Recent scholarship on the history of the biblical canons has increasingly recognised that the
Jewish and Christian Bibles were not formed independently of each other but amid controversial
debate and competition. But what does it mean that the formation of the Christian Bible cannot
be separated from the developments that led to the Jewish Bible? The articles in this
collection start with the assumption that the authorization of writings had already begun in
Israel and Judaism before the emergence of Christianity and was continued in the first
centuries CE by Judaism and Christianity in their respective ways. They deal with a broad range
of sources such as writings which came to be part of the Hebrew Bible literature from Qumran
the Septuagint or early Jewish apocalypses. At the same time they deal for example with
structures of authorization related to New Testament writings examine the role of
authoritative texts in so-called Gnostic schools and discuss the authority of late antique
apocryphal literature.
