stephan huller

We have all been experienced desperation in our lives. Whether it be having sex with the fat girl at school or being too eager to answer a question at a job interview which led to someone else getting the job, to be human is to be desperate. Nevertheless nowhere is this more apparent than with the countless scholars who have claimed they 'know' what the Marcionite gospel and letters looked like. Not only is our information 'spotty' (we depend almost wholly on Tertullian, Adamantius and Epiphanius) their testimonies are down right atrocious. Ulrich Schmid rightly discounts most of Adamantius's Dialogues because they are hopelessly corrupt. This leaves Tertullian and Epiphanius yet even here Tertullian and Epiphanius often disagree on basic details.

I have thought about the problems related to this effort to 'reacquaint' ourselves with the Marcionite canon and I am absolutely certain - all previous efforts stink. There are many reasons for my low estimation of previous reconstructions but I think the people - whether von Harnack, Schmid, Detering, Mahar have all been too desperate to accept Tertullian's information uncritically. The obvious difficulty coming down to - when is Tertullian giving us the reading from Marcion's canon and when is reading from his own?

I think the way people get around this (at least in their own conscience) is to assume that Tertullian's canon was 'sort of like' Marcion's. But this is hopelessly deluded. We don't that this true. We'd like it to true but we have know way to know the answer. As such I say toss it all in the garbage and try another approach entirely.

I am still working out the details to how we move forward but my basic approach is:

I am still working all of this out in my head but I wanted to emphasize to my readers that the basic pattern which emerges in Clement's citation of Romans conforms to what most people think the Marcionite letter looked like (save for the question of whether chapter 15, 16 was present where it agrees with those who said the Marcionite text had at least something from these chapters). Now let's look at a specific example where the Clementine citation of 1 Corinthians agrees with what we know was NOT in the Marcionite canon but a superficial examination of Tertullian and Epiphanius would lead us to believe that 1 Cor 14.34 was in the Marcionite canon.

Both Tertullian and Epiphanius make reference to the obviously forged addition of:

When I say obviously I mean that because we know from other sources that women took leading roles in the Marcionite church. They had to be speaking in the Church. As such, this is a Catholic addition and follows patterns of misogyny in this tradition.

What is interesting of course is that Epiphanius himself never mentions 1 cor 14.34 in any of his other works - i.e. only in the section of the Panarion which deals with the various Marcionite gospel readings. So Carroll D. Osburn in her Text of the Apostolos in Epiphanius concludes that because Epiphanius only mentions it here Epiphanius's reference must reflect that was actually in Marcion's text:

Yet this is completely ludicrous. The obvious solution to the difficulty is that the material appeared in neither Marcion's version of the letter nor Epiphanius but comes rather from the source that Epiphanius used to provide information on Marcion.

As I have noted many times before Epiphanius's original source is the same original text which stands behind Tertullian's Against Marcion Books 4 and 5. The differences that exist between Tertullian and Epiphanius have come about because of Tertullian's reworking of that original source which was clearly Syrian (the use of the Diatessaron and the order of Pauline canon is not Marcionite but Syrian i.e. Galatians first). In any event here is the reference in Tertullian Against Marcion 5.9 which clearly still known to Epiphanius:

Whoever this original source was (Theophilus of Antioch? Rhodo?) the most important thing for us to see is that Clement of Alexandria makes almost a hundred references to 1 Corinthians but never once to 1 Corinthians 14.34. http://books.google.com/books?id=XS2...lement&f=false

tanya

Absent a reliable second, independent text source, "Clement" is just as unbelievable as Tertullian.

yes, I suppose that I am a tad chubby.