Duvduv

C.P. Sense totally rejects the idea that Marcion was docetic with strong arguments.

mountainman

You must bear in mind that this was a theory of the 17th century, and these people had no real way to estimate the age of manuscripts that were not otherwise securely dated (i.e. with a date in them). As the centuries progressed to the 21st other theories have developed about Christian origins. But perhaps the best way to imagine the state of knowledge of the 17th century when Hardoin wrote, is to read the following from 1802 CE


That is - they did not have any real tools (aside from numismatics) to determine their chronological estimates, and hence the vital important of C14, and its relevance to the questions (i.e. possible postulates) about the chronology of "Early Christian Origins".

aa5874

There is PRIMARY evidence.

And based on Julian the Emperor parts of "Church History" may NOT even have been written by Eusebius.

"Church History" attributed to Eusebius appears to not only be a bogus "history" of the Church but a manipulated source where it was interpolated after Eusebius was ALREADY dead.

mountainman

What is the primary evidence that "Marcion" actually published an Apostolikon?

Toto

I don't think it's a question of enlightenment. They key theological issue in those early centuries was whether the Christ was fully human, fully divine, or both, or some even more arcane combination of essenses. The compilers and editors of the Bible were gathering together as many factions as they could under one "big tent," so they kept Paul's letters but just added enough to make him conform on a few key issues.

Toto

Because:

The C14 results can only date two manuscripts. They cannot show that these manuscripts were the original copies, or what they are based on.

You have had more than enough opportunity to ride that hobby horse in two different forums.

aa5874

It is extremely difficult to find primary evidence for things that never happened.

Even the author of "Against Marcion" admitted that he attributed an ANONYMOUS writing to Marcion.

"Against Marcion" 4.2

mountainman

There have been two tests to date. There are hundreds of manuscripts.


The C14 results tell us that the Gnostics (and/or their preservers) were operative in the manufacture of Coptic non canonical codices in the chronological period defined by the results. The C14 results have their limitations, but so too does the reliance upon the suspicious black cloud that hangs over the history of the early church.

The postulate that there were original Greek copies from which the Coptic translations were made is sound, but we have no way of knowing for sure whether the Greek originals were authored two decades or two centuries earlier. Hence the debate.

Is not the HJ a hobby horse? Do you think that there has been more than enough opportunity to ride that hobby horse in two thousand different forums? Its a debate toto, not a horse race.

Sheshbazzar

You seem to be misunderstanding or misconstruing the major premise here.
Marcion was not so much a forger as simply a compiler and an arranger, into a memorable and popular connected narrative form, of those oral traditions, stories, and a few as yet mostly anonymous writings and 'sayings' texts that had been long been accumulating and 'handed down' amongst his contemporary christians.

The Key Word here being 'contemporary'.

What Marcion produced was simply the first cohesive narrative written form of a single proto-gospel and a couple of 'Pauline' proto-Epistles.
Marcion was not freely inventing new material, but mostly only arranging and 'connecting the dots' in narrative fashion of that large selection of oral and written material -that already existed- and already well known and accepted by his contemporaries.

Marcion DID NOT have his hands on all of the Epistles, and not all of these Epistles were even written or even thought of during his lifetime.
And what of them were, were much briefer than those improved 'versions' that were finally authorized and canonized by the Orthodox Church 2 to 4 centuries latter.

We don't have any of Marcion's actual texts, only highly questionable and biased political religious claims that were made by latter adversarial orthodox writers who employed him as a convenient foil for presenting their much later developed doctrinal persuasions.
And how convenient it was to them, that old 'Marcion the heretic' was long dead and gone and no longer around to be able to dispute their bogus contentions or to point out whom, how, and where his actual beliefs and writings were being fudged and misrepresented.

Nowadays a great amount of emphasis is placed on written texts as being the most 'authoritative' source for determining 'right' christian practice, or for the settlement of doctrinal disputes.
But contemporary with Marcion no NT text document had as yet achieved such status, and the final authority on any such matters laid with whatever leader, or group-leadership the community of believers consented to follow. It was on this form of 'authority' that christian communities consented to replace the 'Jewish' Seventh-Day Sabbath with the christian instituted 'Lord's Day' rest. Nothing contained within the NT texts actually supports any such a change.



.

DCHindley

I believe that there are references in some early Christian literature that reasonably could be from the Pauline letters, but many simply wave them away by either questioning their genuineness or whether they are interpolated themselves. It was 2nd century christian writers who downplayed the Pauline letters as the level of their own literary sophistication rose above that of the letters, which are basically a jumble of contradictory ideas.

I guess no matter who published them they were published to make a statement. Paul appears to have been known to a sizeable number of Christians (proto-orthodox or heterodox), not that he was really like the figure Marcion or the proto-orthodox portrayed him to be. If that party had obtained real letters, creative editing and annotation can put quite a spin on them in the interest of making the editor's point.

If the original letters weren't about Jesus Christ, or about his earthly days, an editor may choose to edit/annotate what they do say.

DCH