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Rethinking Thanksgiving and Canonical Boundaries

by Shirley Paulson, PhD

It is so good to have a day dedicated to gratitude. Thanksgiving, celebrated in several parts of the world, reminds us to appreciate the good in our lives. But Thanksgiving is also a fraught reminder of the way in which humans rewrite history to suit their own popular narratives.

Similarly, while the Bible holds an honored place in our daily lives, reminding us to appreciate the constant presence of Christ, what it now contains also rewrites the historical record to fit the political situation when it was compiled by overlooking (silencing) some of the widely read and illuminating texts.

Thanksgiving in the U.S.

When Thanksgiving was first acknowledged as a national holiday in the nineteenth century, Americans believed that the United States was destined to expand across North America, overcoming all impediments. This included the seizure of land long occupied by indigenous people and the removal of Native Americans from their homes by violent means. The societal norms of the European settlers were considered better and more Godly than those of the native people. While the reasons for the Thanksgiving holiday – recognizing family and the good in our lives – are timeless and still highly relevant, our understanding of right and wrong has shifted. Manifest Destiny may have once seemed reasonable to us but is now understood to be highly problematic. Moreover, as our country attempted to specify the reasons for the celebration, certain inconvenient facts were overlooked and essentially erased.

This is not to say that a holiday focused on gratitude, our Thanksgiving, is unnecessary, only that celebrating our thankfulness wrapped in a faulty narrative diminished its possibilities.

Sacred Christian scriptures

When sacred Christian scriptures came to be canonized after the fourth century, there was a similar phenomenon of narrative manipulation. Many of the existing and widely-circulating scriptures were excluded. It makes sense, for example, that Jesus’s voice of opposition to the Roman government would present a problem for the fourth-century Christians who found themselves and their religion being subsumed in the Roman government.

Sweeping in and colonizing other lands and peoples is now widely acknowledged as an evil act. But we would do well to also recognize that the ‘colonizing’ of ancient writings suppressed important aspects of the biblical canon—treasures which could enhance our faith today—if only our Christian ancestors had not erased them.

Due to the availability of ancient writings discovered in places such as the Dead Sea, Oxyrhychus, and Nag Hammadi, we now have a much more vivid picture of these treasures, gems missing from the Christianity that was passed down to us. In fact, it is startling to realize that more suppressed ancient writings have been rediscovered in the last century and a half than the entire number of texts which survived the creation of the canon.

What is missing in the scriptures?

One major area that is missing from canonical scripture is the evolution of healing attitudes and practices. Many people know that healing played a large and important role in the historical identity of Christianity, but few would claim to know where it came from or how it evolved. Jesus healed, but how did those around him understand it? Was it a show of power? A miracle? Magic? A theological proof of something? Did he learn it somehow? Did he teach it?  We have no definitive answers, but this is an area of ongoing discovery.

One of the surprising discoveries is the role angels and demons played in Jewish thought during the centuries before Jesus, and how this particular subject led to later beliefs and practices associated with healing. Annette Yoshiko Reed has argued in her book, Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism, that the so-called ‘pseudepigraphal’ writings, marginalized by canonical authority, are the specific texts that contain the missing information on demons and angels. The concepts of angels and demons as external powers laid the foundation for exorcism and other forms of healing more familiar to us now in the New Testament.

Pseudepigrapha

The term ‘pseudepigrapha’ refers to a large body of texts discovered within the Dead Sea Scrolls and written during the centuries before the New Testament era. The category ‘pseudepigrapha’ is a modern one yet is often overlooked because it also refers to questions around authorship. The stigma of author uncertainty reinforced canonical boundary-making, and the pejorative attitudes about many of these texts means they are excluded from scholarly scrutiny.

I don’t know that scholars have clarified yet whether the pseudepigraphal focus on demons and angels or the historical evolution of Jewish literary creativity caused the myth-making that silenced these ancient writings. But they were somehow connected and, for some still unknown reason, suppressed together.

Exposing both myths

My hope is that the exposure of both myths, the traditional Thanksgiving narrative and the canonical traditions, will break the silence, open serious investigation, and reset our course. We deserve a more informed appreciation of the treasures buried in the pseudepigrapha and other extracanonical writings, even as some Americans have come to embrace a more thoughtful and inclusive Thanksgiving story at their table.