeb Ancient Greek Texts series.
When Ronald Knox started to talk about the Sherlock Holmes "canon" in the 1930s he was making a scholarly religious joke. But once you've stopped laughing, the Holmes canon isn't particularly hard to define: it's whatever Conan Doyle wrote. Fifty something stories and a handful of novels. I am told that some people play a meta-game where, for example, Laurie King's Mary Russel books are treated as canon, but that's all part of the joke.
Comic book canon is quite a bit more fiddly. There are an awful lot of Spider-Man comics out there and it takes a monumental act of faith to believe they are all true at the same time. But if I say "Is Captain America canonically Irish?" or "Is Jimmy Olsen canonically gay?" I think you understand the question. Captain America's heritage has been alluded to in the comic books themselves; Jimmy Olsen has only been said to be Superman's Very Special Friend in fan-fiction.
You might very well say that it doesn't make any difference; but you understand the question.
So: how, as readers, scholars, and adaptors, should we define the Tolkien canon?
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Regarding Biblical canon qua Biblical canon: I sympathise with your annoyance at that turn of phrase, but I think you might be swinging the pendulum a bit too far the other way. I don't think the apocryphal Gospels were written purely as literary exercises — I assume their authors intended them to be accepted as true esoteric texts by future generations. The Gospel of Thomas was intended by """Thomas""" to make it into 'the Bible', if there was to be such a thing; and thus, saying that the hoax — if we must call it that — didn't 'take' is a more meaningful and relevant statement than "Good Omens never made it into the Bible".
ReplyDeleteRegarding fictional canon: I find it clears up a lot of things to distinguish between "the [X] canon", which refers to a body of text from a Doylist (extra-diegetic) perspective, and the Watsonian (intra-diegetic) concept of "canon". I believe there are in fact a couple of Holmes texts in which A.C. Doyle had a hand, but which are not typically considered "canonical" in the "are we going to pretend they really happened" sense — chief among them the infamous William Gillette stage play Doyle cowrote, in which Moriarty was called Robert and Irene Adler was called Alice Faulkner.
Of course, I may be anticipating points you'll get to in future posts in this series… but hey, selfishly, all the more reason for me to nail my colours to the mast before I've been spoiled on where you're going. Makes me look cleverer.
Thanks for that comment.
ReplyDeleteI agree that I didn't clearly distinguish between different types of work that have been called "apocryphal". 1st and 2nd Clement were sometimes included in ancient canons, and they were certainly neither hoaxes nor fan fiction. Someone at some time decided to draw a line between "the New Testament" and "the Church Fathers".
I only intended the word "hoax" to apply to modern forgeries. (The consensus seems to be that Secret Mark was concocted by Morton Smith to demonstrate that New Testament scholars were more easily fooled than classical scholars; and the recent "Gospel" of Mary was almost definitely the work of a modern forger who had a sideline in "historical people slash fiction".)
The gnostic texts rediscovered at Nag Hammadi are clearly neither forgeries nor literary creations. The writers may have been using a literary device to express deeply held mystical insights; or they may genuinely have thought that they were writing under divine inspiration (like the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 Step Solution). Whether they envisaged themselves as part of a collection of texts that included the writings of St Paul I very much doubt.
I really had in mind things like the Proto-Evangelium of James or the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which seem to be works of imagination. "Thomas" wasn't claiming to have been present when Jesus got thumped for cheeking his Hebrew teacher or when he brought toy birds to life; nor was he passing on an oral tradition. It was more like, say, "The Carol of the Drum" or the painting of "Christ in the Carpenter's Shop" -- imagining what might or must have happened. That's why I used the term "fan fiction".
Something I only recently came to understand is that Catholics believe in the authority of tradition, as well as in the authority of Scripture. No-one suggested including the Proto-Evangelium in texts of the Bible: but they were quite happy to say that Mary's parents were Joachim and Anne, and to include images of Joseph choosing Mary from among the temple virgins in stained glass windows. These things were probably true because people had believed they were probably true for a very long time and because they weren't contrary to establish doctrine. So the canon/non-canon border is a little more porous than protestants probably imagine.
Obviously, what we'd be most interested in would be "accounts of the life of Jesus, or epistles to the primitive church, which are as ancient and well attested as the four extant gospels and Paul's writings, but separate and independent of them". But sadly, there is virtually nothing. I think some scholars believe that the Sayings Gospel of Thomas (not the same as the childhood one) may draw independently on the same traditions that Matthew, Mark and Luke were derived from; but others think he knew the synoptics directly. And there is some evidence that the completely whacky version of the Easter story in the Gospel of Peter was written in Aramaic, and may therefore be as old and older than the one in Mark.
Yes, in the game of fictional canon, you have to make some decisions. (I believe Star Trek fans went with "everything Roddenbury had a hand in, apart from the cartoon and one of the films" .) I spotted the idea of hierarchical canon when I was very young indeed: a Magic Roundabout or Basil Brush comic strip had to stick pretty much to the TV show, but the TV show was under no obligation to pay the slightest attention to the comic strips. (I think the Hartnell and Troughton TV Comic stories were pretty much consciously a different "thing" to TV Doctor Who; we'd now have to say they were set in a parallel world.) In theory Star Wars now has a single, unified canon, but I don't think anyone remotely thinks that the TV and movie universe is going to treat the comics as historically accurate. (Vader allied with Amidala's handmaidens to overthrown the emperor, anyone?)
Thanks as usual for your interest.
Thank you for the reply! Oh, I wasn't bouncing off of your use of "hoax", I was very much using the term myself in reference to the Gnostic apocrypha. You're right that some of these writers may have sincerely thought they were channeling divine forces, although I am cynical enough as to think that a significant number of cult leaders who say "an angel of the lord passed this secret knowledge unto me" are clever showmen, not earnest schizophrenics. And I'm inclined to suspect this was probably already true in the 4th century.
DeleteAs to "whether they envisaged themselves as part of a collection of texts that included the writings of St Paul"… That depends on what we mean. I think that they intended for their texts to be passed on as theologically important revelations, and studied as such by later generations of Christians. This doesn't mean they're the same type of thing as the four Gospels, but I think it may well make them (by intention, not actual reception) the same type of thing as Revelation; and that their writers would be rather put out to learn we haven't preserved them as such.
but they were quite happy to say that Mary's parents were Joachim and Anne, and to include images of Joseph choosing Mary from among the temple virgins in stained glass windows
Oh, indeed. I've been studying a lot of Renaissance artwork recently, and there are whole cycles about the Life of Joachim etc. from the likes of Giotto.
(I think the Hartnell and Troughton TV Comic stories were pretty much consciously a different "thing" to TV Doctor Who; we'd now have to say they were set in a parallel world.)
Tut tut, we have to say no such thing! But then in my DWU fiction-writing I like to recognise a maximal amount of stuff as canonical, contradictions be damned. Or rather, contradictions cunningly explained away. The point is, Ncuti Gatwa definitely remembers his grandchildren John and Gillian as far as I'm concerned; which I suppose is academic given that no one's letting me fly quite so close to the sun, but if I put the Pied Piper of Hamelin in a Faction Paradox story it's going to be a Piper who remembers his battle of wits with Dr Who, inventor of the spaceship Tardis, just as much as the time he was played by Bradley Walsh and Sarah Jane Smith stuck him into a meteorite. And you betterbelieve I have explanations for all of this, no multiverses needed, although sometimes they're too finnicky to be worth spelling out. (Even sticking to BBC-authorised media, it may interest you to know that ol'Jack and Jill Who got a reference as late as one of the Eleventh Doctor IDW comics, so I am not alone in that position!)
I recognise, of course, that this is very much a self-imposed literary challenge and not the natural or expected way to approach this stuff. Doctor Who is unusually suitable to cheekily saying that the Doctor has seven different genealogies because of off-screen timey-wimey hijinks; it probably wouldn't be interesting to try to write Middle-Earth as if Gandalf is aware of a prior version of history in which he was a dwarven king and Sauron was a giant cat.
Regardless I do prefer to think about a plurality of canons rather than a hierarchy of canons. Each piece of media is primary unto itself; the movies can't be expected to tow the comics' line or vice versa. Tie-in media are at their worst when they seem neurotic about their own inferiority and bend over backwards to avoid contradiction; contrariwise they are at their best when they revel in viewing themselves as the centre of their reality for the duration. I might or might not decide that a given Star Wars cartoon is real in my head in the end, but I'm not interested in watching it if it's going to avoid interesting narrative pathways for fear of being contradicted by a mediocre Hollywood blockbuster in five years.
Also, Paramount actually put the question of "should the old Star Trek cartoon be canon" to vote among Trekkies, and it was voted in. This fact rather delights me.
ReplyDeleteI think -- especially with Doctor Who -- that it is obviously fun to embrace the contradictions, or to come up with clever explanations for them. But the simplest possible reading of TV comic -- one which was obvious to me when I was a kid -- was "this is a different set of stories about a different set of characters". And I'd be pretty happy if we could leave it that, rather than default to "this is a meta fiction about a universe where Eroll Flynn for some reason turned into a fox."
ReplyDeleteI think it is a pity of the critical games overwrite the original text. The 1950s comics in which Captain America was anti communistic zealot are real and exist and part of the history of American comics. The 1970s comics in which it turns out that that Captain America was an insane imposter are real and canonical and quite interesting. But I am very concerned if someone says "In 1950, Stan Lee wrote a series about an insane man posing as Captain America." (cf "In 1965 the Doctor met a fellow Gallifreyan called the Meddling Monk.")
There is another analogy with the Bible here, actually. When you get two different versions of the same story, there is an obvious temptation to say "How can we harmonise them so both are true?". And equally a temptation to say "What actual true event lies behind these two contradictory stories?" But I always tend to "why did these two writers tell the story in two different ways" or even "why did Matthew make these particular changes to Luke."
(Has anyone done an essay on the Synoptic Problem postulating a Jesus of Earth 1 and a Jesus of Earth 2.)
(Dave Sim, obviously.)
But I am very concerned if someone says "In 1950, Stan Lee wrote a series about an insane man posing as Captain America." (cf "In 1965 the Doctor met a fellow Gallifreyan called the Meddling Monk.")
DeleteOh, I quite agree there, my point is really that I can accept John and Gillian existing in the current understandings of the Whoniverse no more or less than I can accept that the Meddling Monk does.
In fact, you'll recall I once got into a bit of a spat with another of your commenters, in these very comment sections, concerning my steadfast belief that the 1977 Star Wars can and should be watched primarily as if Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader are different men, even if it is an interesting game to watch it as if they aren't.