spin

You've missed out a key piece of information. It's not just that there are two bodies, but that they are of the same entity. Missing that fact means playing without the full deck.

The nature of the first body has already been established: perishable, sown in dishonor, physical. I've used the term "inception" because it relates directly to the image of Adam, ie the first man: the first "Adam" who became a living being and the last "Adam" who became a life-giving spirit.

However, two bodies are of the one entity, a fact made clear in 15:44.

The claim of tendentiousness seems to me one based on not understanding the text.

avi

I must emphatically disagree, here.

I don't know anything about this German philosopher working at the university of Birmingham. I am willing to suppose that he is very brilliant, and that his expose of the life and writings of Eusebius is simply sans pareil. But, no matter how illustrious, how brilliant, how skillful, how many languages he reads, writes, and thinks in, his level of adroitness can not compensate for the absence of manuscripts by Marcion's own hand.

He can only offer an educated guess, not a fact.

avi

stephan huller

Avi

“Educated guesses” is overstating matters. We have a body of Patristic literature which basically interprets the Apostolikon as spin suggests (points to him). But this same body of literature makes reference to an earlier Marcionite interpretation of a similar collection of letters of the apostle which seems to point to something likewhat earl is suggesting

As I have mentioned many times with regards to the inadequacies of your understanding, a jackhammer can't crack adamantium

EarlDoherty

Against my better judgment, and after a long night of soul-searching, I have decided not to retire from the field and leave spin and Don free to roam the landscape of Paul’s words, slashing and burning crops and slaughtering the peasants. I guess it has become a matter of honor and my desire to protect Paul from adulteration, and so at least for the next week, when I have more free time due to March break, I will become Tim O-Neill’s—oops, spin’s (but you know, that resemblance is getting more and more striking)—nemesis here. I am not going to let him get away with the violence he is doing to Paul’s text, and if he so much as dangles a Greek participle, I will be all over him like Charlie Sheen on a porn star (well, OK, maybe not quite).

Tim—sorry, “spin”—makes a lot of noise about me overlooking some (well-hidden) processes in Paul’s use of language which allows spin to import a formerly-human-now-resurrected Jesus into Paul’s text and reject my demonstration that he is not there. Performing that sort of violence on the text is a staple of New Testament scholarship everywhere. But let’s cut to the chase. Let’s zero in right on the text itself, distract ourselves from the sound and fury “spin” indulges in to cover up the fantasies he perpetrates, and try to see if Paul actually bears him out.

We have to back up to the beginning of Paul’s attempt to convince the Corinthians that they can indeed be resurrected, that their physical bodies on earth, upon death, will be transformed into spiritual bodies in heaven. I’ll urge our two atomists to please try to follow this, (and we can include you, too, judge). At verse 35, Paul says (I’ll mostly use the NEB):

Over the next few verses, Paul focuses on an attempt to show that there are, in principle, different kinds of bodies. He first makes the statement (v.36-38) that a sown seed first dies (this is biological nonsense, but what the heck), and then comes to life again in a different form. IOW, what is sown/dies as one kind of body, ‘resurrects’ as another kind of body. The plant is different from the seed. This is an example Paul comes up with to demonstrate the principle of dying in one body form and rising in a different body form.

Then he tries another approach. Verse 39: “All flesh is not the same flesh: there is flesh of men, flesh of beasts, of birds, and of fishes—all different.”

This doesn’t work quite so well, since it’s about variety in nature, not about dying and rising in two different states. But it serves his point to make a distinction between one kind of “flesh/body” and other kinds. Again, Paul is countering the Corinthians’ doubts that their human bodies can be resurrected, presumably because they cannot envision that such bodies can be raised. Paul is arguing: you are right, but it will not be those human bodies that are raised, you will inherit a different kind of body.

Now we leave earth and go to the heavens for our examples:

Verse 41 then makes a statement about the difference in “splendors” between different types of heavenly bodies. This is largely irrelevant, since this distinction, like that of verse 39, does not involve any dying and rising. (Paul’s argument in this passage is not that well crafted in spots. Tim/spin likes to claim that Paul’s hurried less-than-coherent writing such as this allows him to read implications into the text that poor Paul inadvertently left out, forcing spin do his work of clarification for him.)

Thus when he goes on to summarize this preparatory aspect of his argument, Paul is guilty of a non-sequitur from verse 41:

Paul is really hammering his point home. Listen, you Corinthians, don’t worry about having your earthly bodies resurrected, all that ugly humiliating flesh and blood being reformulated in the coming kingdom. (He’ll tell them later that flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom of God.) You are going to be different. From weakness you will go to strength, from humiliation to glory. From animal you are going to go to spiritual.

Follow so far? How about you, judge? Is everything clear to this point?

Now, it is of course at this juncture that I have introduced my regular persistent troublesome question. Paul has searched about him for examples to illustrate his point about the process of dying in one body and resurrecting in another, from weakness to strength, from humiliation to glory. What has he come up with? Seeds “dying” in the earth, flowering in a different form. Hmmm…that’s really about it, as far as an example of dying and rising. The rest of it is really quite inadequate as examples of this. Different kinds of human and animal flesh; no dying and rising there. Different kinds of heavenly bodies, sun and moon, etc.; no dying and rising there. Granted, they have served his principle about the existence of different kinds of bodies, and he has introduced the two basic classes of body: physical on earth, spiritual in heaven, and he is going to build on that.

Note, however, what is so far missing. Something dying on earth and resurrected in a different form? Something going from humiliation to glory, from weakness to strength? Gee, how about Christ himself? Maybe he ought to offer that to the Corinthians. Would they be too dense to understand it? Was he in such a hurry that it slipped his mind? Since he referred to Christ being “raised” several minutes earlier (though he was in such a hurry there as well that he failed to specify that it was from a physical body on earth, and moreover gave us to understand that he knows of this resurrection through God giving us knowledge of it), was he just assuming that the Corinthians would fill in the blank for themselves, and he didn’t really need to offer it as an example, letting “dying seeds” be more than adequate for his purposes? I am sure we would all agree that planted seeds was a much better example for illustrating how humans could rise from the dead in a transformed state than some incarnated man-god whose physical flesh died on earth in humiliation and weakness and rose in heaven (for, of course, Paul never tells us he rose on earth) in glory and power. We need not question why Paul would choose to leave it out, right?

In the face of this silence on Paul’s part, what is the solution for our two atomists? Why, read it into the text, of course. Scrape, twist, boil, cook the words on the surface, and there it is, as plain as day! Buried but not forgotten. Hidden but not irrecoverable by determined archaeologists. Let’s see how they’ve done it. First we need to look at what the text actually says…

After his argument about different forms of body and one thing (seeds) dying and rising in different states (35-44a), Paul goes on:

Again, the focus is not on any progression here, but simply on the principle of there being different kinds of body, though now Paul is zeroing in on the two specific types that are directly pertinent to his argument. The animal and the spiritual. (“Animal” is the NEB’s translation of “psychikon” which Paul uses throughout, otherwise translated as “natural,” meaning physical, material. For clarity’s sake, I will substitute the RSV’s “physical.”)

So Paul has left behind his examples (actually, one) of dying and rising. Itemizing in 44b the two separate states of the physical and spiritual does not constitute an example of such. It involves no progression, let alone one of Christ, and from what follows, it clearly serves another purpose, to establish the two separate states with which Adam and Christ are going to be identified. Separately. Each one confined to his own, if we can go by the text itself. (Yes, I know that’s a radical notion.) Adam will be equated in several ways with the physical body/state; Christ will be equated in several ways with the spiritual body/state. There is no association of Christ with both states. Let me repeat that. There is no attempt by Paul to make Christ serve as an example of first one state then the other. Rather, Adam represents one, Christ represents the other. Each provides its own respective illustration of the difference between the bodies of humans who die, and the transformed spiritual bodies of humans who are resurrected.

The key verse in spin’s fantasy is verse 45. This is where he cooks the books to force in some reference—no matter how veiled and obscure—to a former physical state for Christ and a progression from that physical state to a spiritual one. He jumps on the word “houtōs” (“thus” or “so”) at the beginning of the verse as conveying this significance, since it apparently looks back on 44b. To some extent it does look back, no problem there, but let’s examine that. (And here the NEB is particularly enlightening, as it often is in regard to meaning, especially where things like conjunctions and the sequence of thought are concerned—though it can also be a translation guilty of reading Gospel ideas into the epistles.) And I’ll preface it by a repeat of verse 44b:

Before going over once again my dispute with the latter translation (which “spin” simply ignored previously), let’s just take this translation at face value. The NEB has very nicely given us the proper sense here by its “It is in this sense that…” In what sense? The sense of 44b that there are two separate categories of body which Paul is addressing: physical and spiritual. Period. No linkage implied here between the two. No progression at this point. The one example of progression Paul has dealt with prior to verse 44b, and it did not relate to Christ. (He preferred seeds.) Now he is setting up the two sides of his comparison with which he will associate the pre-death and the post-death Corinthians. Those two sides are “physical” and “spiritual.” In this sense scripture says:. So scripture is being quoted, supplemented by Paul’s addition, to illustrate those two sides. Period. However we translate verse 45, it serves to identify Adam as representing the physical, and to identify Christ as representing the spiritual, the two specific categories he itemized in 44b. That is all it does. Period.

It cannot seek to introduce Christ as progressing from the physical to the spiritual, because this would be out of whack with the preceding 44b which has nothing to do with progression but simply with categories; it would be seriously out of place as offering the example of Christ as undergoing such a progression and is so obscurely presented that “spin” and Don have to twist themselves into knots in an attempt to get it to say such a thing. Why, indeed, would Paul have been so obscure if he wanted to get across the idea of Christ constituting such an example?

Moreover, what follows would also be out of whack with spin’s fantasy. Paul has just defined Adam as fitting his category of “physical” and Christ as fitting his category of “spiritual.” He now says: “Observe, the spiritual does not come first; the physical body comes first, and then the spiritual.” He is enlarging on his verse 45 statement. But that enlargement has nothing to do with a progression of Christ from one to the other. Rather, it is a further statement, a further focus, on the separateness of the two categories, their separate natures. And if Paul in verse 45 is supposed to be a veiled implication of Christ progressing from physical to spiritual, then Paul is contradicting himself. For his physical Adam is said to come first, followed by his spiritual Christ. No mistaking those words. Where is the physical Christ here? It is not simply an allegedly invalid argument from silence, it is a blatant exclusion of any such physical Christ. The physical Adam was followed by the spiritual Christ. There is no physical Christ, pre-resurrection or otherwise, anywhere in view. The language excludes the very existence of a physical Christ.

(Any chance that you get this, judge? Can you follow thus far?)

Now let’s look at the translation itself of verse 45. I’ve gone over this before, but I’ll repeat it again, because clearly it sailed right over our two atomists’ heads. As we saw, the NEB, typical of most translations, has:

Again, I’ll point out that the “has become” is not in the Greek, but has been understood by most translators, dependent on the Adam statement. But if this scripture+Paul statement is supposed to cast “sense” back on 44b, or vice-versa, what does “becoming” have to do with it? Rather, Paul is now supplying the specific example of the “physical” and the specific example of the “spiritual”; or vice versa, scripture plus Paul’s addition is being understood in light of the categories of physical and spiritual. Any concept of progression from one to the other by Christ simply does not belong, and Paul, too, would be tying himself and his text in knots if he wanted to imply any such thing.

Besides, what state did Adam “become” from before he was an animate being? Would spin like to tell us what he was before becoming an animate being? The idea is nonsensical given that meaning. Clearly, Adam was created as an animate being. So trying to impose spin’s interpretation on the last Adam would destroy the contrast in parallel between the two. Thus Paul is not trying to say that Christ “became” a life-giving spirit from any previous state. He, too, in parallel with Adam, was ‘created as’ a life-giving spirit. That was his inherent nature, the only one Paul ever gives him. This is reflected in the only sensible translation of the verse I have seen, that of Jean Hering which I quoted before:

which removes any contorted implied reference to the resurrection of Christ or any association with a previous life on earth. Spin, needless to say, ignored this whole question, even when I repeated it in answer to his “well, what was Christ before?”

We can briefly look ahead and see that Paul’s succeeding remarks are a further development of the ‘separate categories’ theme, equally having nothing to do with an application to Christ of both categories, let alone of a progression from one to the other.

I’ve already made the point that the usual translation of “from” heaven and alleged to mean he came to earth from heaven makes no sense as a parallel to Adam being made of the dust of the earth. The latter is “ek gēs xoïkos, literally, ‘out of earth, earthy.’ It refers to the constituency of Adam, the earthly material of his physical self. The second half is, “the second man (is) ex ouranou,” literally, ‘out of heaven.’ To make a parallel with Adam, Christ must be made “out of” heavenly material. There is no precise corresponding word to “earthy” (material) for the heavenly, so ex ouranou is made to stand for the heavenly material. We can tell that this is indeed the meaning by the next verse (48), which enlarges on 47:

Even spin and Don ought to be able to see that this negates any meaning of “coming from heaven” in verse 47, since there is a complete incompatibility between “coming from heaven” and “the heavenly man is the pattern of all the heavenly (beings).” The two verses are entirely about constituent material, declaring the heavenly material of the heavenly man to be the prototype for the post-resurrection material of humans, just as Adam’s earthly material has been the prototype for that of still-on-earth humans. Needless to say, Tim-spin made no attempt to dispute this indisputable argument, but simply blustered his way past it as though it wasn't there.

The final nail in the coffin is verse 49:

This, too, clarifies the meaning of verse 47 and makes impossible any reference there to a “coming from heaven.” It is all about constituent material. As humans we wear Adam’s physical type of skin; when resurrected, we shall wear Christ’s spiritual type of skin. Still no deviation from the ‘separate categories’ theme Paul has been presenting since 15:44b, and certainly no allusion to, or room for, any progression of Christ from physical to spiritual. And certainly no imputing both bodies to "the same entity"—Christ—as spin recently replied to Neil Godfrey (without, of course, backing up his declaration with any argument). Hmmm, I wonder what Paul thought about us wearing the same skin as Christ when he was on earth? I wonder what he thought about Christ himself wearing Adam’s skin when he was on earth? Puzzles within riddles within conundrums. All of which Paul seems oblivious to. But then, so are spin and Don and a multitude of others. What about you, judge? Have you solved this one any better than they have? Have you been able to follow along so far?

But let’s look at those attempted solutions by spin. We can skip over the accusations that I am a contortionist—unless spin would like to demonstrate how any of the above is a contortion, instead of merely declaring it. We can skip over his accusation that I follow the evidence according to my prior conclusions—unless he would like to demonstrate how my conclusions have rendered false my above interpretation of the evidence, instead of merely declaring it. So let’s see what his actual demonstrations consist of.

(to be continued)

Earl Doherty

GakuseiDon

Oh, I agree, and I wasn't trying to draw a parallel between 'man of dust' and 'man of flesh'. I agree that Paul's point here was in what you call 'inceptions' of a new state, a transformation brought about by God. My change to your chart was to counter claims by a certain person that Paul didn't have a 'preceding half' in mind. Paul obviously did, though as you say that isn't the focus of Paul's point.

That sounds confusing. There is no death nor resurrection with Adam that leads to the new state. The common element is 'transformation' of the entity in question through God's action, but that isn't due to death in Adam's case AFAICS. Paul says that everything must die before being given a new body, except those that are alive when the Lord comes, which Paul calls a 'mystery'. But that is separate to the transformation that took place with Adam, which was 'dust' into 'living soul' via the breath of God. Certainly the dust didn't die and resurrect.

EarlDoherty

(continued)

Spin’s demonstrations center on verse 44-5. Let’s start with this:

No, I certainly don’t get “the drift of the movement”. Is this something he detected in the air? Because it sure isn’t in the text. Verse 44a is “sown as an animal body, it is raised as a spiritual body.” Is this even a veiled reference to Christ? No, it follows on verse 42a: “So it is with the resurrection of the dead.” As I have pointed out above, this entire paragraph follows on Paul’s question: “But, you may ask, how are the dead raised? In what kind of body?” Is there any mention, any implication, of Christ here? In this entire paragraph? No, he is talking about the raising of humans like the Corinthians. Spin would like to introduce some unspoken inclusion of Christ, but there is not the slightest hint of it, let alone his woolly “drift of movement.” Reading into the text what he would like to see there when there is no sign of it is not permitted, even on a “semi-scholarly” board like this one. Can he provide a justification for inserting it based on the text itself? I haven’t seen one.

And apparently he’ll never “get” his own linguistic problems. His “natural understanding” of Paul’s words is the imposition of what he wants to see in those words. I’ve just demonstrated again that the words of the text under examination do not contain that understanding. He alludes to the earlier passage of 15:12-16. Once again, into “if (Christ) hasn’t been resurrected” he reads, “if Christ wasn’t resurrected on earth from a human body.” Do the words say that? Does the context say that? Not even 15:3-8 says that. Is his argument that the words must mean this, because gods could never be thought of as resurrected in a spiritual realm? (I addressed that in my response to Don’s review.) That would be a whole other dimension spin would have to demonstrate, rather than simply declare it axiomatically. IOW, by begging the question.

As a principle, I have demonstrated that words and phrases do not always have one single meaning, that they often have a diverse semantic field, and particularly in regard to “kata sarka.” Does he argue against that principle? Does he even argue against it in regard to kata sarka? He calls up four examples of the phrase which have one of those diverse meanings within its “semantic field,” but treats them as though that is all there is, as though there is no diversity. Apparently his definition of “semantic field” is “singularity of meaning,” since he ignores the other meaning I called up from the semantic field of kata sarka. This is linguistic integrity? This is logic? He simply repeats himself and says that in me suggesting (and arguing at great length in my book) that the phrase in Romans 1:3 does not have to mean the same as in 9:5, I am the one with linguistic problems. I don’t think so. (And how does he know that this is “the best I can do”? He hasn’t even read any of my material which presents that case for a different meaning in Romans 1:3. And I am hardly going to reproduce it all here, since it is rooted in several passages and chapters. Let him read the book.)

Here is his next attempt:

“Jesus became a life-giving spirit upon resurrection.” Where does it say this? I have demonstrated above that verse 45 cannot be read in the fashion of Christ becoming anything in a change from something else, if only because such a process cannot be read into the intended parallel statement about Adam, who did not “become” a human being after being something else. I have demonstrated above that, as Jean Hering recognizes, the first part of the verse means Adam was “created as” a human being, requiring the parallel thought that Christ was “created as” a life-giving spirit. There is no progression between one state and another for either part of the statement, for either Adam or Christ. I have demonstrated above that the following verses—which are clearly stated as elucidating verse 45 (“Observe, that...”)—maintain a clear distinction of definition between Adam as physical and Christ as spiritual; and blatantly leave out any thought of a previously physical Christ anywhere between Paul’s “the physical body comes first” (referring to Adam) and his “and then the spiritual” (referring to Christ).

What more does he want? And where is the “causal linkage” he suggests between verses 44 and 45? What does he mean by “causal”? Verse 44b has put forward two categories: that of physical body and spiritual body. Period. As a parallel to these two categories, Paul offers scripture and his supplementation of it: the first man Adam fits the category of the physical in that he was created as a living (human) being; the last Adam fits the category of the spiritual in that he came into being as a life-giving spirit. General categories plus specific examples of those categories. There is no “cause” here. Verse 44b doesn’t “cause” verse 45. Spin is inventing his own language, so no wonder he has problems. Rather, verse 45 illustrates verse 44. It goes from the general to the specific. It supplies the specific cases of physical and spiritual which he needs to carry through his progression of physical humans to spiritual heavenly beings: humans like Adam, heavenly beings like Christ. There is no presence of a progression from one to the other for Christ in these verses.

Implied? More hurried incoherence by Paul? He must be turning over in his grave to have his abilities at articulation so maligned. Spin keeps trying to insert an unargued meaning of an earlier passage into this one, even though Paul has made no room even for an implication. Paul can spend ten verses (35-44a) in setting up his “process of the resurrection of the dead from physical to spiritual,” referring to seeds, birds and fish, stars and planets, sun and moon, but he cannot insert a reference, allegedly important in his “process,” to Christ’s own resurrection as a part of that process, here where the actual argument is being laid out? Instead he leaves it to be ‘inferred’ from 20 verses earlier? For all his careful treatment of the terms “physical” and “spiritual” and their respective applications and constituent materials, he cannot make any actual reference to a physical body of Christ as preceding his post-resurrection spiritual one? He cannot lay out in clear fashion how this serves as the best example of the progression the Corinthians will undergo, but leaves it as an obscure implication from an earlier passage which he didn’t even clarify there???

Nonsense. Ludicrous. Incredible. A clear case of imposing without justification one’s own preference for orthodoxy upon a very unorthodox Paul.

And what of spin’s other sentence within the above quote: “We saw the first half [of Paul’s process of the resurrection of the dead] with Adam (who we must presume will also be raised to a spiritual body) and the second half when Jesus was resurrected (and received a spiritual body)”?

So this entire “second half” of Paul’s process is going to be left completely unstated, missing in action? This would be beyond hurried incoherence. It would be utter incompetence. It would reduce Paul to a clumsy dullard of a writer, completely unable to present an integral argument to get across to the Corinthians his all-important convictions about the resurrection of the dead. I don’t think his writings as a whole would suggest that of him. And notice that spin has been forced to rejigger the “first half” in order to support his second half. The latter has been turned into a resurrection for Jesus from a physical to a spiritual body, and so to create some kind of parallel with this, Paul’s first half has to become a resurrection for Adam, from his physical body into a spiritual body. But this idea (while not outlandish per se, of course) also appears nowhere in Paul’s argument, not even as an implication. For Paul nowhere appeals to the idea that his Corinthians are going to emulate Adam in regard to resurrection (they do so only in regard to constituent material and sharing in his sinfulness), any more than he appeals to the idea that they are going to emulate Christ's resurrection. Adam is the category example/prototype of the Corinthians pre-death state. Christ is the category example/prototype of their destined post-resurrection state. Period. That’s all Paul offers in this passage of 15:35-49 to overcome the Corinthians’ doubt about the feasibility of their personal resurrections.

Anything else is sheer invention. Spin (Tim?) has been flailing about trying to grasp onto something, any supposed implication he can come up with, no matter what fallacious reasoning it might entail, no matter what violence it does to the text—and leavened with 90% bluster—to deny what Paul is saying, and what I am saying. I think it’s pretty clear he has failed.

Enough said, for now.

Earl Doherty

avi

Wow, two hammers in two consecutive posts on the same thread....

Ok, we are definitely making progress, for now, we understand WHY the jackhammer is necessary.

NO, Earl, I cannot follow anything here:

Adam is a MYTH, earl. There is no "physical" Adam.

There was no physical Jupiter. No Zeus. No Eve. No Aphrodite.
These are all myths, Earl. Do you talk about a (physical versus spiritual) Paul Bunyan and his Babe the blue ox?

Are you attempting to relate jewish folk lore written several hundred years before Paul, with Paul's own mythical fantasies? Clearly he drew from that lore, but so what? Why should Paul's adoption of ancient Jewish fantasy be important in establishing the mythical character of JC? It may be important to impeach the veracity of JC, from a Jewish perspective, but not from an atheist's point of view. I don't need to understand even one word of Greek (and I don't!) to rule out the notion of Zeus as a living God, participating in the affairs of man. Earl, in my opinion, the mythical character of JC does not depend on demonstrating a link between the fables found in the four gospels, with the ancient texts of Judaism. I am certain there is a link between the Christian fable and the ancient Jewish fables, but clarifying the nature of that link is not necessary to comprehend that JC is a myth.

Yes, exactly right. "literature", not data, not facts, not scholarly treatises, just fiction, and forged fiction at that. Most of the so called "patristic" evidence is not simply full of holes, physically, it is also so overrun with interpolation, that it is impossible to ascertain with any kind of confidence, the nature of the original author's intention.

The Marcionist perspective, in particular, is completely unknown to us, as it has been wholly destroyed. Those who would cite "Origen", please, SHOW ME THE EVIDENCE.
It does not exist.
What does exist is Eusebius. That we have.
We do possess Eusebius' account of what Origen wrote about the Marcionists.
The German professor teaching Birmingham University students all about Eusebius, can write, and lecture, and publish, to his heart's content. It does not change the fact, with or without jackhammer, that neither he, nor anyone else, possesses even one scintilla of evidence from Marcion's own hand.

avi

stephan huller

It is a bit surreal to have a group of athiests arguing over what 'Paul' meant when he wrote a particular letter. I have made this point before but without any response (other than the typical noise of the ignorant). It is difficult to use the Catholic recension of the writings of Paul to absolutely determine what was meant 'originally.' It makes more sense to divide things into exegetical 'schools' of the second century. There was one school which read the letter in the way spin suggests, another which read it the way earl is suggesting. Is there any need to expect to know an 'absolutely correct' interpretation of a corrupt manuscript tradition?

avi

NO.

avi

stephan huller

No it is not. It is unknown to you because you feel no need to beyond your own ignorance. You like your own ignorance. You are at home in your own ignorance and you want everyone else to be homeless too.

Markus Vinzent has made sense of the Marcionite tradition. So have a number of other scholars. I know I have tried to make sense of the Marcionite tradition. You won't even try because ...