aa5874

How can they both ACCEPT and DISAGREE about the interpretation of Paul at the same instance?

Tertullian ACCEPTED Paul as written.

Marcion REJECTED Paul as written.

According to Tertullian, Marcion used "falsifying hands" to interpolate and discard St. Paul's epistles.

Against Marcion 5.21 Marcion MUTILATED Paul.

Marcion REJECTED Paul.

Ben C Smith

They both accepted Paul as an apostle. They disagreed on what Paul wrote or taught.

Exactly. Marcion rejected the form of the epistles known to Tertullian and accepted what is known as the Marcionite form of the epistles.

According to Tertullian, yes.

Still unanswered: Have you consulted a trusted Latinist yet?

Ben.

aa5874

So, it is now "their apostle", no longer "his apostle".

Against Marcion 5.1 Clearly, Tertullian is begging and pleading with Marcion to accept Paul, Tertullian's apostle.

Against Marcion 5 Tertullian says, "Paul is mine"

Against Marcion Paul is Tertullian's apostles.

Marcion did not accept the career of Paul as handed down in the Acts of the Apostles.

JoeWallack

JW:
Fascinating. Continuing with the External evidence, summary so far:

Justin Martyr c. 153

http://www.earlychristianwritings.co...stapology.html

And there is Marcion, a man of Pontus, who is even at this day alive, and teaching his disciples to believe in some other god greater than the Creator. And he, by the aid of the devils, has caused many of every nation to speak blasphemies, and to deny that God is the maker of this universe, and to assert that some other being, greater than He, has done greater works.

Irenaeus of Lyons (yes "Lyons") c. 180

The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus

Besides this, he mutilates the Gospel which is according to Luke, removing all that is written respecting the generation of the Lord, and setting aside a great deal of the teaching of the Lord, in which the Lord is recorded as most dearly confessing that the Maker of this universe is His Father. He likewise persuaded his disciples that he himself was more worthy of credit than are those apostles who have handed down the Gospel to us, furnishing them not with the Gospel, but merely a fragment of it

Tertullian c. 207

http://www.earlychristianwritings.co...ullian124.html

Marcion, on the other hand, you must know, ascribes no author to his Gospel

...

For if the Gospel, said to be Luke's which is current amongst us (we shall see whether it be also current with Marcion), is the very one which, as Marcion argues in his Antitheses, was interpolated by the defenders of Judaism, for the purpose of such a conglomeration with it of the law and the prophets as should enable them out of it to fashion their Christ, surely he could not have so argued about it, unless he had found it (in such a form).

...

If, then, it be evident that these (Gospels) also were current in the churches, why did not Marcion touch them--either to amend them if they were adulterated, or to acknowledge them if they were uncorrupt?

Epiphanius is the next Patristic source to write extensively on Marcion but the combination of his lack of credibility and relative lateness here gives his testimony relatively little weight.

Evaluating the Patristic witness chronologically than for earliest Attributed authorship and use of "Luke":

Justin c. 153 sees the Marcion controversy as primarily a Philosophical difference and not a Textual one. This is completely consistent with Patristic writings to this pontus in time. Presumably different Christian sects started with a Philosophy (like Paul) and than wrote texts to support it. Historicity of the texts was not an issue.

We will see that most categories of evidence regarding who had the earlier version will favor Marcion. Note that Justin only chooses either the one or the main category that favors the orthodox, the claimed continuity of early Christian writings to the Jewish Bible. This is the Mark of an Advocate and not an objective witness.

Irenaeus of Lyons (yes "Lyons") c. 180 as opposed to Justin is separated from Marcion by generation and geography. Irenaeus sees the Textual issue but gives no sources so one has to wonder if Irenaeus is merely observing the textual differences of his time and projecting them to Marcion's time. Again, Irenaeus is an Advocate and not an objective witness. Like Justin he chooses the best category of evidence, for his position, supposed continuity, to emphasize, but unwittingly chooses another, disciple continuity, which he thinks favors the orthodox but actually favors Marcion.

Tertullian c. 207 comes a generation later and provides a detailed Textual analysis trying to answer the Attribution questions. Tertullian provides limited and mixed information regarding whether Marcion was aware of any other Gospel which existed before his and what that Gospel was. Again, it's quite possible that the other Gospel Marcion was aware of was "Mark" and not another version of "Luke". Tertullian's analysis of the differences between orthodox and Marcion "Luke" appears to be original and not based on previous such analysis suggesting that these Textual differences were an issue of Tertullian's time that he anachronistically is projecting back to Marcion's time.

So in summary for the External evidence you have Biased and few Patristic witness that gradually moves from a Philosophical argument to a Textual one removed from Marcion by generations and geography. The External evidence is inconclusive as to which version of "Luke" likely existed first.

By an Act of Providence though there is a simple and Objective test available based on Internal evidence. Compare Marcion and orthodox "Luke" to the original source, "Mark". Which is quantitatively closer based on mathematical measurement?



Joseph

FAITH, n.
Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

http://errancywiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

JoeWallack

JW:
Objective Internal evidence test, which Gospel, Marcion or orthodox "Luke", is closer to the original source "Mark":

The Gospel of Marcion

Is Marcion's story substantially in "Mark"?

SECTION I (Lk.3:1-7:50)

3:1/4:31- 37 The Arrival of Jesus at Capernaum Yes

4: 16-30 The Synagogue in Nazareth No

4:40-44 At the Setting of the Sun Yes

5: 1-11The Lake of Gennesaret No

5:12-16 Healing of the Leper Yes

5:17-26 Healing of the Palsied Yes

5:27-35 The Feast of Levi the Publican Yes

5:36-38 The Old and the New Yes

6:1-11 The Lord of the Sabbath Yes

6:12-16 The Choosing of the Twelve Yes

6:17-42 New Edicts of the New God No

6:43-49 Good Fruit, Evil Fruit No

7:1-10 Faith of the Centurion Yes

7:11-17 Dead Corpse Rising No

7:18-35 John the Baptist No

7:36-50 The Alabaster Box No

Score Section I (Lk.3:1-7:50):

Marcion story substantially in "Mark" = 9

Marcion story substantially not in "Mark" = 7



Joseph

FAITH, n.
Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

http://errancywiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

aa5874

This is Tertullan in Against Marcion 4.2 But it would seem that Tertullian"s LUKE had passages from gMatthew and/or gMark.

It can be clearly shown that as Tertullian compared his Luke with Marcion's version, passages in gMatthew and/or gMark were found in Tertullian"s LUKE.

This is Tertullian, comparing his contents of gLuke with Marcion's gospel.

Against Marcion 4.7 This passage is NOT found in [KJV] gLuke, it is ONLY found in gMatthew 5.17.

Tertullian appear to be using a document that contains passages from gMatthew and gLuke simultanaeously.

Yet again in Against Marcion 4.7, Tertullian's Luke contained passages found ONLY in [KJV] gMatthew and/or gMark.

Tertullian in Against Macion These passages are found ONLY in gMatthew15.24-26 and/or gMark 7.27, not at all in [KJV] Luke, this again indicates that Tertullian's Luke was a document that simultanaeously contained gMatthew, and/or gMark and Luke.

Matthew 15.24-26 Tertullian may have been comparing the Memoirs of the Apostles or the Diatessaron with Marcion's Gospel.

Based on Tertullian, it can now be seen that Marcion mutilated passages found in gMatthew, and/or gMark and gLuke at the same time.

The Memoirs of the Apostles and the Diatessaron both have parts of gMatthew, gMark and Luke simultanaeously.

the_cave

This is quite interesting...could it be possible that Tertullian knew a version of Luke that did not contain the Lukan nativity sequence?

The evidence seems to suggest this...Tertullian, in Adversus Marcionem IV-V, where he is supposedly focusing on a comparison between GLuke and GMarcion, mentions the visit of the Magi, and the census of Augustus--both details present in GMatthew...but not in GLuke. He has an open opportunity to quote the entirety of GLuke's nativity story when he riducules the beginning of Marcion's gospel...but doesn't mention it at all. He mentions Mary by name, but not the Annunciation. Do I have this right?

This is rather striking. Could it mean that...Marcion did mutilate a gospel, one that Tertullian had in his posession, and that basically followed Luke's narrative order, but that...it contained the Matthean nativity material, rather than the Lukan? And that it contained other material that found its way into Matthew, but not into GLuke? So that...both the claim that Marcion "mutilated" a gospel, and the claim that GLuke was a "mutilation", could be true?

So the sources would work out this way:

pLk(+Mk/dMk)-->GMt
pLk-->GMc
pLk+L-->GLk (& Ac)

(Based on my own theories about stemmatics, this is quite an interesting and exciting idea. I'll have to do some work, but it may explain a lot. I have long suspected that both GMt and GLk depend not on Q, but on a complete gospel containing the Q sayings, as well as a nativity sequence. The question was, did this gospel more closely resemble GMt, or GLk? I wonder if we have our answer...it resembled GLk, in sequence and in the Q language, but it resembled GMt in the nativity sequence, and in certain passages here and there. GMt and GLk are different versions of this Q-gospel, which is equivalent to pLk above.

What's even more interesting is that this would mean GLk may not rely on GMk at all--but the Q-gospel did. Unsure about this, but it's an idea.)

It's also true that P75 does not contain any nativity material...correct? Which could be due to decay, but is rather interesting.

aa5874

Justin Martyr, at around 150 CE mentioned passages from a text called the "Memoirs of the Apostles". He even mentioned that the Memoirs of the Apostles were read in the churches both in the city and country.

The passages from the Memoirs of the Apostles appear to contain parts of gMatthew, gMark and gLuke, but these Memoirs were not given any specific authorship, just always called Memoirs of the Apostles.

But what is most interesting and very significant is that Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen and Eusebius never mentioned a text called the Memoirs of the Apostles, even though Justin claimed it was read in the churches.

The Memoirs of the Apostles seems to have just vanished. Not even in Church History by Eusebius did the Memoirs of the Apostles ever get mentioned.

neilgodfrey

Agreed. The difference with Josephus and Thucydides etc is that we have external controls to give us starting positions with their texts.


By using the term "historians" here, we are implying we have made an evaluation of certain authors that is, I believe, based not solely on the self-attestation of their works, but of their works as evaluated through external controls. We cannot do this with Acts.

Agreed. C'est la vie. But this does not mean we cannot do any sort of history. We can still study the nature of the texts, and compare them with other texts, and come to some understanding of what they were trying to do, their functions, etc. That's not to be sniffed at.


I wasn't the best geometer at school but I think the assumption of historicity is circular.

Probabilities need to work with controls. Without them they are really speculative rather than probability assessment. We have no external or objective controls to assess historical probability in the case of Acts.


Unless there are some new tests that can compensate for complete absence of primary evidence and absence of controls on the secondary evidence, then we can only ask the questions that the evidence will allow us to answer. Rules of historical enquiry can't be changed for the sake of finding "at least some answer" to a question we want to ask. I have read so many works by "biblical historians" that break these elemental rules and it is simply embarrassing.

Self-attestation is all we have to work with in the case of Acts if we are asking to what extent any of its narratives are historical. If there were methods to help us break through that monolithic barrier then I suspect we would have a set of rules that would enable nobody to ever be misled by or misunderstand a text again.

But I'm not opposing the possibility of historical enquiry. Only the course it takes. We do have evidence, such as Acts. But it is evidence for some provenance, some matrix that gave it birth. To me that is the fascinating question, because we can work with the evidence according to supported rules of evidence and enquiry. We can attempt to explain this artifact, this book of Acts. And the answers to that will be something we can add to the question of Christian origins. But I don't believe Acts alone can be justifiably used as primary or even secondary evidence for the supposed historicity of the events it narrates. We can study Acts in relation to other literature, such as Paul's letters, but that is a literary/textual/theological comparison. Not a study of historicity. It is easy to fall into downward circular spirals, and many do.


We have nothing in Acts, or the gospel of Luke, to suggest that the name of one of the "we" people was Luke, of course. I know that's not what you are saying here. Hoffmann suggests, iirc, that the Lucan fiction was created from 2 Timothy 4:11 to be the "proto-orthodox" link in the chain of authority from Paul to the "proto-orthodox" church led by the elders.

One very good reason for the more modest claims to have been accepted in the earliest stages of the literature has to do with the status of "innovation" in ancient matters religious. If these stories are too obviously innovative, then they are arguably going to have a harder time becoming widely accepted. A name of authorship up front only advertizes in flashing neon lights the innovative nature of the work. Luke-Acts and John are the first to drop in sly hints of someone close to being in the know as the authors. But before then we had GMark and GMatthew that are as anonymous as the narratives of Kings and Chronicles. GMark is also arguably structured around and imitative of the Elijah-Elisha narratives. All gospels tell stories of Moses, Elijah, etc etc disguised and re-written as Jesus tales. I don't buy the assertion that this was because Jesus was so awesome and unique that his followers just couldn't help but believe he was a resurrected god and that they couldn't bring themselves to describe any of his life as it really happened, but could only rewrite Elijah type stories about him. Rather, what makes sense to me is that the gospel authors are justifying their innovation by disguising it -- so it appears as a continuation and transvaluation of the old, the known. Hence the Elijah-like John the Baptist to introduce Jesus, and the words from the Law and Prophets etc. This was all to give the new story the legitimacy of the old. To add a name of a contemporary author to it would have undermined this intent.

Later, once the story became accepted and took on an independent authority, then we see the rivalry for different narratives under the guise of pseudonyms like Peter and James. But before that level of boldness was possible, we have the in-between sly hints of authorship we see in John and Luke-Acts.

According to Bernard Levinson this was the technique used by the author/s of Deuteronomy and how he/they introduced the literature to underpin their radical religious reform agenda.

Neil

JoeWallack

JW:
Continuing from here Mark's DiualCritical Marks. Evidence Of Intentional Fiction In The Original Gospel

Regarding The Call of the First Disciples story which clearly is Fictional in "Mark":

http://errancywiki.com/index.php?title=Mark_1

which of our two candidates for succession, Marcion or orthodox "Luke", likely has the earlier The Call of the First Disciples story?

Let's see what's behind D'var number One:

http://errancywiki.com/index.php?title=Luke_4

JW:
Note that in orthodox "Luke" Simon and Jesus have not been properly introduced at the Text level at this point (no preceding equivalent of "Mark" 1:16-18). Why did "ohLuke" (orthodox "Luke") exorcise it? Because it sounded like Fiction. How can "ohLuke" have an implication at the Sub-text level (Reader) that Jesus already knows Simon at this point if the Text does not indicate it? Because "ohLuke's" source ("Mark") does. A likely sign that "ohLuke" is Editing. The orthodox portray "Mark" as an unsophisticated author and "Luke" as sophisticated but the above observation is representative of the relative literary skills of the two. The fish story comes later in "ohLuke":

JW:
The above has mixed information regarding whether Jesus knew Simon at this point in the narrative but generally favors "not". So for the supposed first meeting of Jesus and Simon in "ohLuke" the text implies they had already met
and for the supposed second meeting of Jesus and Simon in "ohLuke" the text implies they had not already met. The likely explanation is "ohLuke" simply switched the first two such stories in her source.

Again, probably the most objective determination of which was likely first, "ohLuke" or Marcion "Luke", is which is closer to the original source "Mark". On a Macrion level Marcion "Luke" is much closer. On a Micro level, for the story above, "ohLuke" is a long way from "Mark". We can not be sure what exactly Marcion had corresponding to "ohLuke's" excerpts above. It is speculative but, to have "ohLuke's" first meetings between Jesus and Simon be so out of whack suggests even more distance between "ohLuke" and "Mark", such as Marcion "Luke".



Joseph

STORY, n.
A narrative, commonly untrue. The truth of the stories here following has, however, not been successfully impeached.

http://errancywiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page