I’d like to focus today on the parameters of our field, on deciding what texts we study, whether we call them apocryphal, noncanonical, or parabiblical. That is an area in which I have experience, not from writing about the problem, but from having to make choices in several projects about what texts to include or not to include and provide justification for doing so. For the most part I have argued for a broad definition—the more texts the better—but have recently become concerned that this approach may be too unwieldy, that our space outside the canon has become too crowded, that perhaps we have wandered too far beyond the canon and lost our way.The question of definition of terms has certainly come up for the Old Testament pseudepigrapha. It came up in the 2013 SBL review of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, volume 1, and I posted my comments on it here (scroll down to the update).
I stand by my comments there. It's good to keep in mind that words are not things. They can never perfectly represent reality. There will never be a perfect term for those amalgamations of texts that we clumsily call Old Testament pseudepigrapha or Christian apocrypha. It is more important that a definition be useful than it be precise. A vague definition can sometimes be more useful than an overly precise one.
It is interesting and informative to follow Tony wrestling with these challenges.
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