stephan huller

I know this will have very little interest for most people here, but I am working on a paper which will now trash every previous attempt to reconstruct the Marcionite New Testament. The assumption at bottom here is that Tertullian and Epiphanius must have either (a) access to the original Marcionite canon or (b) has a source which knew enough to help us reconstruct the original material. Yet I see absolutely no evidence of any of this. In fact I only see a polemicist at work attempting to discredit the 'heresies' and being completely indifferent to the whole question of whether or not a particular passage was actually found in the Marcionite canon. He just wanted to use whatever was available to him to demolish the 'wrong beliefs' of the opposition, whether or not it actually was found in their Bible.

What I mean by this is that Schmid and Clabeaux just assume that because Tertullian almost jumps out of the gate developing a systematic attack against the Marcionites from a New Testament text and infrequently makes reference to different readings found in the Marcionite text that the text Tertullian was using to develop his arguments throughout his work was the Marcionite text. One might be able to expect this if the author of Against Marcion was honest or was so interested in the truth that he wanted to engage his opponents to get to the right answer. But I see a habit in Irenaeus's writings of this sort of 'fuck the truth, I just want to win' attitude.

Here's an example that I just happened to be thinking about - the time when Irenaeus argues that those who say that Jesus's ministry was just a year are 'heretics' because the Gospel of John says x, y and z:

The point here is that what the fuck does it matter that the Gospel of John says all of this if the community who Irenaeus's condemns only used a synoptic gospel or rejected John? You could use the same argument here that the morons to develop their senseless claims about Marcion's text (i.e. the people Irenaeus is attacking 'must' have used the material here = John for Irenaeus to have made these arguments) yet it is obviously false. The people here clearly don't accept John, or at least the version of John (= our canonical text) which Irenaeus is citing throughout his argument.

Why would Irenaeus cite John against a tradition that only used a synoptic gospel and held that Jesus's ministered only a year to prove that Jesus ministered for almost twenty years? The short answer is that Irenaeus doesn't care about the truth. He wants to demolish his opponents. The same methodology is likely used by the author of Against Marcion - i.e. he is not citing from the Marcionite text but his own copy of the New Testament - adding in references which he heard from Marcionite citations of their NT once in every other section or so.

The point is that Tertullian is just translating an original Greek text by someone else (like Against the Valentinians = Irenaeus Against Heresies Book 1.1 - 12). The author sounds authoritative. Maybe he sounds like he was citing from the actual Marcionite throughout (Tertullian never says so but Epiphanius who uses an older version of the same text apparently thought so) but that's just the way Irenaeus writes. It's his literary habit because he has so little respect for the truth so little.

aa5874

Please explain how Irenaeus could have destroyed his opponents with KNOWN LIES?

You must remember that "Against Heresies" is supposed to be a PUBLIC document which should REFLECT what Irenaeus TAUGHT and PREACHED in his lifetime.

Clement of Alexandria in the "Stromata" claimed Jesus preached for ONE single year and used gLuke and these should have been PUBLIC documents.

I really don't understand how Irenaeus can DEMOLISH his opponents by ignoring the truth when there should have been PUBLIC documents that would instead DEMOLISH the arguments of Irenaeus.

The evidence is actually suggesting that there is more than one author of "Against Heresies".