Ben C Smith

One other item here. How can details about the career of Jesus possibly have started with Justin? Are we forgetting the Marcion had a gospel in his possession just brimming with details about the career of Jesus?

Ben.

aa5874

What did Marcion have brimming in his gospels about the career of Jesus?

Well, you know whatever it was that Marcion had brimming was rejected by the Church! They just couldn't use it. I think it may have been dumped or burnt. It was trash.

Ben C Smith

See for yourself.

Ben.

aa5874

I could not see anything REAL. Marcion's Jesus was AN APPARITION, he had no REAL career.

Ben C Smith

Where does the Marcionite gospel call Jesus an apparition? Thanks in advance.

Ben.

gstafleu

The problem is that we do not have any (or not a lot) of documentation of historical Jesus details (HJD) before 150. The challenge is: explain this. What I was saying is that documentation we do not have cannot be used to provide an explanation. So, you cannot say that we explain this because there actually was a lot of documentation with HJD before 150, but it fell prey to canivory. True, you also cannot say that the missing documents did not mention HJD, it is an unknown. Neither of these things you cannot say, though, can be adduced as evidence for the existence of HJD before 150, and that is the question: given we start seeing so much HJD as 150, what is the evidence of it existing before 150? If there is no existence for HJD before 150, the "Justin did it" hypothesis remains standing.

BTW "Justin did it" does not mean Justin made it all up out of whole cloth. He could have happened onto a thus far not well known stream of tradition--the same stream that produced the gospels and hence Marcion's source--that did contain HJD. Or that narrow stream started to surface concurrently with Justin. Outside that narrow stream, pre 150, there was no HJD (that we know of--and that means we can't adduce it as evidence that there was pre-150 HJD). That would place Paul and many other epistolarians (following Doherty) outside the HJD stream.

So, does this presume that the documents before 150 lacked HJD? No, it simply states that the documents before 150 that we do have (mostly) lack HJD, and that is all we can form our hypothesis on.

Gerard Stafleu

Roger Pearse

Well, we have a fair idea what various bits of it contained. But I agree that it is difficult to use. What we cannot do, however, is argue from silence based on this, since we don't know that it *was* silent.

Do you mean manuscripts? Or texts composed at that time? We have only papyrus fragments of any texts from the second century, you see.

We have no evidence of any such proliferation. You have reiterated the point to which I objected earlier, I'm afraid.

The remainder of your post doesn't seem to need comment from me!

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Ben C Smith

The OP stipulates that we do have some details from before 150:

Correct. I agree.

Agreed again.

We are back to the some details from the OP. We scan Paul, the epistle of Clement, the epistle of Barnabas, the epistles of Ignatius, Papias, Marcion, and the rest to see what we can find from before 150.

We have seen that no existence for HJD before 150 is false; therefore, the Justin did it hypothesis topples, at least that version of it that has him pretty much kicking the whole thing off. You agree with this, right?

That is an attractive possibility.

We have seen enough to know that this is not the case.

On your principles outlined above...:

...we are allowed neither to suppose that the missing texts contained such details nor to suppose that they lacked them. We must remain silent. In short, we are not completely certain how narrow the stream was.

Where did this come from? This does not follow from anything you have said so far.

I sit here asking myself what the antecedent of the demonstrative pronoun that is in your sentence. The only thing it can be, I think, is this:

So your argument seems to be: There was a narrow stream of Jesus details from before 150; therefore, Paul and many others lie outside the stream.

Something is missing in this argument, and for the life of me I cannot figure out what it is. How do you know that Paul and other early epistle-writers lie outside the stream?

Ben.

aa5874

But, what is the Marcionite Gospel?

Tertullian in Against Marcion 4.2 Tertullian in Against Marcion 1.1

Ben C Smith

I am sorry; I must have stuttered. Let me rephrase: Where does the gospel of Marcion say that Jesus was AN APPARITION with no REAL career?

Ben.