Should the Bible be continued?

What is the Bible? A collection of books, divided into two “Testaments” that describe the workings of God in the World, before and after the coming of Christ. But these books are not the only ones ever written about which this could be said. Even at the time of the “modern” Bible’s creation, in the 4^th century AD, there were many books that fought for a place in the canon. Some were accepted, others rejected outright, and yet more were given a shadowy acceptance as the “Apocrypha”, given respect by some branches of Christianity but not others.

When we look at the books that did gain admission, we find some strange bedfellows. In the Old Testament, for example, we have Esther and the Song of Solomon, the first of which is a thoroughly good story involving an assassination plot and the unmasking of a villain, but in which the name of Jehovah is not mentioned once.  As for the latter, it is not far short of pornography!

However, if these books were intended to show God at work, in many and various ways, why did we stop the process of Bible-building 1700 years ago? Have there been no texts written in more recent centuries that perform exactly the same function? Would it not benefit today’s Church-goers to hear words of witnesss read to them that relate more to today’s world?

I would like to suggest the Bible be expanded in this way, and the example of Wikipedia, by which individuals can make their own contributions to a body of knowledge, is an interesting one to follow. Indeed, a closer examination of some of the books of the Bible shows that they were given the "Wikipedia" treatment thousands of years ago. Isaiah and Jeremiah, for instance, are both mashups of texts, with later editors adding bits in as and when they saw fit.

So Yes, why not? A Bible that took account of the lives lived and knowledge gained over the centuries since the canon was established would be a better "testament" to the work of God in the world today than the set of ancient texts on their own. These days we understand that mental illness is not the work of “devils” and that homosexuality is a perfectly natural occurrence, and a recognition of these facts in our Bible might lead to greater tolerance on the part of religious people. 

I can foresee problems, however.  The very intolerance caused, in part, by rigid interpretations of scripture, has led to splits in the Church that make it hard to imagine that agreement on which testaments to add to the canon will be at all easy to reach. However, the very procedure of debating the canon afresh might have the effect of making people examine their beliefs in greater depth and reaching new agreements with their fellow Christians, which surely would not be a bad thing.

© John Welford