Canon Formation: Tracing the Role of Sub-Collections in the Biblical Canon, editedby W. Edward Glenny and Darian R. Lockett. London: T&T Clark, 2024. xix + 348 pp. $108.00.
Christians have always recognized the various groupings of books in the Old and New Testaments of their Bibles. Jesus himself noted at least three of these groupings in Luke 24:44 when he referred to the Old Testament as the “Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms.” In 2 Peter 3:15–16 the apostle Peter mentioned a group of Paul’s letters, indicating an awareness of a Pauline letter collection that was apparently already well-known at the time Peter was writing (c. 65).
Evidence suggests that “a crucial step in the process of canonization of the biblical texts was the coming together of discrete canonical sub-units” (1) like these mentioned by Jesus and Peter. In other words, well before Athanasius’s Festal Letter in 367 (the first known complete listing of the 27 books of the New Testament), sub-collections of inspired books circulated in the early church including the four gospels, the Pauline letters (plus Hebrews), and the General or Catholic Epistles (usually with Acts at the head of the grouping).
Ed Glenny, Professor of New Testament Studies and Greek at the University of Northwestern-St. Paul, and Darian Lockett, Professor of New Testament at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, recognized the need for a study of these canonical sub-units, and they have garnered the services of fifteen other canonical scholars to produce a volume that provides “a state-of-the-question discussion of the various canonical sub-collections” (2). To the editors’ knowledge no “other collection of essays…so comprehensively introduces the reader to the details of canonical context for biblical interpretation” (3). This fact alone suggests the importance of the volume for tracing the historical and theological significance of these canonical sub-collections in the field of canon studies.
Indeed, the main point of the book and basic presupposition of this field of canonical studies is that “most of the biblical texts made their way into the canon as part of a collection rather than as individual books” (1). This idea is confirmed by the Foreword written by Lee Martin McDonald. Regardless of whether or not one agrees with all of McDonald’s statements there, he provides forty questions regarding the study of Old Testament and New Testament canon formation, a gold-mine of possible avenues students could travel in studying the canon.
The sixteen essays of the book are organized under four general categories. First, “The Bible as a Whole and the Old and New Testaments as Canonical Units” (four chapters) has an initial article which “summarizes the early phase of Christian scriptural canon formation,” followed by three essays on the canonical shape of the Hebrew Old Testament, the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint), and the New Testament. Second, “Old Testament Canonical Sub-units” includes seven essays on the Torah, the Psalter, Wisdom books, the Megilloth, Prophets, and two articles on the Hebrew and Greek versions of the Book of the Twelve (Minor Prophets). Third, “New Testament Canonical Sub-units” has four essays on the four-fold Gospel, Acts and the Catholic Epistles, the Pauline Corpus, and Revelation. Finally, “Hermeneutical Considerations of Canon” contains one essay which focuses on the importance of the canon for interpretation.
Since space constraints prohibit a summary of each chapter, this review will seek to extract the significant points about canonical sub-collections made throughout the book. Section One covers the Bible as a whole. Here we learn that the Hebrew Old Testament had a tripartite structure seen in “the earliest external evidence for the Hebrew Bible that is available” (37). This tripartite structure includes the Torah (Gen–Deut), the Prophets (the Former [Josh, Judg, 1–2 Sam, and 1–2 Kgs] and the Latter [Isa, Jer, Ezek, The Twelve]), and the Writings (Ruth, Ps, Job, Prov, Eccl, Song, Lam, Dan, Esth, Ezra/Neh, 1–2 Chr). It appears that the majority of early Christians used the Septuagint, and that the canon of the Greek Old Testament depended on the Hebrew canon for its contents. However, the order of books and structure of the LXX differed from its Hebrew counterpart. The LXX was arranged by genre and contained Historical (Gen–Esth), Poetic (Job–Song), and Prophetic (Isa–The Twelve including Dan) sections, thus changing the way people read their Old Testaments as their Bibles ended with prophecy and eschatological expectation rather than with history (1–2 Chr) as in the Hebrew Scriptures (76). In regard to the canonical shape of the New Testament there are three approaches: 1) the minimalist view sees no real significance to the shape of the canon; 2) the post hoc position suggests that the shape of the canon does have hermeneutical significance even though the biblical authors shared no intentions with regard to its canonical compilation; and 3) the maximalist school believe that the “shape of the books both within specific corpora and between all four major corpora [e.g., Gospels, Acts and Catholic Epistles, Pauline letters, and Revelation] is due to authorial, editorial, and/or redactional intention” (83). While all four of the essays in Section One were helpful, Stephen Dempster’s “The Canonical Shape of the Hebrew Old Testament” (Chapter 2) was exceptional.
Section Twodeals with Old Testament sub-units, and the vast majority of the contributions in the section are quite beneficial. These include the essays on the Psalter (Nancy deClaissé-Walford), the wisdom writings (Craig Bartholomew), the Prophets (Christopher Seitz), and two on the Twelve (Don Collett wrote on the Hebrew version and Ed Glenny on the Greek version). These articles by Collett and Glenny spotlight one of the main values of the book by showing how canonical shaping between the major sub-units of the Old Testament as well as the different ordering of the books within the Twelve itself (219–20) help to influence the way readers perceive the Old Testament message. For example, placing the Twelve in the central section of the Hebrew Bible with the Latter Prophets as opposed to the end of the canon in the LXX has the effect of emphasizing the historical working of God in Israel’s history rather than enhancing eschatological expectation of the coming Messiah when the Twelve present the final words of the Old Testament (187–88). Incidentally, the essay on the Pentateuch (Stephen Chapman) suffers from the assumptions of source and form critical origins for the Torah, creating an insufferable dissonance when compared to all the other fine articles in the book.
The New Testament sub-units are treated in Section Three, and all four essays brim with useful interpretative help. These include (1) the four-fold Gospel (Greg Lanier); (2) Acts and the Catholic Epistles (Darian Lockett); (3) the Pauline corpus (Randolph Richards); and (4) Revelation (Külli Töniste).
Ched Spellman’s essay, “Hermeneutical Reflections on Canonical Sub-Collections: Retrospect and Prospect,” is the lone article in Section Four. Spellman “examines several concepts native to canon studies, including the context of canon, the coherence of canonical intentionality, the notion of canon-consciousness, and the relevance of the biblical canon to the task of biblical theology” (3). His closing sentence well summarizes his chapter and the book as a whole: “In my view, the canonical approach in general and the analysis of canonical sub-collections in particular have a strategic role to play within the broader field of Old and New Testament studies” (329).
Oh, that I had more space to give favorite quotations from this book! While the high price might cause hesitation for the parsimonious, the value gained from the insights therein will replace those doubts with appreciation. I highly recommend Canon Formation.
