ABSTRACT
We come now to consider the whole question of canonization. This is the complex process which leads to the existence, in many religious communities ancient and modern, as well as in other contexts, of a fixed ‘list’ or ‘canon’ of texts believed to be sacred, inspired or in some way special and different from all other texts. In a religious context, decisions are taken by a Church council or a group of leaders like the rabbis at Yavneh, to lay down precisely which books can and cannot be read aloud, and which can and cannot be preached on at public worship. In ancient Rome, the state gave canonical status to certain books or collections of books, such as the poems of Virgil and the Sibylline Oracles, which were officially consulted in times of doubt or crisis, and other texts with a sacred function like the ‘Fasti’ and the hymns to the gods, which were used on state occasions (Gordon 1990:184–91). Outside official religion, and over against it, there have been efforts to establish alternative canons. The second-century Gnostic, Marcion, for example, in opposition to orthodoxy fixed a canon containing only the Gospel of Luke and ten Pauline Epistles. In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther decided to remove the apocrypha from the traditional canon of the Western Church, and in the eighteenth century the Swedish scientist and reformer, Emanuel Swedenborg, founder of the New Church, rejected Job, Proverbs, Pauline Epistles and other books as uncanonical.
