arnoldo

Sorry if my earlier post was off topic but I was responding more to the title of the thread rather than the content. Now that I've read some of your blog it reminds me of a book I read some time ago called War and Peace (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Vernard Eller. Eller coined a phrase called “reverse fighting” which he uses to interpret the gospels. Constantine, on the other hand, may've been more interested in direct fighting when he possibly incorporated Marcion's “man of war” to consolidate the roman empire (see below).

stephan huller

I think what gets lost in the "mythicism" debates is the fact we cannot prove Jesus wasn't of flesh and blood doesn't mean that there isn't a very old -a tradition which wrote the New Testament - which "knew" Christianity was founded by a wholly supernatural being

arnoldo

Levene, CMB M 163 has a second part to the sentence noted above.


How can this magic bowl be “very likely Marcionite? There is always a chance it is indeed Marcionite but it sounds more orthodox to my ears.

stephan huller

The Marcionites didn't have a Holy Spirit? Or an exalted Father? The name may not have been exclusively Marcionite but they certainly had an interest in איש. The same might have existed in early Church Fathers but it was systematically removed. Probably because of Celsus's argument that Christians wanted to overthrow the Empire.

stephan huller

More proof that was pronounced Ees:

Grog

I think what Clinton said was "It depends on what the meaning of the word is is."

stephan huller

yes

DCHindley

Arnoldo,

I think I have to agree, although I do not think the writer of the incantation was himself a Christian.

In the work you cited, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity (or via: amazon.co.uk), Part 4 2011, Ṭal Ilan states that "the usual differentiation between Jewish and Christian incantation bowls is the languages (Jewish incantation bowls are composed in the Jewish script; Christian incantation bowls are composed in the Syriac script), some [Aramaic] bowls include specific Christian themes, which may suggest that the scribe or the clients or both had Christian sentiments" (p. 38).

Back to the point. When Dan Levene first published this text in Jewish Studies Quarterly, Volume 6 (1999) pp 283 308, he noted that "[t]he bowl contains 30 lines of text written in a very neat and small square Jewish Aramaic script which spirals in a clockwise fashion from the centre of the bowl outwards." In the next paragraph he says "Alongside ... the usual demonstrative pronouns in the magic bowls, there also appear [... three ...] which are like the Syriac forms³ and rare in the Jewish Aramaic magic bowls."

Are we, as Stephan seems to do, to assume that because Syriac speaking Marcionites were said to call Jesus "Ishu" and that Syriac-like demonstrative pronouns sometimes cross over to Aramaic, that the use of the name Ishu in M 163 must have been written by a Marcionite?

Those who follow Aramaic Incantation Bowls in general will know these are magical incantations, not necessarily drawn from a coherent tradition, but pieced together by the scribe-magician for dramatic effect on either the demons or the client, maybe both. For a taste of real live Jewish incantations see Sepher Ha-Razim: The Book of the Mysteries (or via: amazon.co.uk) (tr. Michael a Morgan, 1983), The Greek equivalent is found in the Greek and Demotic Magical Papyri. See The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation: Including the Demotic Spells (or via: amazon.co.uk), vol 1, ed. Hanz Dieter Betz (1986).

But Dan Levene himself, in A Corpus of Magic Bowls : Incantation Texts in Jewish Aramaic from Late Antiquity (or via: amazon.co.uk) (2003), indicates in the table of contents:

4. Sources from which magic bowl texts draw 10 (14)
4.1 Biblical verses and Liturgy 11 (3)
4.2 Hekhalot, the Sword of Moses and Sepher Ha-Razim 14 (3)
4.3 The historiola [(‘Little story’). Modern term describing brief tales built into magic formulas, providing a mythic precedence for a magically effective treatment ] 17 (1)
4.4 The get [the legal formula found in the Jewish bill of divorce] 18 (3)
4.5 Gnostic, Christian and pagan sources 21 (3)

In the article immediately following Levene's in JSQ (pp. 309-319), Shaul Shaked makes the observation that this "is the only bowl text in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic known to me so far to make an explicit allusion to Jesus, and it does so in terms that are clearly borrowed from Christian usage."

He notes that there is a good parallel to M 163 in a "Mandaic bowl in the Scheyen Collection, MS 2054/124, which ... is also a bowl addressed at certain named antagonists, and ends with a Christian formula of the trinity."

Incantations directed at the creator god's demons/angels, especially with a Trinitarian like formula, is in my weak and feeble mind not likely to have been written by, or for, a Marcionite.

DCH

stephan huller

Perhaps I should rephrase it like this. The bowl witnesses or reflects the Marcionite interest in god as איש

The group that produced this bowl may or not be Marcionite. But the original name of the Christian god was איש and the Marcionites were one of several groups who testify to that.

stephan huller

And what does 'being a Christian mean'? I think the Mandaeans were distantly related to the Marcionites. But again, what is a Christian? I have always thought the Marcionites were sort of Jewish, hence Tertullian directing the same treatise basically against Jews and Marcionites.