74 GEORGE C. HEIDER Indeed, we may add, “Torah” in Judaism and “Gospel” in Christianity came to connote the essence of the faith, despite their (relatively) late emergence as literary entities. What has this second observation to do specifically with Deuteronomy and John? Besides reinforcing the centrality of the section of the canon in which each is found, even at the expense of chronological priority, the question of ordering among sections brings to the fore the issue of ordering within sections as of possible import. In this connection, recent studies of ordering in ancient literary collections suggest that there was indeed special—even corrective — significance to granting the “last word” to a given piece within a corpus 18. In sum, the placement of Deuteronomy and John within the Torah and Gospels, respectively, does appear to grant to each a distinctive and parallel role. But exactly what role? We turn now to look within the two books for assistance in making that determination. III. Internal Factors in Deuteronomy and John that Contribute to Their Canonical Function While the way in which a given book functions within the larger canon is, first and foremost, a matter external to the book itself, the books of the canon are not bricks whose canonical usage is merely a result of how they happen to be arranged vis-à-vis the others (much 18 Thus, P.A. ROSENMEYER, Ancient Epistolary Fictions. The Letter in Greek Literature (Cambridge 2001) 215, cites N. Holzberg’s observation that in ancient pseudonymous letter collections: “frequently the structure is that of gradual revelation of information that is explained fully by a longer ex- planatory letter at the end”. Within the NT, M.M. MITCHELL, “Corrective Composition, Corrective Exegesis: The Teaching on Prayer in 1 Tim 2,1-15”, 1 Timothy Reconsidered (ed. K.P. DONFRIED) (Leuven 2008) 43, draws upon the work of A. Merz to assert: “The Pastoral Epistles (1 Timothy among them) represent a self-conscious attempt, not to replace the existing corpus Pauli- num, but to enlarge it and interpret it”. It is particularly notable for our pur- poses that, elsewhere in the article, Mitchell argues that church fathers including Ignatius, Polycarp, Athenagoras, Origen, and John Chrysostom re- cognized this function of the Pastoral Epistles and even imitated their tech- niques in their own works. (I am grateful to Prof. C. ROTHSCHILD of Lewis University for calling both the Rosenmeyer book and the Mitchell essay to my attention).