Inaugural Lecture reviewed in the Corriere della Sera

It was a nice surprise when I gave a paper a few days ago in Lecce, South Italy, on Eckhart and the Parisian University of 1311-1313, that my dear colleagues Alessandra Beccarisi and Loris Sturlese pointed me to an article that had appeared a few weeks earlier in the Sunday addition to the Corriere della Sera. In this article Alessandro Scafi reported and discussed my inaugural lecture that I gave last year at King's College London. If you want to read the article, you will find it following this link.

Here an English translation of the Italian text:

London, autumn 2012: in the Conference Room of King's College, a German scholar of fifty-three years holds his inaugural lecture for his appointment as Professor. Markus Vinzent offers its audience a radically new view of the history of early Christianity. The person who wrote the first Gospel, after the destruction of Jerusalem in 136, would be Marcion, a wealthy Greek shipowner from Sinope, in Asia minor. The authors of the canonical Gospels would have taken their material from the account of Marcion (of which there remain only the parts mentioned by his critics). In his own day considered a heretic, today undervalued by scholars according to Vinzent, Marcion would play an important role in the process of formation of the new Christian identity. To Marcion the Risen Savior of the new Covenant stood in antithesis to the Jewish God of the Old Testament, but the authors of the Gospels who undertook a first redaction of Marcion's text, would have altered it to turn its antithetical character into an anti-Judaic. In the inaugural Vinzent reiterates the thesis of his recent Christ's Resurrection in Early Christianity and the Making of the New Testament (2011): For St. Paul the resurrection of Christ was the foundation of Christian hope, but in contrast to Paul, the center of theology and liturgy of the first generations of faithful were the teachings of the Lord and his sacrificial death, not his resurrection. It would have been Marcion to rediscover the emphasis on the salvific character of the Pauline resurrection of Christ with an enormous impact on the following development of Church doctrine. Vinzent, who teaches the history of theology, said he had discussed with a New Testament colleague the Gospel of Luke in comparison with that of Marcion, a synopsis which convinced this colleague of his new interpretation while they were sitting in the Augustinian convent at Erfurt, where Luther was.

Matthew Twigg: Review of 'Christ's Resurrection in Early Christianity'

Matthew Twigg in his review calls the book an 'exciting and controversial study' and shows that 'the widespread absence of references to, and speculations upon, Christ's Resurrection in Christanity before Marcion, and even up to the close of the third century' does not need to face 'the accusation of interpreting absence of evidence as evidence of absence', as I can also show 'by examining texts like Tertullian's De Resurrectione Carnis and Athenagoras' On the Resurrection ... that even in texts defending a general resurrection of the dead, Christ's Resurrection was neither appealed to as a proof, nor mentioned at all.'
When Twigg mentions (and thinks I had downplayed) evidence like Barn 15:8 or 1Clement - then, let me state again, that the latter not only clearly knows of Paul, as he mentions him twice, so was acquainted with at least 1Corinthians, and still does not deploy its rich Resurrection topology, but instead refers to all sorts of natural explanations for the general resurrection of the dead and only hints at Christ's resurrection, and similarly, the long epistle of Barn focusses so much on the Lord's suffering and only once, in Barn 15:8 in a liturgical half-verse introduces it - but theologically it does not play a role in either of these two texts. So my intention was not to downplay something which is prominently there, but the pointing out that it has a minor role in these texts, especially if we compare them with Paul.
Despite his criticisim, Twigg writes towards the end: 'Overall, Vinzent provides an admirable and wide-ranging defence of a controversial thesis. I would certainly recommend his book to experts, for whom it will surely become a classic in its field.'

William Arnal, Review of my Christ's Resurrection in Early Christianity

Sorry for being a few weeks absent from my blog - but I had been asked, among other things, to contribute a longer article for the first issue of a new journal, Judaisme ancien, and it was supposed to be on Marcion and the Gospels. Instead, I have chosen a related topic, as I thought, I'd like to work out the relation the Marcion and Judaism had, as I felt uncomfortable with the older solutions, and found Sebastian Moll's note convincing that Marcion rather excused Jews instead of being himself anti-Jewish. So, the article which will be submitted to the new journal is entitled: 'Marcion the Jew'. More about this soon.

Today, however, let me point you to a new review of my previous book, Christ's Resurrection in Early Christianity, written by William Arnal, Associate Professor and Department Head at the University of Regina in the Journal of Religion in Europe 5 (2012): 415-424, from which I learned a lot. Especially the reference to Mark and the fact that I could have made more of looking into the reluctancy with which Mark approached Christ's Resurrection. Indeed, I agree, the Marcion/anti-Marcion reception overwhelmed me a bit, not in overstressing the texts that I read, but I should have also demonstrated more widely those texts which are unrelated to Marcion. I can only recommend this review, as it is both critical and also very encouraging and, as he says at the end, 'a must-read, as rewarding for those who will disagree with its conclusions as for those who will assent to them' - thanks Willam!

Marcion and Paul's Letters

Being asked from a reader of this blog, I sent the following response:
The question of the nature of Paul's letter needs a thorough examination. The last attempt to do this was Schmid's book ( Schmid, Ulrich, Marcion und sein Apostolos (Berlin a.o., 1995), but it was done entirely on the other assumption that Marcion was a big redactor, hence the model how he went about the Gospel was also used for that of his use of Paul's letters.

Now, I think, we can see from Tertullian that Marcion was indeed handling the Gospel very differently from Paul's letters and that he did neither forge the letters, nor wrote them in the name of Paul, but that he, indeed, collected those and, only occasionally as Schmid shows, corrects and deviates from the text as we have them today. Yet, it is clear, having done some research on these texts (far from being substantial enough to form a final opinion with regards to most details of the letters), that the letters were different to some extent from what we have today and were, indeed, post Marcion redacted in an anti-Marcionite way. Take the example of Romans. Romans, in Marcion's collection, ended with chapter 14. He did not shorten it, but it was later broadened. Similarly, the opening of 1Corinthians 15 did not display the reference that Paul has taken his information from others, and such references were not cut out by Marcion, but introduced to make Paul depending from the Apostles. Without having done a full examination (which is a huge job and needs to be done in the future), I think, we can build on Schmid's work, but need to revise the assumptions, and, therefore, will also come to very different results,

AHRC-Major Research Grant awarded for Eckhart Research

 

An AHRC-Major Research Grant (£571.000 for the years 2013-2016) was awarded for the project 'Meister Eckhart and the Parisian University in the early 14th century - Codex Vaticanus Latinus 1086', directed by Professor Markus Vinzent (PI) and Professor Oliver Davies (CO-I).

Meister Eckhart was one of the towering figures of early 14th c. humanist teachings of philosophy and theology at the University of Paris. The project which includes one postdoctoral researcher and two Phd studentships intends to rewrite the history of this time, broadening the textual basis for Eckhart and reading his texts against the background of other, largely unexplored scholars of his time.
Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260-1329) is one of the most widely read medieval philosophical theologians and preachers today, and he was highly influential and controversial in and beyond his times. Only Thomas Aquinas before him was called twice to the chair of Theology in Paris. From his Parisian teaching, several documents have survived, but Eckhart's Parisian Questions are regarded as 'one of the most famous set of texts that medieval thinking has produced' (Kurt Flash, Meister Eckhart, 2010, p. 113).
So far we only knew of five such Questions, three that were dated to his first magisterium in 1302/3, the other two to his second in 1311/2. While Markus Vinzent wrote his 'Art of Detachment' (Peeters, Leuven, 2011) and his 'Eckhart's On the Lord's Prayer' (Peeters, Leuven, 2012), he re-discovered four more Parisian Questions that he thought were likely to be authored by Eckhart, but had been excluded as dubious from their first discoverer Martin Grabmann (and all subsequent editors). He presented his findings as invited main lecture at the International Medieval Congress 2010 (published in JTS 63, 2012). Although the re-discovered Questions are already worth a detailed study, the source from where the four derive will shed further light on these questions: The manuscript Vat. Lat. 1086 ranks as a document of crucial importance which will help us understand the development of philosophical, theological and juridicial teaching at Paris in the beginning XIVth century. Prosper's collection contains names and opinions of students, bachelors and masters (regents) of the university and preserves the documentation of a detailed insight into the atmosphere of learning of this European cultural centre as no other document does. For many of the named people, this will be a first scholarly study of their bio-bibliography and their thinking.
Here just a few examples of people who's questions are contained in Ms. Vat. Lat. 1086:
Prosper, Jacques d'Ascoli, Gregoire de Lucques, Joh. de Monte s. Elygii, Gregoire de Lucques, Henricus: de Gand?, Gilles de Rome, Aegidius Romanus, Simon de Corbeia?, Bertrand de Turre, Gerardus de s. Victore, Gregoire de Lucques, Pe<trus> de s<anc>to dyo<nisio>, Henricus Amandi, Jean de Pouilly (142ra1), Jean, de l'ordre du Val des Ecoliers?, Martin d' Abbeville, François Caraccioli or de Caroccis di Napoli, Brito: Raoul Renaud, Gui Terreni or de Perpignan, Durandus, Thomas de Aquino ...
To substantiate the potential authenticity of the four re-discovered Parisian Questions and to read them against the background of this unique Latin manuscript will provide an entirely new insight into the early beginnings of humanist theological and philosophical thinking of Paris University of the early 14th century.