Kirkland
Raab commented on a youtube video of Jacob's History Channel with me (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou7n-7-hB2s).
Here are
his two questions and my answer that I posted there:
Q1 Where
does Paul and his writings relate to this with respect to his chronology and
influence?
Q2 Do we
have any scraps of document- evidence of the interdependence of the creation of
Mark, Matthew and Luke, as Professor Vinzent suggests? i.e. A written statement
from an insider/witness about the creation of the gospels?
And here my
answers:
Dear
Kirkland, thanks for your two questions.
To Q1: As
my work on Paul is still in the making, I can only give a preliminary answer as
for now. What has become clear already (and two new books argue into the same direction,
though unfortunately in German: Alexander Goldmann, Über die Textgeschichte des
Römerbriefes. Neue Perspektiven aus dem paratextuellen Befund, Tanz 63,
Tübingen 2020; Tobias Flemming, Die Textgeschichte des Epheserbriefes. Marcion änderte nichts: Eine
grundlegend neue Perspektive auf den Laodicenerbrief, Tanz 67, Tübingen 2022),
and I had the privilege to discuss my preliminary insights with the two authors
of these books - and their teacher Matthias Klinghardt, and his research group
(Jan Heilmann, Kevin Künzl and others) at Dresden a few weeks ago:
The version
of the 10 letters that were part of Marcion's collection, and which were a lot
shorter than the version which we find in the canonical New Testament, is
closer to Paul. In many respects, it shows a different language, another
self-understanding of Paul, different theological concerns ... it might be that
just as Marcion accepted a set of two letters (Laodicenes and Colossians,
perhaps also 2 Thessalonians) which show a closer relation to the redactional
profile of the later canonical New Testament, the people who redacted or
produced Laodicenes and Colossians, in return, accepted Marcion's set of his
seven or eight letters plus Laodicenes and Colossians which Marcion had
integrated into his collection. And as Marcion had apparently heavily redacted
these ten letters, so the canonical redactors turned to this collection, added
further letters (1-2 Tim, Tit, Hebrews; the Catholic letters), Acts, redacted
Luke and added Matthew, Mark and John and Revelation. For the chronology - an
early stage of the collection and mutual exchange of what different people had
collected and reworked seems to have been the aftermath of the second Jewish
war. What the stock was that lies underneath both sets (set 1: Marcion's seven
or eight letters; set 2: Laodicenes and Colossians) is too early to say, here I
need to finish a bit more homework. So far, however, we can see the impact that
Marcion's activity had, just as we see other players exerting influence on him.
To Q2:
Interestingly, we have four 'witnesses' for the interdependence, not only of
the gospels, but equally for these sets of Paul:
1. There is
the (Latin) prologue to John's Gospel, referred to Papias of Hierapolis where
there is mention of a debate between Marcion and John with regards their
Gospels. Though it ends with a rejection of Marcion's Gospel by John, it shows
their mutual knowledge.
2. Marcion
in his Antitheses, as reported by Tertullian, criticizes those other four
gospels (he calls them plagiarisms of his own gospel), attributed to two
'apostles' (Matthew and John) and two 'pupils of apostles' (Mark and Luke),
hence, he demonstrates that when he published the first 'New Testament' that we
know of, he took into account these four gospels, just as he claims that these
gospels had adopted and adapted his own.
3. As
previous scholarship (most detailed recently by Matthias Klinghardt) have
shown, there is a series of papyri and manuscripts of gospels (and Pauline
letters) which provide variants and readings that our witnesses (Tertullian,
Epiphanius, Adamantius, Ephrem ...) mention to have been those of Marcion. They
demonstrate that his 'New Testament' had an enormous impact on the canonical
tradition beyond the text of the canonical New Testament as we have it today in
the early large codices of the 4th and 5th centuries or the critical edition of
Nestle-Aland of the 20th and the 21st centuries.
4. The
impass of 150 years of research into the synoptic question. That scholars
cannot come to an agreement with regards the genealogical model (either with or
without Q) is not due to good or bad will, of learnedness or ignorance of
scholars, but, if I am not mistaken, of the approach from the perspective of
genealogy: Only when we acknowledge an interdependence of our writers and
sources can different positions about which of these gospels were first or
dependent be both right. Even Marcion's Gospel is not independent of the four
canonical ones, just as even Marcion's redaction of Paul's epistles is not
independent of the canonical redactors who have produced Laodicenes and
Colossians.
