Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 59:1 (NA 2008)
Article: Canon, Narrative, And The Old Testament’s Literal Sense
Author: Christopher Seitz

TynBull 59:1 (2008) p. 27

Canon, Narrative, And The Old Testament’s Literal Sense

A Response To John Goldingay, ‘Canon And Old Testament Theology’

Christopher Seitz

It is a pleasure to be asked to respond to this stimulating essay by Professor Goldingay. He has an engaging style and brings considerable background in teaching and publishing to the very important topic of canon and Old Testament Theology. I have had the written text to work from in order to respond orally and have adapted that very little for this setting in the Tyndale Bulletin. The sense of proportion that comes from hearing the full oral presentation, or the printed version of that, may seem disturbed in my response, as my attention was drawn to this or that matter of detail, and of emphasis. That is, I am not attempting to do anything more than call attention to features which struck me as worthy of further reflection and critical evaluation.

Let me proceed, then, by filing by title three questions related to specific assumptions; or the way a matter has been formulated in the course of this stimulating and broad ranging address. There will be some overlap.

1. The Form Of The Canon

I confess I found this section confusing in what was assumed to be clear enough: that on the one hand, there is a Hebrew-Aramaic order, and on the other, a Greek order. Both have a lot of narrative, so the differences between them ought not to matter that much; that seemed to be Goldingay’s larger point. I will come back to the matter of narrative as such in a moment.

First: on the assumption of competing orders, whose competition is not so great.

TynBull 59:1 (2008) p. 28

I would argue that it is possible to understand something of the reasons for the emergence of different orderings of biblical books, and further, that it is important for an appraisal of canon and theology that we do so (the topic of the Heyward Lectures, given at Acadia Divinity School, were devoted to this theme). In actual fact, the only order that settles down in the history of the Old Testament’s reception is the tripartite of the Hebrew order (with some minor movement in the Writings). Since Goldingay is not interested in arguments which trade heavily in origins, and getting the matter right in terms of original orders—a point I agree with in general—what we find when we look at lists from antiquity is that there simply is no such thing as ‘a Greek order’ (or ‘a Latin order’ based upon a Greek order). The so-called ‘fourfold order’, such as we find in modern printed Bibles, has no single or obvious exemplar in the history of the Bible’s reception.

In the Greek-speaking Churches of the earliest centuries (u...