Commenting on Rev 22:18-19, a common “proof-text” used by his fellow co-religionists against Latter-day Saints, Craig Blomberg correctly noted the eisegesis inherent within such an appeal:
As for an expanded
canon, the average Evangelical will (wrongly) cite Revelation 22:18-19 about
God damning anyone who adds or deletes words from John's Apocalypse. Not
recalling that in context this could refer only to the book of Revelation, and
because Revelation is the last book of the canon, they will assume that it
applies to the whole Bible. (Craig L. Blomberg, “Are Mormons Christian?” in
Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst, eds., The LDS Gospel Topics
Series: A Scholarly Engagement [Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2000], 27-50,
here, p. 39)
What was interesting about this is the
footnote attached to the above paragraph:
Indeed, to argue for
a closed canon is to implicitly adopt the Catholic notion that the church
determines and therefore can close the canon, rather than the Protestant
concept of the canon as self-attesting. As Bruce M. Metzger (The Canon of the
New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987], 282-284) phrases it, the biblical canon is “a collection
of authoritative texts,” not an “authoritative collection of (authoritative)
texts.” (Ibid., 39 n. 34, emphasis added)
In other words, appealing to this text as
many errant Protestants do is to be, well, very “un-Protestant.”
Of course, for a Protestant scholar to
claim Rev 22:18-19 is not talking about anything other than the book of Revelation
is not surprising; such is the scholarly consensus. See the discussion of this
text at:
Not By Scripture Alone: A Latter-day SaintRefutation of Sola Scriptura