My answer to Kirkland Raab on Paul's letters and the interdependence of Marcion and the canonical redaction

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.