Clivedurdle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcion_of_Sinope

Are there any fixed points here?

Surely the catholic encyclopedia cannot be as unreliable as wiki?



And this site only mentions AD 70 in relation to major battles - was everything else not that important?

http://www.roman-empire.net/diverse/battles.html


This site seems to list most events in Palestine.

http://members.verizon.net/vze3xycv/...s/romanpic.htm

Ben C Smith

I have now read the Klinghardt article (thanks, Chris Zeichman!) once through, and should modify the above statement slightly. Klinghardt has Marcion filling in the role of Q only on the so-called three-source hypothesis (in which Luke uses both Matthew and a Q text of some kind). The diagram he offers has Mark being written first, then the Marcionite text cribbing from Mark, then Matthew cribbing from both Mark and the Marcionite text, then finally Luke cribbing from the three others.

Also, when Klinghardt refers to the Marcionite gospel he is not assuming that it originated with Marcion; for him it was an already extant gospel which Marcion merely reused or republished. Klinghardt is basically saying that, contrary to what Tertullian and company charged against him, Marcion actually made far fewer changes to this original gospel than later orthodox editors made to it.

In short, Klinghardt is not really throwing Marcion himself into the synoptic problem as such; rather, he is using Marcion (as attested in Tertullian, Epiphanius, and Adamantius) as a witness to what amounts to a proto-Luke, and Klinghardt says so explicitly right after giving his diagram of the textual relationships.

Ben.

andrewcriddle

One interesting emendation suggested by Gieseler and adopted by Hort is to replace Marcion by Mark (the supposed author of the second Gospel) ie If this is correct Clement would be suggesting that Glaucias and Theudas are later and less reliable as hearers of Peter and Paul than Mark is.

Andrew Criddle

Casper

Could Marcion be intermediate, ie: writing from a proto-mark or whatever you wish to call it?

So that Luke took from Marcion what Marcion took from this earlier work?

That would open the possibility of course that Luke and Matthew were independent, especially if Matthew's source was the proto-Mark (the same as Marcion's), while Luke's source was Marcion.

I love this stuff, it has no end and really fills up the afternoon

aa5874

In retrospect, for what purpose would Marcion need gLuke, if the following is the doctrine of Marcion?


1. Marcion believed his Jesus had no earthly parents, therefore it can be assumed that Marcion would not need the 1st three chapters of gLuke, which dealt with the birth and genealogy of Jesus.
2. Marcion believed his Jesus was not human, it can be deduced he did not need the last three chapters of gLuke, which covered his last supper, arrest, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection.
3. Marcion did not believe the Father of his Jesus was the God of the Jews, therefore all references in the OT with respect to prophecies about Jesus would not be needed by Marcion.


It would appear to me that Marcion would not need gLuke to develop the Phantom in any way since it would mean discarding the entire gospel and then re-writing it. This makes no sense to me.

neilgodfrey

I have much catch up reading to do on this thread since I last visited. Meanwhile, I have since caught up with the Klinghardt article and posted some of K's general remarks on my blog. Have also a slow train series of posts on my readings of Hoffmann and Tyson there too.

The Klinghardt notes are here.

(Maybe a fuller discussion has since been found elsewhere -- let me know.)

Cheers,
Neil

Ben C Smith

Thanks for that, Neil. One nitpick. The following paragraph...:

In other words, Tertullian appears to be tacitly accepting (without wanting to agree with) Marcion’s charge that the catholics were indeed editing the “purified” Marcion gospel.

...does not seem accurate to me. I do not think Tertullian ever accepted, tacitly or otherwise, the notion that the catholic church was editing the Marcionite gospel. He and Marcion simply disagreed on which came first, Luke or (call it) proto-Luke.

Ben.

spin

Work on a reconstruction of the Marcionite gospel seems rather difficult to me because it seems hard to separate Tertullian's comments from the ideas in the Marcionite gospel. So, how much was it like Luke?


spin

Ben C Smith

I agree it is difficult, and I have by no means done it comprehensively, but from what I have seen so far the Marcionite gospel has a lot of stuff that we would classify as L material in the synoptic problem; it is found only in Luke. When Jake Jones IV was posting here, he pointed out a couple of places where the Marcionite gospel apparently had M material, found only in Matthew. However, one of those examples (IIRC) admitted of a different interpretation (something along the lines of what you wrote about separating Tertullian from the gospel he is discussing). The other examples were interesting, and have yet to be explained to my satisfaction, but it still seems, from those places in Tertullian where it it is clear what Marcion wrote, that Marcion had a lot more in common with Luke than with either Matthew or Mark.

Also, there is Epiphanius; he sometimes disagrees with Tertullian (possibly due to the scribal history of the Marcionite gospel itself over the interval of time between Tertullian and Epiphanius), but more often (I think) either supplies new information that Tertullian does not discuss or simply agrees with Tertullian. (It is, for example, the coincidence of Epiphanius and Tertullian that makes the omission of and perverse as secure as such a thing can be.)

Ben.

Ben C Smith

I would love to see a (necessarily partial) reconstruction of the Marcionite gospel from a neutral perspective; some of the past reconstructions seem to me to have assumed certain things that make a great deal of difference. For example, if Marcion is said to have been docetic, then certain parts of Luke are assumed to have been expunged, which in turn entails the assumption that the fathers were correct about the relationship between Marcion and canonical Luke. Also, it sometimes seems to be assumed that, if the Lucan passage holds nothing offensive to a Marcionite and none of the fathers mentioned that Marcion expunged it, then that passage must have been present in Marcion.

Ben.