Invitation to my Inaugural Lecture at King's College London

Inaugural Lecture: Markus Vinzent: Marcion's Gospel and the beginnings of Christianity

Location

Safra Lecture Theatre

Category

Lecture

When

17/10/2012 (18:00-19:30)

Contact

Parts of the Arts & Humanities Festival 2012: Metamorphoses: Transformations and Conversions:
Presented by the Department of Theology and Religious Studies

To book, go to our booking page

Description

That Christianity began as a movement in the mid first century, triggered by an individual that suffered capital punishment from the hand of the Romans, is common knowledge. That the Jesus-Movement grew and transformed, if not converted the Roman Empire is undisputed. Many questions, however, how this process took place and what transformation or conversion entails are still unresolved, others have not even been asked. The lecture raises one of those and challenges the standard assumption that during the first two centuries Christianity soon departed from Judaism and developed alongside community based narratives of Jesus' life by which it distinguished itself from both Judaism and Paganism. Instead it introduces the hitherto disregarded Gospel of Marcion as the first of its genre, written after the year 136 AD, which not only transformed a Jewish branch into a stand-alone religion that changed the world, but also provided a single-authored narrative that became the world's most copied and sold book ever.