Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> THIS BOOK is not meant as yet another treatment of the favourite topics covered in textbooks on the history of the Canon. My purpose is not to trace when and where the various books of the Bible first emerged were quoted grouped together and disseminated and finally found their place in the Canon. These are questions which taken by them- selves belong rather to the science of biblical Introduction than to Church history; and it is hardly likely that any further substantial dis- coveries will be made in this area. My own interest lies in the great historical process of the formation of the Canon as such the problem of the Christian canon the pressures which motivated and the resistances which obstructed its emergence the outcome of the controversies and the theological significance of that outcome. In previous presentations of the history of the Canon this aspect of the subject has at best been merely touched upon or treated in outline; it has never been made the central theme. It may perhaps seem presumptuous to attempt anything of the kind. It was the view of Theodor Zahn whose immense Geschichte des neutestamentlichen Kanons remained a fragment that a history of the ‘dogmatic ideas’ a history so to speak of the dogma of the Canon would be virtually impossible to write; and that in any case such an enterprise would be unrewarding (I p. 84). He justified his position on the grounds of the nature and incompleteness of the extant early Chris- tian literature and concluded that in the early Church the Canon never at any time became the ‘object of serious dogmatic thinking or of real doctrinal formation. (SP)