Christian Apocrypha and the apologetics of canon

It was around before, but since The Da Vinci Code, I've noted that I have to say more about the legitimacy of the NT canon more often to both Christians and to enquirers. And so it's great to find a relatively brief blog post by my old friend Doug Chaplin which helps orient us to helpful approaches to respond. It's here in full:
Christian Apocrypha and the question of Church censorship and here are a few things he writes to give you a sense of the value of the thing:

"I suspect the modern parallel might be rather more what texts and theories are allowed in the science classroom than about freedom of religious belief. If our analogy is the debate around creationism and evolution, then I’m not sure we will easily resort either to language of censorship or the assumption that all truths are of equal value."

And that is probably quite a well-chosen analogy which helps undercut the anachronistic thinking in a way that helps to retrieve the positive value of canon in something like the way that many early Christians might have seen it.

Then there is a second analogy, based this time on the debate in literary studies about whether there is a "canon" of literature that should be taught in order to give students a helpful leg-up into the kind of texts they need to look at in order to educate their palate (to use yet another analogy).

The literary analogy certainly does say something about the power of the guardianship exercised by a cultural elite, but it also suggest there is something about the texts themselves which is also of significance for why these texts get read, edited, performed, reflected about and passed on. They are perceived by a cultural community as being of better (whatever better means in this context) value than others like them – indeed, as being simply better texts.

This latter is something like the way I have found myself answering: that in the course of using texts over a few generations, certain texts emerged, relatively independently in many cases as being those that were most used because, presumably, they spoke and gave voice to what seemed to those early Christian communities to be the most authentic voice of Jesus and the apostolic witness. It's a bit more complicated than that, but we need a headline /on a t-shirt way in first in such circumstances as I'm usually experiencing the issue being raised.

Christ and the Bible