This paper assumes that there is a Bible and not just biblia, that there is a more or less recognizable corpus of revelation. It assumes the soundness of the Christian instinct which eventually said that ‘all these books and no others, all these books with all their parts’ constitute a book. Precisely which books and which parts of which books are to be included is not so important. None of the deutero-canonical (‘apocryphal’) books represents a genre of literature that is not represented in the universally accepted Bible. The whole Christian tradition has a book with an agreed beginning and an agreed end, a book that plays itself out between the Pentateuch and the Apocalypse. Exactly where the canon is fixed between those bounds is not a matter of great moment, exactly what weight Christians give to the decisions of the Synod of Jamnia.

But assuming that there is a book and not simply a collection of books, all the various literary items which go to make it up have to be read within the context of the whole book whose terms are the Pentateuch and the Apocalypse. That is, they all have their context in the overall Christian myth, of the movement from creation to re-creation (Genesis to Apocalypse) or within the myth that stretches from Exodus to Apocalypse, the myth of redemption, which is situated by and also situates the creation-recreation myth. All the individual books with all their parts are misread if they are not read as held in tension by this myth. Of course they have a right to be studied as though they had not been finally included in the Book, and that is so for each part of each book even down to each saying ascribed to Jesus by a gospel-writer.