DCHindley

This relates to the middle ages, which is when he believes that Church socialism finally broke down completely.

IV The church property in the Middle Ages

Christianity was not able to justify and could not be in a position to a new mode of production to bring about such a revolution. So it was not to be able to save the Roman Empire before the destruction. If despite all this social depravity of its existence could drag on through the centuries, it had the advantage of not Christianity, but the heathen barbarians, the Germanic tribes. These were, as we have seen, as mercenaries and colonizers, the supports of the sinking company.

But Söldnerthum and colonization were not enough to satisfy the encroaching Germans. This means they only showed the weakness of the empire and made them acquainted with flavors that were to meet only in the Roman Empire, it reinforced the drive to the south. Finally, the German crowds overflowed the kingdom, and took possession of it, a party of the other and displacing vordrängend until peace came gradually back into the chaos, the individual colonies were settled and new states were formed, a new social order was developing.

The Germans were in the age of migration at the stage of primitive agrarian communism. The various tribes, districts and communities formed cooperatives, Mark co-operatives, with common property in land. House and home, however, were already private property of individual families become, the arable land was divided among them for special purposes, but it was the right of property to the cooperative, pasture, forest and water remained in the use of the Community.

The poverty, the lack of possessions as a mass phenomenon ceased since the great migrations. Probably occurs in the Middle Ages often mass misery, but it is due to crop failure or Kriegsnoth or epidemics, but not by possessions. and it was always a temporary and not a misery for life. Where, however, were found in need because they do not leave there: the cooperative, to which they belonged, offered them protection and assistance.

The benevolence of the church ceased to be a more necessary for the survival of society factor. The church organization was even in the storms of the time, but only in that they are adapting to new conditions, that they completely changed their character. From a Wohlthätigkeitsanstalt she became a political institution. your political functions besides their riches were the main source of their power in the Middle Ages. Their wealth saved the church in the storms of the Great Migration from the old to the new company. How much did they lose it, as much or even more, they knew how to acquire new. The church was included in all the Christian-Germanic States the largest landowner and one third of the country the way they see, in some areas even more.

This rich patrimony belongs now to complete to be Armengut. Charlemagne even as some other institution of the Roman Empire did, including the quartering of Church property transferred into the Frankish kingdom. But like most of his "reforms" that remained on paper - or parchment. A few years after Charles's death already appeared Isidore Decretals, a collection of cheeky invented and falsified documents, which should justify the claims of the papacy and the legal basis of his politics were. In relation to the church property claim this Decretals, that among the poor, whose fortune it fancy, understand only the clergy were to have taken the vow of poverty. This theory was generally brought to bear, from then on the church property were considered to be goods of the clergy. In the 12th Century, this theory was their consistent training by claiming that all church property belongs to the pope, who could dispose of at will. [18]

These views correspond entirely to the actual facts, the rule which the Church in the state and society that practiced the papacy in the Church.

But if the church property also ceased to be Armengut, so that it does not mean that is the average age of pages of church organizations nothing happened to the poor, as far as it ever was poor at that time. Although there is no proletariat was in our favor in the first centuries of the Middle Ages - except for some cities maybe - so there were not occasionally a few needy, as we mentioned earlier, in times of bad harvest the hungry, in times of epidemics sick and widows and orphans who lacked a family that received them in time of war even landless people from the neighborhood or from a distance, the enemy had driven the slump.

To support those in need was in the Middle Ages as the duty of every property owner, above all, each landowner, including the largest landowner, the Church. This duty they did not meet because they would have been a special Wohlthätigkeitsanstalt, but because they belonged to the haves, this duty was not the outcome of a particular Christian, but a general, if you will, pagan principle, a principle that all nations in common is available at a lower stage of civilization: the hospitality.

The joy of parts, at the mid-Healing is all one people, where the primitive communism, or at least its traditions still prevail. And the stranger is just there so rare, so striking fact that he may face impossible to remain indifferent, depending on its origin and behavior do you fight him as an enemy, honors or him as a guest, as a valued member of the family, it splits his skull, or is it home and yard, kitchen and cellar are available, sometimes even the marriage bed.

The joy of communication of the surplus that generates its own husbandry than the needs of the family also receives, so long as there is the so-called natural economy, so long for the market or the customer is not produzirt for sale but for the own use. This mode of production prevailed during the Middle Ages, at least in agriculture, and this branch of production at that time was for the social life of much of the key.

The more developed the production, the greater the excess of the estate each scored. Especially in the hands of large landowners, the kings of the high nobility, the bishops, the monasteries accumulated huge surpluses of food to which they could not sell. They could, they just - feed. They used them to keep many men of war, practicing artists and artisans, as well as the most generous hospitality. It had then been subject to highly indecent if point an average family would have failed a peaceful stranger food and drink and shelter as soon as this matter addressed.

If bishops and monasteries, the hungry fed, the naked clothed and sheltered the homeless, they did nothing that did not end any other property in the Middle Ages as well. The difference was most of that, as the wealthiest, the other property owners it could be ahead.

But the custom of hospitality is growing rapidly to an end as soon as the production of commodities begins to Produziren the sale, once a market for various products, enlightens. The individual host properties are now in a position to convert their surpluses for cash, those great producers of power from which you can never have too much that does not spoil, the clump can be. Instead of the joy of healing from the mid surplus occurs at the pleasure of storing up treasures that generosity is killed by the greed.

The more so-called push back the money economy, the natural economy, a process of the 13 from Italy and southern France since the Century, spread rapidly through the rest of Europe, the more restrict the property owners their hospitality and generosity.

But in the same proportion in which the generosity vanished, increased the number of the poor. The development of commodity produced a proletariat that grew rapidly and reached a significant expansion in some areas.

His best refuge found this in the generosity of the monasteries.

Large corporations seem increasingly cumbersome to be in its development and changes in circumstances less easily adapt as individuals. [19] Certainly this was the case with the monasteries. She held out longest in the old kind traditions of their tenants, while around them the benefits were converted into money taxes, they avoided more than their neighbors to deprive the farmers of their Landantheile or hinaufzuschrauben their services, they kept finite in general longer than this old-fashioned hospitality and their generosity.

But could not close completely, the monasteries of the new time. Their occupants were taken thirst of gold, their meals for the needy reduzirten more and more on "broad beggars' soup."

And even where they clung to the old liberalism, as it turned out to be less and less adequate to the growing demands of Massenarmuth.

Again arose the problem of poverty, and again were formed communist ideas and aspirations.

This took on two forms. In the lower classes was early on a vague feeling of communism, in the layers of learned men and bold friends later formed a clearly thought-out, philosophical communism, utopianism.

In purely literary, the latter direction appears to be a continuation of the Platonic, the former as a continuation of the early Christian communism.

About two directions are different from their predecessors in these key areas. For a new social power arises and takes possession of the communist idea of a power of Plato and the early Christians knew nothing: the wage labor as the basis of a new mode of production.

Footnotes:

18th This change in the character of the church property had an important consequence. She urged for performing the celibacy, of the celibacy of the clergymen. For ideological reasons had different directions desired in the Church since always been the celibacy of the clergymen, sometimes also arranged but it was not with them succeeded, penetrate with it. These aspirations had only success, than themselves a material interest linked thus, the worry about the Kirchengut. As long as this as Good of the municipalities was regarded, which the bishops had to manage b1os, it was threatened in it existed through the families of the clergymen not very . That changed themselves, than the Kirchengut the Gut of the clergy was itself. Well was looking at any clerics, had of the children, to communicate to these dated Church Good as possible much. "One experienced every day that these priest sons received not alone the genetic make of their fathers, but also the Kirchengut, whose usufruct Those have had, than her Inherits healing took in claim!" (Giese Brecht, Gesch. d German. Emperor time, II, p 406) Gar touchingly are the lawsuits, the eg Benedict VIII On the Ticinese conciliar (1014-1024) about it intoned: "Large basic pieces, large goods that what always they can acquire, the vile fathers (the married clergymen) their vile sons out of the Church treasure - because something Other they possess not "& c. (In the case Gieseler, teaching book of the Church history, Bonn 1831, I., p were 282nd Through Gieseler we made attentively out of context between Kirchengut and celibacy of the clergy.) But the squandering of the Church related product to the children of the clerics was able effectively done only halt be, than in the Church the sole rule of Popery was been firmly established. One of the first tasks of the papal power was now fighting the marriage of priests. Leo IX. (1048-1054) began thus, of the energetic Gregor VII (1073-1085) led the prohibition of the priests marriage through at the entshiedensten. Meanwhile it lasted north of the Alps long, until it was widely recognized. In Liege we still find in 1220, and in 1230 in Zurich, still married clergy in office. (Gieseler, cit, p 290)

As a secularized in the Reformation the Kirchengut, by the princes torn in itself was and the clergymen transformed themselves into officials the State aimed were living from her Solde, of course every interest disappeared in the maintenance of celibacy of the clergy. The Protestant clergymen can have children, so much he wants, he finds not a Kirchengut, the he could zuschanzen them.

19th Consider, such B. the toughness, firmly keep with which the great English trade unions at of their old politics, while everywhere otherwise the workers' world joyfully hurries under the flag of socialism.

DCH (Now, I must go to work ... proletarian as I am)

DCHindley

I've been trying to trace down this contention that Kautsky took over and modified Kalthoff's Roman community communism theory (cobbled from the Platonic ideal state that was in the air so to speak and practical survival tactics of the neglected members of households rarely if ever visited by their masters) and then applying it to the Jerusalem community.

I found a discussion group message by Klaus Schilling here, that describes Kalthoff as:

A. Kalthoff, [a] Lutheran minister, ... [upon following the path of Strauss and subsequent] theologians [who] attempted ... to distill history from the envelope made by church-tradition concerning the life of Jesus.

Kalthoff ... soon had to recognise that this research was futile: there's no historical core to the onion of the Gospel-Jesus. Kalthoff ... reasoned ... that [it was] not Jesus and his personal followers [who] constructed the movement that turned into the Christian community, but the Christian community [which] constructed Jesus, a religious fiction.

For Kalthoff, the original community was a proto-communist social reformers' club, using both classical philosophy and Jewish apocalyptics for backup. Schweitzer thought that Kalthoff stretched Christianity as much as Kalthoff thought liberal theology [attempted] to stretch Jesus.

Through pure luck, I happened upon a German transcription of Kalthoff's "book" (it appears to be only 88 pages, and resembles a position statement) Das Christus-Problem: Grundlinien zu einer Sozialtheologie ("The Christ-problem: baselines to a social theology," 1902) at Hermann Detering's website, which I was able to more or less successfully run through Google Translate.

Now that I have had a chance to review it, it actually quite tame stuff. Schweitzer critiqued attempts to find the source of influence for early Christian development, looking at scholars who attribite it to Judaism and/or Hellenism, and Kalthoff appears to be one of those who advocates Hellenism (through Plato and Romanized large scale agriculture).

More to come ...

DCH

Huon

An evil-minded guy could say this :

Saint Peter had a big hammer in his hand when Ananias and Sapphira died "miraculously". And the young men who buried hurriedly Ananias and Sapphira were the body-guards of Peter. It seems that Peter kept the money of the sect, partly for the organisation, partly for himself and his body-guards.

DCHindley

Very labor-ish to use a hammer, that. Actually, Kautsky thought that the Church started out as a charitable organization operated with volunteers. Over time, as the job duties became more intense with the expansion of the church population starting in the 4th century, it grew into an institution with paid administrators (Bishops) and those in charge of distribution (Deacons). Supposedly there was no coercion for contributions (the sale of property had shortly morphed into using property for the benefit of others).

In Kautsky's POV, the relative value of an organization is not in how it uses resources, but how it produces resources. The Church itself was not actually producing anything, and the rag-proletariat (most of the Christians) continued to be as complacent as they had been before christianity, only more so as the distributions of food, etc, became entitlements.

DCH

DCHindley

Curious about the relationship between the socio-economic theories of Marx & Engles and the theories about early Christian development of Albert Kalthoff and Karl Kautsky, I created this table of their works. I've annotated some of it, especially as it related to Kalthoff in order to show how he was influenced by Liberal Theology of Schleiermacher, the higher criticism and Christian Socialism of Kingsley, Bousset's History of Religion School which caused Kalthoff to abandon the concept of an historical Jesus, and finally the new-agey "life-affirmation" of Nietzsche which pushed him to the ultra left of Christian liberalism.

Kautsky's social ideas are of a completely different nature than Kalthoff's. Schweitzer made the point that Kalthoff came to his conclusions about the unknowable nature of a historical Jesus Christ independently of Bruno Bauer. Engles recognized the value of Bauer's identifications of influences that affected early Christian development, as it set a framework under which Marxist theory could explain the development of the Christian church. Kautsky mentions both Bauer and Kalthoff only in the sense that they showed that theologians had dressed the scant details about Jesus with their own views of what Jesus should have been like. What Kautsky did was to use that as a launching point for deducing facts from these accounts about the social conditions that influenced the early Christian writers.

DCH

Date	Marx	Engels	Kalthoff	Kautsky
1839		"Letters From Wuppertal" (1839) [Letters to magazines and newspapers about the plight of labor in the cotton mills of the Wuppertal Valley in Germany. Engels' father owned several such mills in the city of Barmen.]
1842	"The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law" (1842)	"Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy" (1843) [his first economic work which anticipates Marx’s later critique of economic categories.]
1843	Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," 1843. Also "On the Jewish Question," 1843
1844	"Notes on James Mill," 1844. Also "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," 1844	"The Condition of the Working Class in England" (1845, tr by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky 1885) [Detailed description and analysis of the conditions of the working class in Britain during Engels' stay in Manchester and Salford, while working in the business office of a mill co-owned by his father. The rapid pace of change in England during the previous sixty years that had brought new ways of production, new ways of living, new classes of people; and the extraordinary upheaval in human relations within the new industrial working class, the proletariat. Machinery, the division of labor, and water power (especially in the form of steam) were the causal technology for the capitalist concentration and centralization of people and economic power.]
1845	"The Holy Family," 1845 [Co-author with Engles]. Also "Theses on Feuerbach," 1845. Also "The German Ideology," 1845 [co-authored with Engles]	"The Holy Family," 1845, ET 1956, tr Richard Dixon & Clement Dutts. [A critique on the Young Hegelians and their trend of thought which was very popular in academic circles at the time. The "holy family" refers to Bruno Bauer and his younger brother Edgar, who were representative of Right-Hegelians.
1847	"The Poverty of Philosophy," 1847. Also "Wage Labour and Capital," 1847	"Principles of Communism" (1847)
1848	"Manifesto of the Communist Party," 1848 [co-authored with Engles]	"Manifesto of the Communist Party" (1847-1848), written with Marx;
1850		"The Peasant War in Germany" (1850)
1852	"The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon," 1852 [Analysis of Napoleon's coup that brought him into power as "President for life" of france]
1858	"Outlines to the Critique of Political Economy" 1858
1859	"A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," 1859
1861	"Writings on the U.S. Civil War," 1861
1862	"Theories of Surplus Value," 3 volumes, 1862-1863
1863	"Theories of Surplus Value," final vol. 1863
1864		Engles becomes a partner in the Manchester cotton thread mill he managed for his father. (1864)
1865	"Value, Price and Profit," 1865
1867	"Capital," Volume I (Das Kapital), 1867
1869		Engles retires from the family business. (1869)
1871	"The Civil War in France," 1871
1873		"On Authority" (1873)
1874			"The question of the metaphysical basis of morality, studied with special reference to Schleiermacher." (Dissertation), Halle 1874 [Friedrich Schleiermacher, d. 1834, known for his attempt to reconcile the criticisms of the Enlightenment with traditional Protestant orthodoxy. He also became influential in the evolution of Higher Criticism, and his work forms part of the foundation of the modern field of hermeneutics. Because of his profound impact on subsequent Christian thought, he is often called the "Father of Modern Liberal Theology."]
1875	"Critique of the Gotha Program," 1875		Reassigned to a small country church due to conflicts with the Evangelical Lutheran Church leadership, and for holding Hegelian views critical to pietistic orthodoxy. (1875)
1878		"Landmarks of Scientific Socialism" 1878 (tr Austin Lewis 1907), popularly known as "Anti-Dühring" [A detailed critique of the philosophical positions of Eugen Dühring, a German philosopher and critic of Marxism, particularly its materialist form of Hegelian dialectic.]	"Speech in defense of the pastor, Dr. K .... against the prosecution of the Royal Consistory of the Province of Brandenburg." 1878. His ministerial license was suspended.
1880	"Questionnaire for Workers" (1880)		"The life of Jesus. Speeches in the Protestant Reform Club in Berlin." Berlin 1880 [See Schweitzer's characterization of the very human Jesus there depicted by him, and the fact that Kalthoff later disavowed this kind of portrait.] Also "The latest measure to combat Judaism." 1880 [referring to German President Hindenburg's stoking of anti-Jewish sentiment for political ends.]	"The impact of population increase on the progress of society" 1880.
1881	"Letter to Wera Sassulitsch" (1881)
1882		"Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity," in Sozialdemokrat (1882) [Bauer's legacy - he died in April this year - was "he irrefutably proved the chronological order of the Gospels and their mutual interdependence, ... by the very contents of the Gospels themselves. ... And, if almost nothing from the whole content of the Gospels turns out to be historically provable — so that even the historical existence of a Jesus Christ can be questioned — Bauer has, thereby, only cleared the ground for the solution of the question: what is the origin of the ideas and thoughts that have been woven together into a sort of system in Christianity, and how came they to dominate the world?"]
1883	"Notes on Wagner," 1883. Died same year.	The funeral of Karl Marx (1883)		"Genesis of Biblical Primitive History" in Kosmos (1883)
1884		"""The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State."" 1884 (tr Alick West 1942) [An important and detailed seminal work connecting capitalism with what Engels argues is an ever-changing institution - the family. Contains a comprehensive historical view of the family in relation to the issues of class, female subjugation and private property.]
"	Made pastor of a Reformed church near Basel.
1885	"Capital," Volume II (posthumously published by Engels), 1885			"Genesis of Christianity" in Neue Zeit (1885)
1886		"Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy" (1886) [Feuerback was a German philosopher and anthropologist and associate of Left Hegelian circles. Politically liberal, an atheist and a materialist, many of his philosophical writings offered a critical analysis of Christianity, especially The Essence of Christianity (1841, 2nd ed, 1848, Tr. Marian Evans 1854 & 1881). His thought was influential in the development of dialectical materialism, where he is often recognized as a bridge between Hegel and Marx.]
1887				"Karl Marx's economic doctrines." 1887.
1888		"""The role of violence in history""
(1888)"	"The Office of NT.s. Inaugural sermon." Bremen 1888 [at his installation as 2nd minister at St. Martin's Churce in Bremen, a Reformed Church]	"Thomas More and his Utopia" 1888.
1889				"The class divisions in 1789: On the centennial anniversary of the Great Revolution" 1889.
1890		"""About anti-Semitism""
(1890)"
1892			"Charles Kingsley." 1892 [Church of England parson, novelist, Christian Socialist, Protestant controversialist, 'muscular Christian,' poet, and amateur naturalist. … Kingsley moved onto the public stage in 1848 in response to the working class agitation that climaxed in the Chartist collapse of that year. As a result of his interest in the condition of the working classes, he joined with John Malcolm Ludlow, Frederick Denison Maurice, and others in forming the Christian Socialist movement].	"The Erfurt program in its basic part explained." 1892.
1894	"Capital," Volume III (posthumously published by Engels), 1894	"""The History of Early Christianity"" in Neue Zeit (1894). [He says that for Bauer ""the New Testament accounts of Jesus and his disciples are deprived ... of any historical background: they are diluted in legends in which the phases of interior development and the moral struggles of the first communities are transferred to more or less fictitious persons. Not Galilee and Jerusalem, but Alexandria and Rome, according to Bauer, are the birthplaces of the new religion.]
"	Appointed 1st Minister at St Martins.
1895		Engles dies of throat cancer. (1895)		"The Forerunners of Modern Socialism." vol 1, 1895. [Contains an analysis of "primitive Christian" development in a socio-economic perspective. Not a word about B. Bauer or Kalthoff, although he does credit Plato's utopian republic with setting the stage for later communistic societies, including Essenes and early Christianity.]
1896			"Schleiermacher's legacy to our time. Religious speeches." Braunschweig 1896
1897				"The Forerunners of Modern Socialism." vol 2, 1897.
1898			"At the turn of the century sermons about the social struggles of our time." Berlin 1898
1899				"The agrarian question: A review of the trends of modern agriculture and the agricultural policy of social democracy." 1899. Also, "Bernstein and the Social Democratic program: An Anti-Critique." 1899.
1900			"Friedrich Nietzsche and the cultural problems of our time. lectures," Berlin 1900 [Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism. Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism, nihilism and postmodernism. ... Central to his philosophy is the idea of "life-affirmation", which involves an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent those views might be.]
1901			"The philosophy of the Greeks, as shown on the basis of cultural history." Berlin 1901. Also "The religious problems in Goethe's Faust." Berlin 1901
1902			"The Christ-problem. Baselines to a social theology." Leipzig 1902	"The Social Revolution." 1902.
1903			"D. Thikötter and the problem of Christ." Bremen 1903 [Dr. Julius Thikötter was a prolific Theological writer.] Also "Religious belief. Speeches," Leipzig 1903. Founded Bremen branch of the German Peace Society and served as its chairman.
1904			"The rise of Christianity. New contributions to the problem of Christ." Leipzig 1904. Also "What we know about Jesus? A statement by W. Bousset." Berlin 1904 [Wilhelm Bousset (1865-1920) was one of the pioneers in the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule or "History of Religions School," which established the scientific and comparative study of Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity.] Also "Zarathustra preaching. Talk about the moral conception of life of Friedrich Nietzsche." Jena 1904.
1905			"The religion of the moderns." Jena/Leipzig 1905. Also "School culture and government." Leipzig 1905
1906			Modernes Christentum. "Modern Christianity." Berlin (undated, likely 1906). Seven Bremen area ministers file a Motion to remove him from his pastorship on charge of "athiesm." Dies same year.	"Ethics and the materialist conception of history." 1906.
1907			"The age of the Reformation. Posthumous Sermons. edited by F. Steudel," Jena 1907. Also "Future ideals. Posthumous Sermons. edited with a biographical introduction to life drawing by F. Steudel," Jena 1907
1908			"From the inner life. Posthumous Sermons. edited by F. Steudel," Jena 1908	"The origins of Christianity." 1908. [Mentions B. Bauer and A. Kalthoff's determination that we cannot really know the historical Jesus from the scant records available to us, only what the writers about him wanted him to be. However, Kautsky says we can learn something of the economic situation of the writers about Jesus.
1909			"Of domestic life. edited by F. Steudel," Jena 1909	"The path to power." 1909.

Vorkosigan

Conley's analysis is quite insightful. It resonated with me because I live in Taiwan where a right-wing nationalist party, the Kuomintang, is organized along similar lines facing a left-wing Communist party in China organized along similar lines.

I think much analysis of early Christianity and other political and social movements focuses too much on content and not enough on structure and organization. Conley's central idea that early Christianity was the first quasi-Leninist organization in the world and that this was the key to its success is quite insightful. My own experience of living in one-party states tells me that structure is more important than content -- look at Mormonism, which has the same quasi-Leninist organizational style in the modern US, is obviously stupid and easily refutable from easily accessible sources, but that has very little effect on its adherents, who have been trained to categorize those critiques in a certain way so as to remove their critical power. Years ago on my Taiwan blog I noted how Mormon missions abroad exist not to spread the faith but to socialize the missionary further into it....

In the early struggles for orthodox Christians, you can see how they were trying to evolve a structure that would give them power over their own adherents, training their adherents to engage in thought control (sin) and to place themselves under the authority of political commissars (bishops). Naturally this led to a natalist policy (no infanticide, birth control, or abortion) which would have the positive side effect of controlling the messy power of female sexuality, and cradle to the grave totalizing social philosophy. I wish there was a modern work that mapped all that out.

Vorkosigan

DCHindley

Let me make a correction: The article I was thinking of is not the one at www.radikalkritik.de, but an article entitled "St. Ignatius: the Insidious Pragmatism of the Episkopoi of Rome and the Rise of Christianity" in the Journal of Higher Criticism, 7/2 (Fall 2000). The article "Marcion's Place in Early Christianity: A Political Power Play" at Detering's site is a simplified version.

Now I am not totally unacquainted with Mike Conley. He and I had exchanged some e-mails for a year or so back around 2000-2001, after he stumbled on a post somewhere where I stated that I had graduated from his alma mater, Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. Hermann Detering was at the time a regular poster on the ibiblio.org version of the Corpus-Paul list (now at Yahoo Groups, I think), and I had suggested he join it.

His response was as follows:

Corpus-Paul (corpus-paul.lists.ibiblio.org)
(Mike Conley) — Friday, August 03, 2001 4:26:10 AM

My name popped up recently by mistake as I attempted to collate your [DCH's] several contributions to Corpus-paul, but pushed the wrong button. This time I'm sending Purposely (modified, shortened).

Very briefly to my person: PhD (1960) in History from the Ohio State University, Columbus Ohio; Have worked for governmental agency in the U.S.A. and in Germany; Became a German citizen in 1975; Am Retired and have spent well over a decade in research and writing, recently completing work on a volume entitled "Scenario: Nascent Christianity Emerges." [This piece of historical fiction has been published, FWIW]

At Dave Hindley's urging (He didn't have to push all that much), I'd call your attention to two articles that appeared in the Fall 2000 (Vol. 7, No. 2) of the JHC, one of them by me, but equally important, one by Hermann Detering who has figured prominently in this site's communications. His "The Synoptic Apocalypse (Mark 13 par): a document from the Time of Bar Kochba" argues for a date in the second century for at least portions of the Gospel of Mark and from my point of view, his argument constitutes the decisive statement on this matter.

But beyond that, for those of you who read German, I can't urge you too much to turn to his web site: www.radikalkritik.de The significance of this site goes far beyond the lessor, immediate German community in its importance. See Hermann Detering's "Der Galaterbrief in seiner urspruenglichen Gestalt," his "Die Gegner des Paulus im Galaterbrief," and very, very important, his: "Marcion - Peregrinus," the most important statement on this matter since Harnack and Detering's own Gefaelschter Paulus."

The other article referred to above is entitled "St. Ignatius: the Insidious Pragmatism of the Episkopoi of Rome and the Rise of Christianity" in which I argue that the success of the Christianoi, among the multitude of pseudo-christian sects of the second and third century was the result, not of `the hand of God,' but of the extremities to which the Episkopoi of Rome were willing to go in their frontal competition with their adversaries, among them, of course, the Marcionites.

Now I'm sure that Hermann Detering has a file containing his article as translated into English, but I'll leave the initiative in such matters to him. As for my article, I'm prepared to e-mail it to anyone in the group who indicates an interest. Indeed, I'd submit it to the Corpus Paul in tact, i.e. the whole Shebang, 42 pages, but for my lack of chutzpah.

Beyound this, I've written my own piece on Marcion and St. Paulus, available in German in Hermann Detering's website, and available per e-mail to those so interested in English

With kind regards to my List contemporaries,

Mike Conley

http://web.archiveorange.com/archive...ZlopPabLZ2ztA9

Based on a file he sent me containing an early draft of the JHC article, I had wrote:

Corpus-Paul (corpus-paul.lists.ibiblio.org)

From: David C. Hindley
Sent: Saturday, August 11, 2001 2:13 AM
To: Mike.Conley at t-online.de
Subject: Your article "St Ignatius ..."

Mike Conley said:

>>It's good to know that you [he means me, DCH][a]re not in a department for Theologians. That means you've possibly no 'vested interests' to defend (like your job in the faculty [he speaks hypothetically]). That makes you a more apt reader for my reflections.<<

Perhaps [I do] not [defend] the "usual" vested interests, but I [do] have my own [highly speculative and has-to-be-wrong] interests. But anyways, here it goes:

After reading your article, "St. Ignatius, the Insidious Pragmatism of the Episkopoi of Rome and the Rise of Christianity," [I think he sent me a file with an early draft of the article before it was published in JHC] I think I understand the gist of what you say:

About the time of Domitian, Christian leadership began to take advantage of a period of relatively lax government interference in order to more firmly establish Christianity as an organized underground movement with a parallel system of government (contrasted to the Roman government) and with a recruitment/enforcement infrastructure in the form of charitable and similar front organizations. The Ignatian epistles were fabricated to serve as a propaganda vehicle to disseminate the newly adopted organizational changes and reinforce the concept of martyrdom for the cause.

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/c...11/002891.html

DCH