The Canon within the Canon of Jim West

Jim West has his roll of Bible bloggers pared down to an elite group of eight. This must be the canon within the canon of Kasemannian fame, die Mitte der Schrift.

What, pray tell, do the members of the list have in common? One thing I noticed: all 8 have been blogging for two and a half years or more. That is more than one can say for almost everyone else who is blogging about the Bible these days.

Like Icarus son of Daedalus who dared fly too near the sun on wings of feathers and wax, many a blogger meets an untimely death after a few months of flight. I wonder who has been blogging the longest in the dom of Bible. Is it Jim West?

Comments

[Jim]

Actually I'm third I think. Jim Davila, Mark Goodacre, and then me- in terms of timeline. So far as Technorati 'ranking' (which has to do with the number of links per site (at present anyway)-

Davila- 97
Goodacre - 151
West - 194

So far as other 'bibliobloggers' present rankings-

Brady - 39
Hobbins - 134
Wilson - 36
Tilling - 93
Weimer - 74
Smith - 71

You can find out your current 'authority' by visiting www.technorati.com

[JohnFH]

194, that's impressive. You have lots of conservative chatty women friends, don't you?

[Jim]

They score even less...
;-)

[Peter Kirk]

Jim sounds a bit like some of our conservative Catholic or Orthodox friends, such as Doug Chaplin, Iyov (well, I'm not sure if these labels fit him) and to some extent yourself, who seem to believe that the older a Christian or Jewish writing is the more authoritative it is as part of the "tradition". But Jim restricts his corpus of tradition to blogs! On the other hand, I value (non-biblical, at least) works according to their content rather than their date of publication or how valued they are by others.

[Jim]

That's the joy of the canon. One can choose what one wishes and exclude what one desires without having to explain oneself to anyone else.

[JohnFH]

I tend to go for things at or near the alpha point, but also, at or near the omega point.

All other things being equal (which of course they never are), it stands to reason that things at or near the alpha point will elucidate it better than things rather later or earlier on a given continuum. That helps explain the importance I ascribe to "intertestamental" literature on the one hand, and early Christian literature on the other.

But I'm not sure that things being written now are elucidative of the omega point that is coming.

[scott gray]

shouldn't this discussion be taking place in nicea?

[Doug Chaplin]

Jim also has other categories in his canonical roll - "Other blogs I like" and "Theoblogs". I am not quite sure which are his OT, NT and Apocrypha, or indeed what his criteria for inclusion in one category rather than another actually is. As a relative newbie to regular blogging (just over six months) I am astounded to make it even into his "Apostolic Fathers" collection

[dave b]

My first post was May day 2005. But in all honesty I am hardly a regular blogger and my posts are certainly not all related to biblical studies.

[Jim]

I don't really think I view Doug's or the other Theoblogs as peripheral. I simply categorized them in such a way that makes sense to me. Imagine it as my own personal filing system and nothing more than that. There's certainly nothing there intentionally 'secondary'. I like what I like and link to those I like the most on my blog and the rest on biblioblogs. I don't list them all because it just becomes too much after a while.