As someone who labours largely in canonical literature, it is nice to bring my head up now and again and teach other material. Right now in fact I'm teaching one of my dream courses: a graduate seminar on the Apostolic Fathers. We're working our way through the entirety of that corpus, and hopefully will also find time to touch upon Justin Martyr's First Apology and the Gospel of Thomas: works not typically reckoned among the Apostolic Fathers, but close enough temporally as to be of pedagogical relevance. As I teach this course, I am finding one unexpected benefit: the fact that none of my students consider these texts to be part of their biblical canon allows us to ask questions openly which some might find awkward when they are addressed towards canonical work.
Let us consider a concrete example. Last week we covered the Shepherd of Hermas. For those unfamiliar, you should go and read it; if you still haven't read it, then I'll give the relevant Coles' Notes here. The Shepherd centres around a series of visions by a Roman Christian named Hermas, active in perhaps the last quarter of the first century or the first half of the second. Students have noted that many of these visions are reminiscent of those in the Revelation of John. Now, if I asked students to explain what is going on with the visions recorded by John of Patmos, many would no doubt feel uncomfortable considering the possibility that they were the result of physiological or psychological realities, and perhaps even more they would feel uncomfortable considering the possibility that the visionary framework is entirely fictional. Much of that reticence disappears when they come to a non-canonical work, and students will much more openly consider possibilities with regard to the Shepherd of Hermas that they might find at first blasphemous with regard to the Revelation of John. That allows us to more openly consider such possibilities. And what that also means is that what when they do turn to canonical work they are all the better equipped to explore such possibilities there. Work with non-canonical texts often opens up a critical distance that many struggle to find when studying canonical texts. Because, after all, the aim of historical investigation is neither to "prove the bible wrong" nor to "prove it right," but rather to more modestly figure out what was happening a couple millennia ago so as to produce the materials available to us today.
Let us consider a concrete example. Last week we covered the Shepherd of Hermas. For those unfamiliar, you should go and read it; if you still haven't read it, then I'll give the relevant Coles' Notes here. The Shepherd centres around a series of visions by a Roman Christian named Hermas, active in perhaps the last quarter of the first century or the first half of the second. Students have noted that many of these visions are reminiscent of those in the Revelation of John. Now, if I asked students to explain what is going on with the visions recorded by John of Patmos, many would no doubt feel uncomfortable considering the possibility that they were the result of physiological or psychological realities, and perhaps even more they would feel uncomfortable considering the possibility that the visionary framework is entirely fictional. Much of that reticence disappears when they come to a non-canonical work, and students will much more openly consider possibilities with regard to the Shepherd of Hermas that they might find at first blasphemous with regard to the Revelation of John. That allows us to more openly consider such possibilities. And what that also means is that what when they do turn to canonical work they are all the better equipped to explore such possibilities there. Work with non-canonical texts often opens up a critical distance that many struggle to find when studying canonical texts. Because, after all, the aim of historical investigation is neither to "prove the bible wrong" nor to "prove it right," but rather to more modestly figure out what was happening a couple millennia ago so as to produce the materials available to us today.
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