chrisengland

Hello
First of all I would like to say it is late and some of what I say may be innacurate.
I saw a documentary and I thought I would ask something before I went to bed so I havn't checked anything.
Anyway I saw the end of a documentary about the Gospels that didn't make it into the New Testament.
It mentioned Marcion and I thought I heard it say he wanted to edit some of St Paul's letters to make his view of there being an evil God aswell inline with them' is this correct?
Chris

DCHindley

The "straight thinking (= orthodox)" Christians claimed Marcion actually did this, editing five of the epistles of Paul to emphasize the role of Jesus as a savior sent by the Good God and neutralize the Jewish aspects of the faith, and also an edition of the Gospel of Luke without the nativity story (among other things). Tertullian even specifically refutes his alleged changes, and in the process cited so many of them that Marcion's version of Galatians can be reconstructed to a certain extant. Christian commentaries preserve a few other claims about his versions of the other four epistles (Romans & 1-2 Corinthians I believe) and the gospel of Luke, and even some citations from them, but not enough to reconstruct them.

It is generally agreed that Marcion considered the Creator God of the Jews inferior to the Good God who had sent Jesus Christ into the world, making his position "dualistic." He apparently considered Judaism distasteful, and felt that it had served whatever function it had in the Good God's plans, and elements from it should be jettisoned as no longer necessary.

His Christ as divine redeemer theology is similar to the Christological passages in the Pauline epistles, and even more resembles the middle-Platonic inspired redeemer myth of the Sethian Gnostics. Whether or not the Christology of the Pauline epistles draws from these kinds of redeemer myths is debatable. Personally, I think this middle-Platonic redeemer myth influenced the development of proto-orthodox Christianity, Marcionism, and Sethian Gnosticism.

There are others who think that Marcion actually wrote the five Pauline epistles he published as part of his NT, and the proto-Orthodox edited them as we have them now, although I cannot comprehend why they would have added what they did.

Personally, I think the Judaic sections of the Pauline epistles, dealing with the relation of gentiles to the God of the Jews on the basis of possessing faith like that of Abraham, is pretty pervasive and makes a coherent narrative. The Christological passages are not coherent but appear to me to be more like interjections. I have proposed that the Pauline letters originally had to do with the relationship of faithful gentiles to Jews and their God, and nothing to do with the Jesus movement, and were later appropriated by a wing of the Jesus movement that had developed a Jesus as savior Christ theology, editing the originals to include their theology. I'd date the publication of the edited Pauline corpus to the late 1st to early 2nd century CE.

If Marcion was aware that the Pauline epistles were edited, but not sure what parts were added (the unedited originals did not seem to have circulated in Christian circles, if at all), but sure liked that Christ as savior theology, he may have assumed that the Judaic parts were the added ones and sought to recover the letters so as to conform to his conception of what Paul would likely have written.

You might try the Center for Marcionite Studies website for files that contain several reconstructions of Galatians.
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Itha...7/Library.html

DCH

Jeffrey Gibson

Cue Klaus.

Any bets as to which of his standard responses regarding how "The canonical gospels are of a fake christianity, they Judaise pre-Catholic christianity which is gnosis and eclectic hellnenic philosophic of religion" and how "The Scriptural elements are usually superficial and out of context, in order to feign that Christianity were based on the Old Testament while it isn't" and or which authority he'll appeal to, we'll see this time?

Jeffrey

DCHindley

Oopsie! That should be 10 letters, not five. His version lacked 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus. He had them in a different order as well: Galatians, 1-2 Corinthians (as a single book), Romans, 1-2 Thessalonians (as a unit again), Ephesians (under the title Laodiceans), Colossians with Philemon attached, and Philippians. He did not include Hebrews either, but this seems to have been added to the Pauline corpus later than the others.

DCH

aa5874

But, weren't Christians sects regarded as heretics by each other, that is , Marcion or Valentinus would have regarded Justin as a heretic. It would appear to me that in the 2nd century that Christian beliefs were very diversed.

DCHindley

True, but the "winners" happened to be the "straight thinkers." I'm sure the other groups did not consider the proto-orthodox to be all that straight thinking, or consider themselves heterodox (other thinking) or heretics even. Our literature comes from the winners, and we just tend to call the winners by names or terms that they called themselves. I think Birger A. Pearson makes comments about inter-faction Gnostic polemic in one of his books (maybe GNOSTICISM, JUDAISM, AND EGYPTIAN CHRISTIANITY (or via: amazon.co.uk)).

DCH

Roger Pearse

Yes he did.

Tertullian, in Adversus Marcionem, books 4 and 5 goes through his 'gospel' and 'apostle', detailing the changes that he made, and demonstrating that even the revised text demonstrates the falsity of Marcion's heresy.

The Evans text and translation of this is online at tertullian.org.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Gamera

My (unorthodox) view of Marcion is that he didn't argue that that the God of the OT was "evil" or "bad," but that it was incomplete, or rather perspectival view of God placed in a particular narrative that was directed at the Jewish people.

Basically, God appears as the god that the people of that time could understand -- he'll make you rich, he'll defeat your enemies, he knows more than other gods, etc. Because frankly, if Jesus had appeared in the OT with his message of love, he wouldn't have gotten a single convert among Iron Age tribes.

In short Yaweh is a narrative trope, not an evil God.

But this kind of thinking would have appeared as heresy to the more literally minded church fathers that had Marcion's work in front of them.

2-J

Should we trust Tertullian? I've just finished reading "THE FALSIFIED PAUL
EARLY CHRISTIANITY IN THE TWILIGHT" by Hermann Detering and you don't have to agree with all his conclusions to find it believable that regardless of who originally wrote them, many of the Pauline epistles have been tampered with? Just because Marcion's copy didn't correspond to Tertullian's, need we assume that Tertullian's copies, at the time he was writing, are truer to the originals? To me that seems very much a matter for debate though I'd welcome views on the subject (my post count does not lie, I'm very new to this Biblical criticism lark. Hello!:wave: )

Detering's full conclusion (that the Marcionite school actually wrote all or nearly all the Pauline epistles) does depend on discounting what we read in Clement and Ignatius of Antioch though (maybe something to take up in another thread..).

Jeffrey Gibson

A better question to ask is: Should we trust Detering?

Jeffrey