Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Craig Blomberg on the "Un-Protestant" Nature of Appealing to Revelation 22:18-19 to Support a Closed Canon

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