DCHindley

Yes, I'd want to normalize the tables:

RULES OF DATA NORMALIZATION:

Start with unnormalized data

1st Normal Form. ELIMINATE REPEATING GROUPS
Make a separate table for each set of related attributes
Give each table a primary key

2nd Normal Form. ELIMINATE REDUNDANT DATA
If an attribute depends on only part of a multi-valued key
Remove it to a separate table

3rd Normal Form. ELIMINATE COLUMNS NOT DEPENDENT ON KEY
If attributes do not contribute to a description of the key,
Remove them to a separate table

4th Normal Form. ISOLATE INDEPENDENT MULTIPLE RELATIONSHIPS
No table may contain two or more 1:n or n:m relationships that are not directly related

It's been a very long time since I have done anything with MS Access (mid 90's)

DCH

DCHindley

I was delighted the other day to find an English Translation of Adolf von Harnack's Marcion: Das Evangelium Vom Fremden Gott, translated by John Steely and Lyle Biema:

Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God (or via: amazon.co.uk) 1990

However, now that I have it I see that it does not include a translation to the 454+ pages of Appendices, which is what I really was hoping for. Dingy dang!

It does appear to be a real translation of the first 235 pages of Harnack's interpretive narrative, so I'll get some value out of it. The Appendices are available in the original German, which can be downloaded from the Internet, although the language barrier just makes it all that harder to interpret or use effectively.

So many obstacles ...

DCH

stephan huller

It is easy to find the PDF of the original German. Roger Pearse had a post at his blog a while back. Just go to www.roger-pearse.com and search for von Harnack - you'll see it. It's at archive.org from what I remember ...

gurugeorge

Just a curious thought. How much do we know about Epiphanius, and from what sources?

I ask, because the bits of writings of him that I've glanced through are so weird they make me wonder if Epiphanius' intention wasn't what we think it is.

I wonder if his intention was actually to preserve knowledge of the heresies (i.e. if he himself was a heretic of some sort, disguising himself as orthodox).

RParvus

Stephan,

The early proto-orthodox heresy hunters connect Marcion with Simonianism by way of Cerdo. That Marcion’s teaching about God was a further development of that held by Simonians seems plausible to me. It may be that he either did not fully understand their doctrine, or did understand it but knowingly decided to go one step beyond it. The Simonian Saturninus, for instance, taught that the God of the Jews was one of the ignorant lower angels who created the material world including men, but that men still retained a connection with the supreme God due to the “spark” of divinity that He—out of pity—imparted to them shortly after their creation. By Marcion’s denial that there was any connection at all between the supreme God and mankind prior to the coming of Christ, he in effect turned the Simonian supreme God into the alien or stranger God. And since his God was entirely alien, the entire Old Testament thereby became unusable by Marcion to support his system in any positive way. Is there some reason the possibility should be ruled out that Marcion’s Gods (both the Alien and the World-Creator) are later developments of the Simonian Gods?

Also, Robert M. Price, in his “The Pre-Nicene New Testament,” has a section on the relationship between Paul and Simon of Samaria. He writes: “Does this identification mean that some Christian authors occasionally used Simon Magus as a satirical mask for Paul as Baur thought? Or does the identification go deeper? Was the historical Paul actually Simon? Hermann Detering and Stephan Hermann Huller think so. This would certainly explain the business about Simon being the father of heresy and Gnosticism because it would mean the same as Tertullian’s famous description of Paul as the ‘apostle of Marcion and the apostle of the heretics.’ The earliest Paulinists we know of, including the earliest to write commentaries on his epistles, were Marcionites and Gnostics. As the church fathers make them the whelps of Simon, the Gnostics themselves claim to hail from Paul. Detering and Huller turn Baur’s position on its head; instead of Simon being a polemical mask, Paul is the orthodox, sanitized version of Simon, a kind of ventriloquist dummy for orthodoxy once Simon and his letters had been co-opted by the emerging Catholic Church.” (pp. 34-5).

Does this accurately describe your position?

stephan huller

Let me say right off the bat that I don't have a “position” on anything. I go where the evidence leads me. My understanding is always evolving. Whatever conversations Price and I had in the last century don't necessarily represent my position today.

With that said I go back to my earlier statement (referenced in your post) asking the question who was Jesus for the Marcionites? Was he the Son? The answer is clearly yes the Marcionites identified him as the Son. But the Son of what or whom? The answer must be the Son of the previously unknown “Father” (unknown to the ancient Israelites).

This surprisingly narrows Jesus's identity even further (and contradicts Epiphanius report which started this thread). The Marcionites could only have conceived that Jesus was (a) the known Son of an unknown Father or (b) the unknown Son of an unknown Father. It's that simple.

Celsus clearly mocks the Marcionites presenting them as holding (b) and all subsequent Patristic references imply that either the Marcionite had a “stranger God” or another beside the Creator or argued that Creator or god of the Jews was other than their “good God.”. Yet we never hear that they had two unknown gods (Father and Son) which is important.

So we arrive back at the original problem about whether Jesus was the Son known or unknown to the Jews. The prologue to John clearly presents Jesus as known but unrecognized to the Jews. This certainly fits the Pauline understanding (cf 2 Corinthians 3). But was it the conception shared by the Marcionites?

One difficulty is of course that the Jews did not identify JHVH as JSVS (Ephrem implies the Marcionite name was Isu). Yet this is not an insurmountable difficulty

On the other side of the ledger we have to ask why if both Father and Son were unknown to the Jews and the revelation made to through the Law and prophets why do the Pauline writings (the Gospel and Apostle) make constant allusions to things said in the Jewish writings? Why does Eznik speak of the Marcionites holding that the Creator had a metanoia associated with the coming of Paul? If the Creator wasn't evil the Marcionites either conceived of him being transformed or if the testimony of Eznik is put aside ignored him altogether

stephan huller

And to answer your statements with regards to the “divine spark” and the unknown Father. We should all be wary when we start to see that our definition of a religion sounds increasingly negative and reactionary. After all our sources - the Church Fathers - went out of their way to present the heretics as being motivated by a negative reaction to the god of Creation.

Yet religious belief starts with something positive. A Muslim for instance is a believer in Islam not because the paganism or the religion of his ancestors was wrong but because he or she believes the Quran is the embodiment of the “perfect religion.”. In other words religious awareness is constantly evolving and Islam represents an improvement or the completion of a process of enlightenment

The same thing must have originally been true for the Marcionites. The Jews and the revelation of the Law and prophets wasn't evil but only a first step in the ultimate revelation of truth. So too the creation.

While creationists will get upset when I say this - white people totally miss the boat with respect to creation as conceived in Genesis as simply a “divine fiat.”. This certainly what the Quran says but not Genesis. The Pentateuch has an evolving creation which took place over many days because it was believed started “in the beginning” hadn't yet been completed or perfect. Like Mark Zuckerberg says in the Social Network “we don't even know what it is yet”

This is Paul in 2 Corinthians chapter 3. The Jews are blinded by their devotion to the Pentateuch but the revelation of the gospel, Christ and a new creation is the thing (are the things?) which complete the process started in Genesis. Just read Marqe or Philo (assuming they were separate people)

stephan huller

Another example. No one says when asked why they are fucking their mistress “it's a reaction against my wife.”. They are motivated by the positive experience of having sex with a woman who doesn't act like intercourse is a prison sentence. Only when caught in the act of cheating (i.e. confronted with the reality that this positive experience is contrary to the rules of matrimony) does the wife figure into things

RParvus

I’ll take that as a “no.” And I didn’t mean to imply that your understanding wasn’t evolving. I only asked because I too think that ‘Paul’ was a name put on the letters to hide their Simonian provenance, and I was wondering if Price’s description still accurately reflected your current understanding (subject, of course, to further evolution depending on where the evidence might eventually lead).


But if “no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him” (the Gnostic lightning bolt in Mt. 11:27), aren’t we dealing with two unknowns prior to the Son’s coming? And so, again, could not Marcion’s two unknowns be derived from the two unknowns of the earlier gnostics?

Perhaps the reason is that the Pauline writings were originally Simonian. Simonians didn’t have a problem with selectively quoting the Old Testament. Simon himself, in his Apophasis Megale, quotes from Isaiah and Jeremiah. Gnostics loved to quote from Genesis to support their doctrines. Many of the pre-Moses figures were heroes to the Gnostics (e.g. Enoch, Seth, Melchisedech). Pre-circumcision Abraham too falls in to the pre-Moses category. Of course, some of the Old Testament quotes in the Paulines may be the work of the proto-orthodox. They would have needed to rectify anything that was only susceptible of Simonian interpretation.

If Marcion, on the other hand, came to know of the letters via the Simonian Cerdo, he would have had a different kind of problem with them. He would have had to purge them of their Old Testament references, just like he would have had to purge such from any other writings of Simon, Basilides, et al that he wished to use. As I indicated in my previous post, Marcion’s alien God concept goes a fatal step further than the Simonians went.

As for Marcion’s Gospel: I think he was late to the game and so had to work with what he found at Rome: some form of Luke. If you want to convert the Roman church, you need to work with some form of what they were using. Personally, I think he would have been better served to choose Mark’s Gospel whose first edition, as I see it, was a Simonian allegory, perhaps written by Basilides.

RParvus

You and I know that. But the question is: Did Simon know that? Apparently not, for he taught that “actions are not just by nature but by convention, in accordance with the decrees of the world-making angels, who led men into bondage through precepts of this kind. Therefore he announced that the world would be destroyed and that those who were his would be freed from the rule of those who made the world” (“Against Heresies” of Irenaeus, 1,23,3). And according to the Simonians (e.g. Simon, Basilides, Saturninus) the God of the Jews was one of the world-creating angels.

Does the reference to the Law as a ‘bondage’ remind you of anyone?