Talking Lions and Man-eating Seals: The OT/NT double standard
In writing a paper for my NT class about the Acts of Paul (particularly the section about Paul and Thecla), I’ve run across an interesting double standard. Many of the “apocryphal” Acts that were written, circulated, and read in churches for the first few centuries after Paul include grandiose stories including talking animals and, in one case, Paul actually baptizes a lion.
One of the main reasons given for why people eventually rejected these other versions of Paul’s life is because these fanciful tales are totally unrealistic. Ancient church fathers ruled out these accounts a priori because they were unbelievable, and they are of no use for contemporary Christians because they are clearly historically inaccurate and, since they’re not in the canon, un-inspired.
This raises two questions in my mind.
One, I’m not sure why they should be ruled out due to their fanciful stories since, if I just turn a few hundred pages back to the left in my Bible, the OT is filled with fanciful and extraordinary tales including, if I remember correctly, a talking donkey. I suppose someone could retort that those OT stories are historically accurate, whereas, the apocryphal Acts are not. But I would be interested to see how one could reason their way into rejecting one and accepting the other without some sort of serious double standard.
Two, and this is the more important question, I wonder if this early Christian literature does have a place in the life of the church. These documents were created by early Christian group, remained useful to them for centuries, and were read publicly in their worship assemblies. Especially for Protestant groups like the church of Christ, we have never said that something is useful because it was eventually accepted or rejected by church hierarchies—our theological focus is a sort of open source theology that wants to ask what early Christians actually did. So what if we broadened that ideal and tried to learn and grow from all kinds of early Christian communities, not just the proto-orthodoxy that was finally labeled as the “true” Christianity 500 years later.
Is there a place for non-canonical books in contemporary church-life?
