Markus Vinzent's Blog

Sunday 28 July 2024

Did Marcion wrote his Gospel from oral material or redacted it from earlier collections? - my change of mind

 I previously held the former view, but having reconstructed Marcion's Apostolos, I learned the following which made me change my mind to a position that aligns now better with traditional scholarship on the beginnings of gospel-writing (as, for example, the two-sources hypothesis). Here are the reasons:


In *Gal 5,21 we read: "I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God."
This is a back-reference to which the only place to which this reference can refer is *1Cor 15:50: " I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable."
From this I have learned that the back-reference in the *Apostolos has escaped Marcion's redactional wit and refers into the wrong direction. This is only possible, if he made use of an earlier collection of letters where 1Cor stood before Gal.
As Marcion in his *Apostolos makes also use of a 3-letter-collection of *Deuteropaulines, it shows that his redaction of the *Apostolos is entirely based on collections. If so, it is most likely, that the same redactor also made use of collections when putting together his gospel.

5 comments:

  1. hi Markus, thanks for sharing your findings with us all. i'm really enjoying you, Jack Bull, and Mark Bilby on your youtube Patristica. when listening to Dr John Kloppenburg talk about the author of Luke's gospel reading maps on Jacob Berman's History Valley 8May24 i was reminded that the author of Mark's gospel doesn't know or doesn't care about the geography of Galilee, Samaria, Perea, and Judea. Do you think that when Papias describes Mark's gospel as an "irregular account" he could have Mark's confued geography in mind? thanks again, k

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  2. Forgive me if I am missing something, which it seems that I am, but I don't see why this affects marcionite priority in the slightest.

    For a start, why assume the reference in Galatians is a reference to 1 Corinthians? Why would he have warned Galatians through a letter sent to an entirely different group of people? Wouldn't it make more sense for Paul to have mentioned the same teaching to the Galatians on a seperate ocassion in another form (perhaps another letter we don't have, or in person, or any other way really)?

    And even if it is somehow referring to 1 Corinthians, why would that therefore mean that Marcion altered these letters? Why couldn't it just mean that Marcion has access to various epistles in no particular order, assembled them together (not necessarily in the correct order), put his prologues at the start of them (not necessarily containing correct information), and then promptly left it untouched?

    Any reply would be appreciated, thanks!

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  3. Why couldn't it be from both sources, oral AND wr

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  4. For a long time I was convinced that TF was a later Christian interpolation. This was evidenced by a computer comparative analysis of texts performed in 1995 by Garry Goldberg. He wrote a paper about it published in The Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 13 (1995), pp. 59-77. https://drive.google.com/file/…..sp=sharing
    Additional discussion on the website
    https://josephus.org/LUKECH.html
    It shows a strong textual relationship between the TF and Luke 24:13-27. For me it meant that TF was inserted by some Christian.

    But times have changed. Klinghardt started dating *Ev to the 90’s CE, You to the 140’s CE. In addition, Pervo's and Mason’s work indicates Luke’s dependence on Josephus.
    It turns out that Goldberg was wrong – it’s the opposite of what he thought. This Emmaus narrative depends on TF textually. And here I reached for ...
    I just looked at Klinghardt’s Reconstruction *24,13-35 (pages 1239-1257).
    It seems that not only Luke used TF but also Marcion.
    So it is bettere to start from the beginning - generic info about Jesus called TF.
    In 94CE, Josephus wrote Antiquities in Rome in which he included a short story about Jesus, condemned 65 years earlier by Pilate and the Jewish elites, crucified and resurrected, called the Messiah. This was the only information about the historical Jesus. Together with the book, it reached various parts of the Empire, arousing religious enthusiasm in some listeners, which gave rise to Christianity.
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-SuNSyBgzyhno7dQ_ZCo_CaaJeKMl6lu/view

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  5. Hello DR. Vinzent huge fan of you work and I follow the Marcionite priority hypothesis but I am having a bit of trouble. What evidence best suggests the current forms of the Gospels are second century? Aswell are you planning on responding to workd arguing against Marcionite priority such as Ronald V. Huggins work?

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