Doug Shaver

How do you know that?

Chili

Yes but Jesus never had a corporeal existence in being but was the human nature of the dual natured god-man called Christ who was born unto Joseph. Please note here that Christ was born and they called him Jesus so now the question becomes: who is this Jesus? . . . if Christ was born as 'son of man' on his way to become 'fully man' . . . who then was the 'young man' that escaped prior to crufixion in [flat earth] Mark who doesn't have a clue about mataphysics or would have started with the birth of Christ in his own Gospel.

So to meet Jesus now is to be a Jesuit-by-nature that for the Jews is was a Nazarite-by-nature (first hand via Mary)and have your own Jesus crucified that you may be a Christ after having your own 'sin-nature' called Jesus crucified . . . and the Jews were happy, eager and willing to do this and did it often and the Catholics have been doing this ever since Peter moved to Rome.

It is no secret that the Marcionites have apostolic tradition because they are the wolves that must keep Galilee alive to nurse the lamb of God unto maturity so he can have his own sin nature crucified and be set free as bar-abbas . . . while the Marcionites, or Marcionites by any other name even today, keep humping the devil in what is called purgatory today.

ashurbanipal

Just to add a little fuel to this fire: there is a fairly robust and (IMO) well-argued body of scholarship which suggests that the line between "internal" and "external" was much more porous for an ancient person than for a modern person. This statement is necessarily oversimplified, since I don't want to write several paragraphs. Bruno Snell, Walter Burkert, Thomas McEvilley, Brooke Holmes, and (though I hesitate to mention him) Julian Jaynes all have something to say along these lines. The upshot is, of course, if they're right, Paul may simply not have made, or even been aware that there was, a distinction.

Chili

Yes and the "internal" is not just a dream but the reality that fantasy dreams are made of . . . that so meant that Paul lived the same dream that Joseph did (sic), who after all was the Jew who's real life event(s) the Gosples are all about.

This then is why I hold that the Gospels take place in what we call purgatory and end with the ascension of Joseph who became known as John in the end at the foot of the cross with "mother, there is your son, son, there is your mother," which then is how the [reborn] child becomes the 'father of man' with man being the mature new creation under the umbrella of the father living inside the 'thousand year' age that reigns henceforth (but is ours via Mary who will be crowned queen of heaven and earth until we die our second death), = no Jesus worship in any way, shape or form for the internal Christian.

It just simply means that Paul was there and done that too. Now you may call this fiction as long as the core of truth is realized to be the essence of fiction in the same was a as there is a reality behind metaphor and an object is needed to make a shadow.

John's infancy is not there but is summarized with Nathan just falling out of the fig tree whereupon Cana was next and rightly so.

stephan huller

Doug

If you have some insight into the Marcionite paradigm which contradicts the underlying assumption of all scholarship written hitherto (ie that the Marcionites developed their theology from only their Evangelium and their Apostolikon and that these were all written by one and the same author) I should be very interested in what you have discovered from your reading of the surviving anti-Marcionite material

Doug Shaver

That underlying assumption seems to be that we should believe everything that is in the surviving anti-Marcionite material. I'm just asking: Why should we assume such a thing?

rlogan

The modus operandi from the first book of the Bible to the last is to fabricate the manuscript and assign its authorship to a legendary figure.

Moses did not exist, and the first five books of the Bible are simply propaganda like all of the rest of the Bible.

Neither did any Paul exist. The person to look at in terms of authorship is whoever "discovers" it. In this case, the Marcionites.

So it isn't that the Marcionites followed the writings of Paul. It is that the Marcionites fabricated the letters of Paul like everyone else does in the Bible in order to pass off their own belief system as ancient and following some "authoritative" legend.

So with Moses we have all these ridiculous legendary feats like turning sticks into serpents, leading over a million people across a parting sea and all... And with Paul he is allegedly a persecutor of Christians but wow golly - he meets God himself and converts so if the worst enemy of Christianity becomes it's loudest proponent that means there really must be something to listen to here...

In the case of Acts you have to move forward in history to a time of reconciling the gospel accounts and the Pauline (Marcionite) camps. Instead of one defeating the other for supremacy over Christianity, we see a sloppy merging of the two.

That also is traditional throughout the Bible, even within individual books. You have "doublets" for example with two different creation stories right out of the gate in Genesis. Neither is consistent with one another, but who cares. The point is to place both traditions under the same roof for control over both groups.

Likewise with Acts, it is a "bridging" document where Paul meets the legendary but also non-existent Jerusalem apostles Barnabus, Peter, and James.

There is no Moses, no Jesus, no disciples, and no Paul. What you have instead are manuscript wars, and there were a lot more of them than what is in the offical canon.

We have gospels of Mary, Thomas, Judas, letters Jesus himself wrote, and some which are referenced by the others in the canon but lost since then.

The existing Bible was a political settlement, and even the Trinity was a political settlement that makes little sense logically. At Nicea in 325 CE, a political conference ordered by the Emperor Constantine was held, with the different competing schools of thought on the nature of Christ ordered to come to an agreement.

Politics is the art of compromise, and such was the case at Nicea. Hence, Jesus becomes God, Man, and Holy Spirit instead of just one or a subset of these three. This Trinity is not found in the early Christian heritage, but it became the official canon under penalty of death after Nicea.

The short story is that nobody has historical information on Paul.

aa5874

Fantastic. Those who "DISCOVERED" the Pauline writings probably wrote them.

Now, there is NO evidence that the Marcionites discovered the Pauline writings. Even an apologetic source claimed Marcion "DISCOVERED" the writings of Empedocles.

Hippolytus' "The Refutation of All Heresies" 6 Another apologetic source Justin Martyr claimed Marcion preached ANOTHER GOD and ANOTHER SON.

"First Apology" Marcion did NOT PREACH that his Son of God was made of a WOMAN. The Pauline Epistles are of NO benefit to Marcion.

According to the Church writer, Irenaeus, Clement of ROME "DISCOVERED" that "Paul" wrote letters since the 1st century in an alleged letter to the Corinthians.

"Against Heresies" 3.3.3 And this is Clement at supposedly c 90-99 CE in the First Epistle 47 And "Ignatius" supposedly c 98-117 CE in his Epistle to the ROMANS 4.

The Church of Rome "DISCOVERED" the PAULINE writings.

The Church of Rome were the PRIMARY benefactors of the Pauline writings.

It is most likely that the Pauline writings, WHOLLY or in PART, were products of the Church of Rome.

There was no Jesus Christ, disciples, Paul, or Jesus cult BEFORE the Fall of the Temple c 70 CE. "PAUL", under some other name, may have persecuted the Jesus cult AFTER the Fall of the Temple since the Jesus story and cult most likely started small and after 70 CE .

stephan huller

Doug,

The reason that the Marcionite paradigm should be accepted as authentic is that it seems to make better sense of the 'Pauline letters.' It is strange that the apostle should make reference to 'his gospel' and 'the gospel of Christ' and then we're told that he didn't mean 'written gospel.' I am certain there wasn't a tradition walking around calling itself 'the Marcionites' but at the same time Clement of Alexandria demonstates in Strom 3.1 - 11 that the Marcionite paradigm was very real (i.e. that the apostle had a written gospel in front of him). Since the Catholics can't explain this without dismissing it, I take the Marcionite claim that the apostle wrote the Apostolikon after already having written the gospels (or 'gospels' cf. 1 Cor 2.1 - 8) very seriously.

Besides when you start believing that everything written in the Patristic writings was some conspiracy to invent non-existent heretics you end up sounding crazy like some at this forum ...

avi

I could not possibly disagree more completely.

There is extant today not one document from Marcion, or the Marcionists.

All we possess are the writings AGAINST Marcion. Such diatribes could range from completely accurate, to wholly fictional, and we would not have a clue, where on the spectrum, the truth lay.

We need to focus on the DATA, not wishful thinking about which algorithm could be more "sensible", in terms of our own perspective.

The data that we do possess, unlike sensible conclusions, is a mixture of forgery, deletions, omissions, scribal errors, and unburned manuscript remnants, often "transcribed" from the original Greek, into Syriac or Aramaic or Coptic or Arabic, i.e. NONE of them members of the Indo-European language family.

There is nothing "sensible" about extrapolating from such pitiful records.

We cannot even begin to explain "Paul" and his life. Why did he travel to Saudi Arabia? Why is there no record of his trip there? What reason would anyone have had in the 2nd century, to travel from the Bosporus to Mecca, except to deliver recently arrived commodities originating from the Silk route, in exchange for silver from Arabia?

"sounding crazy" is what you are doing by invoking a conclusion unsupported by the data. There is no reason, but faith, to support the idea that "Marcion" has some relationship with "Paul". We know more about Don Quixote than we do about those two legends...

Here's a question for those who love these two guys, Paul and Marcion: Why, on his trip to Saudi Arabia, didn't good old Paul stop by the Essenes, there in Qumran, and drop off some manuscripts? Isn't it interesting that we have NO evidence of Paul's existence from either Qumran or Nag Hammadi, well, unless you consider the "Apocalypse of Paul" to represent something about Paul of Tarsus:

Gosh, does sound sort of like the text of a tax collector......

Nag Hammadi, third or fourth century Coptic texts, reference writings of neither Paul of Tarsus, nor Marcion. Why not? Is it genuinely "sensible" to draw conclusions about a relationship between two men, neither of whom exists on paper prior to Nicea? Paul's letters you say? Hmm. What did David Trobisch write: something about, let me see now, ah yes, that's right: Our oldest extant copy of Paul's letters is contained within Codex Sinaiticus. Isn't that remarkable, oh, yeah. POST-Nicea.....

avi