Ben C Smith

Justin knows some gospel passages that are found today only in our Luke.

Ben.

dog-on

Justin speaks about the memoirs. Could this be the "Ur-Lucas"?

Ben C Smith

Well, the memoirs could include a proto-Luke (since Justin makes clear that the memoirs are multiple texts). Possibly.

But, interestingly enough, the bits in Justin that come from Luke seem specifically to derive from the western text of Luke, and seem to include things that I would not tend to attribute to proto-Luke, such as the infancy narrative.

Ben.

DCHindley

Ben,

I can only point to the way Marcion is said to have treated the Paulines. Again, Tertullian makes the claim that Marcion cut down the letters of Paul. Marcion is said to have contended that here too the truth has been adultered and the letters that spoke of Christ the son of the good God had been Judaized.

Many modern exegetes from the 19th century onward have seen the Christology in the epistles as somehow inherently superior to the Judaic doctrines, and therefor it MUST be the key to understanding Paul's thought. The Judaic thought is surpassed in glory by its majesty, and thus consigning the former to the trash heap of history.

If one were to ask me, it seems Marcion agreed with this kind of thinking, only instead of understanding the Christ dogma as the product of a historical process, he wanted to believe that it was a direct revelation of a pure, good, God, that is dirtied by any admixture with Judaism, which he seems to consider barbaric.

Personally, I think is is much harder to get a coherent Christological system from the Paulines than it is to get a Hellenized sort of diaspora Judaism that sought a closer association between Jews and God-fearing gentiles. However, if one is predisposed to prefer the opposite, then that is what one tends to see.

If Marcion had become aware that the Paulines (he seems to have only been aware of Romans to 2 Thessalonians in canonical editions) existed in more than one edition, but didn't have access to any other than the canonical one, he may have felt justified to reverse edit it to recover what he was absolutely sure MUST have been in the original. Once he made that step with the Paulines, it is a small additional step to do something similar to a canonical Gospel.

DCH

Ben C Smith

I agree that how Marcion handled the epistles is very relevant to deciding how he handled his gospel text. If he mutilated the epistles, then there is prima facie a reason to think that he may have done the same to the gospel.

So... how would you argue this same point with regard to the epistles? Can you show that the Marcionite version of them is not the original? (I think I can....)

Another option to consider.... What if both the epistles of Paul and the gospel followed the same pattern, and that pattern is this?

1. Marcion adjusted the gospel, and so did the proto-orthodox.
2. Marcion adjusted the epistles, and so did the proto-orthodox.
3. The originals of each are lost to us, and must be reconstructed using both Marcion and the proto-orthodox.

Ben.

renassault

Texts were lost, but they were not as popular as presumably ur-Luke would be, where if both Luke and Marcion used it, it certainly would be. They may have outlived their usefulness, but that doesn't mean that they can be so lost so late (150 AD) as to leave us speculating only without any textual confirmation. Q is 100 years earlier when there was no widespread Christianity to the extent that we should expect it to be preserved like a document in 150 AD would, if it were this widespread.

It is highly unlikely Luke used Marcion because of the non-logical rearrangement Luke would have to have made (putting Capernaum's healing after Nazareth's preaching). It's quite easily explainable that Marcion cut out the first 2 chapters of Luke and wrote the appearance of Christ in Capernaum. In support of this is the fact that there is no introduction; there is no reason given as to why Christ came, and there is no introduction like Mark 1:1, or something like John 1:1-18. Therefore, Marcion was conscioussly editing out the first chapters of Luke.

aa5874

If "Paul" wrote letters to churches 100 years before Marcion dealing with specific matters, why does 100 year old letters need to be mutilated by Marcion?

It is more likely that Marcion would have written his own document to support his other God and his other son, and not mutilate letters that should have been well known and circulated in the churches 100 years before Marcion.

Ben C Smith

I think you are underestimating the caprice of history. Papias is not preserved for us, either, and was lost much, much later than 150, even though many ancient and medieval fathers referred to him.

Things like this could just be editorial fatigue.

Ben.

renassault

But he is not unknown and solely speculative, and we have fragments.

That isn't editorial fatigue. Editorial fatigue is when an author is actively changing some designation or phrase and forgets to change it after some time. In this case we have a single rearrangement that doesn't make sense.

andrewcriddle

Hi Ben

I listed earlier some passages found in both Luke and Mark that were apparently missing in Marcion's Gospel. On the other hand Marcion's Gospel certainly contained substantial material found in both Luke and Mark.

If one assumes Marcan priority, then I can find no plausible explanation for this other than Marcion deleting (as Judaistic) some of the material found in the Gospel which he used as a basis for his version.

What do you think ?

Andrew Criddle