Reading the right books: memory
Over the last few posts, we’ve seen how there is a continuing thread running from Judaism into Christianity of reading the scriptures in the context of giving worship to God. One of the obvious questions that the early church then found itself asking was “Which books should we read in public worship?”. This was one of the key drivers in developing a sense of “bible”: making lists of the books that Christians should read above all when they met in public to worship God, and which would therefore also form their core collection of texts when they wanted to think about faith and life. Some of these books were clearly inherited from Jewish tradition, from Jesus as a user and interpreter of scripture, and then from his apostles and the earliest Christian communities. These earliest communities, the ones we find reflected in Paul’s letters, didn’t know they were Christian, of course. They simply thought of themselves as people who were finding the Jewish prophecies ...