Wow, this video totally BLEW MY MIND!!!! It revealed that underneath Dan McClellan's dour, take-no-prisoners, data-over-dogma exterior, there beats the heart of a wishy-washy liberal cafeteria Christian.
Everybody's entitled to their opinions, of course. Mine is that, if asked, I would reject the question. I go with (I think) Helmut Thielicke, who wrote decades ago that scholars, at least, should abandon reliance on a canon. As the late Edmund White liked to say about the literary canon, people who really love reading aren't interested in canons; they (we) want more and more books. Canons are for people who don't like to read, and want to limit radically the number of books they "have" to read. Scholars of early Christianity should be interested in as much literature from the period as they can get at, because they know that the canon didn't exist then anyway. Deciding which book one would remove from the canon is like constructing your own Dream Team of elite athletes, a useless if briefly entertaining exercise.
On top of that, McClellan's reasons are extremely poor. If the Revelation wasn't written by the traditionally ascribed author, neither was most of the New Testament. There's no reason to think that "John" intended to be confused with the author of the Fourth Gospel, who wasn't named John anyway. "John" was a common name at the time, like "Jesus" or "Mary." Unlike the other three gospels, the Fourth Gospel singles out one of its characters as the author, but never by name. The people who constructed the eventual canon were wrong about most of their decisions anyway, so why cite them as authorities? If McClellan objects to the Revelation because of authorship, he should throw out most of the canonical New Testament too.
The bit about the Revelation being about a Jesus who wasn't the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount is hilarious. The Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount is a Gehenna and damnation preacher - cut off your hand if it leads you to sin, or be cast into eternal fire! (Matthew 5:29-30, Dan. You know it as well as I do.) It's not surprising that lay Christians and village atheists skip over those parts, but McClellan is, as he likes to remind us, a scholar of the Bible. He knows better. The Revelation develops themes that are everywhere in the New Testament and early Christianity, they aren't at odds with it except possibly in degree. First take the beam out of your own eye, Dan.
McClellan goes on to say:
And [the Revelation] was widely accepted precisely because of leaders saying, "Well, we have to include it." And primarily because it allowed them to structure power and values and boundaries over against the Christians that they didn't like.
To the limited extent that this is true, it's true of the rest of the New Testament. Most of those writings contain denunciations of false teachers, prophets and brethren among Christians. My favorites are the short letters ascribed to John -- the same John to whom the Fourth Gospel was eventually ascribed, though probably not by him either -- in which the author orders his followers to withhold fellowship from his opponents, and then he complains because fellowship has been withheld from him. It happened to the Apostle Paul, as he reports in Galatians. That's how these things go; you could call it karma.
These passages, and there are a lot of them, allowed leaders "to structure power and values and boundaries," but they could be and were turned against the leaders. I think that the Revelation has more often been used by those at the bottom of their communities to justify overthrowing those at the top, and that's why it's unpopular with the learned and privileged. For examples, see Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957). I recall one episode Cohn recounted in which the Inquisition came to some city to root out rebellious troublemakers but had to flee when they met violent resistance from the populace. Cohn was indignant about this; he seems to have been somewhat confused about power and values and boundaries.
The early Christians rejected the power structures of their time, but they wanted to upend them, not eliminate them. Jesus taught that the last would be first and the first would be last; no more than his followers could he imagine an end to hierarchies, nor did he want to. He expected that when the rich and mighty were brought down, he and his followers would be raised up. He would ride into town at the right hand of power, and all authority in heaven and earth would be his. Vengeance would be terrible - for the bad guys, but they deserved it. The earth would be cleansed of their defilements in blood.
It happens that this video went up just as I began reading 1 Enoch, in McClellan's recommended Hermeneia version. Enoch, as McClellan knows, strongly influenced Jesus' milieu and likely Jesus himself. The same fantasies of divine vengeance and heavenly armies slaughtering the ungodly run through 1 Enoch. Here's an example from chapter 10:
And to Michael [the Most High] said, “Go, Michael, bind Shemihazah and the others with him, who have mated with the daughters of men, so that they were defiled by them in their uncleanness. And when their sons perish and they see the destruction of their beloved ones, bind them for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, until the day of their judgment and consummation, until the everlasting judgment is consummated. Then they will be led away to the fiery abyss, and to the torture, and to the prison where they will be confined forever. And everyone who is condemned and destroyed henceforth will be bound together with them until the consummation of their generation. <And at the time of the judgment, which I shall judge, they will perish for all generations.>"
It's a common trope in apocalyptic writing, and as McClellan knows, Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher who thought only a few would be saved. What would happen to the majority? Shhhhh, it wouldn't do to talk about that. As I've said before, those who'd like to get rid of the Revelation forget or never realize that its bad points are everywhere in the New Testament, especially in Jesus' teachings.
Thinking about all this led me to reread James Barr's Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism (Westminster, 1983). Barr was theologically conservative, but in this book he basically deconstructed (I'm using the word accurately here, I think) the whole idea of the canon. For example, the people who lived in biblical times and are featured in the Bible didn't have the Bible. Yes, the first Christians had the Tanakh, aka the Old Testament, but they didn't have the New Testament. Nor is the biblical canon specified in the Bible (23-4):
It was impossible to provide scriptural proof for this most central of questions,namely, which precisely were the books which had been divinely inspired. No passage in either Old or New Testament gave a list, nor indeed, as we shall shortly see, did any passage give any indication that they cared seriously about the question. The List of Contents prefaced to the Bible, though it was all-important for the total shape of what lay within, was not part of the inspired text of the Bible itself. For evidence about what was within the canon, one had to go outside the canon itself.
This is also true of other parts of Christian apologetic, such as the claim that all twelve of Jesus' original followers were martyred; maybe so, probably not, but the evidence for most of them comes from outside the Bible. Barr lays out the contradictions in orthodox, traditional accounts of the canon and how the idea has been used. The book is densely written, but if you could follow the quotation above and have access to a university library, it's worth tracking down and reading. Video scholars like Dan McClellan, Bart Ehrman, and others can introduce you to the subject, but sooner or later it's vital to do some reading - not only of their books but of others. Barr wrote several books for a general audience, as did other scholars I learned a lot from. I also read the work of scholars I disagreed with, including conservatives and fundamentalists, and I learned from the experience. As Rabbi Hillel told a doubter, go and learn.
