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Steve/James

  All good points...I am liking the progress we are making!

  I would remind the readers that Jesus [not only his disciples]  is recorded as having spoken about his divinity and his impending death and Resurrection...I have read portions of apocrypha and find them much as Jim describes...I was raised catholic and the Apocrypha are valued by them for some functions...it also helps to recall that the story of Hanukkah is recorded in one of the Apocryphal Maccabees texts...I think of it this way: if I authored a work, and then someone wrote a similar work, how would I protect the original work? how would I protect the names and terms associated with it? In religious circles, orthodoxy seems to be useful, in that copyrights and other protections do not exist...without some efforts in the  direction of protecting the Word anyone and everyone can author alternative accounts, leave out important things for their own purposes and basically liable-lize what was original...if the original was an eyewitness account, then it would be a disservice to believers of a group to allow false accounts to proliferate....

Comments

Colleen said…
I think this is a very important point you are making: writings outside the canon are not necessarily unimportant or false, only less comprehensively essential and ideologically fundamental.
That is so...but it must be noted that there are extra-canonical texts that the members of the church from its beginning would have rejected and we can see in scripture comments about what came to be called "heresies" -these provide us with clues to what is antithetical to Christianity.

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