gurugeorge

"And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!""

Surely the process of adoption is redundant if we are already his sons?

There's also a "we"/"you" confusion that makes no literary sense, whereas the shift from "we" to "you" in the Marcion text has dramatic impact (the discussion is at first general, then the punchline focusses in on YOU).

Clouseau

The sons were as slaves until 'the time had fully come', adoption took place, and the Spirit was sent. Far from being literary 'fluff', the whole passage makes a cogent unity.

That can be explained as Paul's strong intent to inform the 'foolish' Galatians, while including himself as a son who knew and shared the same experience of sonship. The Marcion text, in reversing pronouns, seems to do the reverse, excluding the author from the experience and the sonship.

Gamera

I don't think it is gnosticism in a nutshell, which is ill-defined at best. We don't really have any original gnostic texts, so it's hard to establish what it was at the time (generally, gnoticism is evaluated through the lens of modern academic recontructions of gnoticism that involve vast sweeps of time and culture).

I think however, it's fair to say gnosticism has certain elements: (a) secret knowledge about God or the universe or the meaning of life (b) possessed by an "adept" -- i.e., guru; (c) who will pass it on to disciples (f) usually at some cost -- service, etc. Curiously, the secret knowledge is never ever revealed, but remains masked in paradoxes and riddles, and one is tempted to conclude that their really is no core once you peel away the onion skin, so that gnosticism is really about the process of peeling the onion skin.

Thus gnoticism is always an "insider" religion in which certain adepts claim superior knowledge over the followers, who can't get to this wisdom without his guidance.

Christianity is of course utterly contrary to these elements, even in Marcion's terms (from what we can tell of it, based on his detractors). The gospel is open to everyone, and according to Paul, the gospel "works" for everybody. You just need to accept it, and you got it. You don't need a guru, you don't need to serve the guru. You just need "faith" in the narrative, which is by definition public.

Whatever odd theological views Marcion had, secret knowledge wasn't one of them. He really did think the gospel was salvational in itself (hence his battle against the Hebrew Scriptures and the Law), which couldn't be more un-gnostic.

gurugeorge

We're not "as slaves" until the Spirit of Christ enters into us, we are slaves ("we were slaves"). We need redeeming, we need purchasing, we need to be adopted, we need that external help, precisely because we are in bondage, precisely because we are not, up to that point, sons, we are simply slaves. We're not "lost little princes" in waiting, which is the ridiculous, laboured, pedantic meaning of the red text - we are simply lost.

That's why Jesus' entry into our hears is such a miracle, transforming us from slaves into adopted sons. Adoption implies prior non-sonship.

The red text merely muddies the waters with the twaddle about sons until they come to majority being little better than slaves. It actually contradicts the non-red text which stands on its own with clear, simple meaning in Marcion's version.

But not only that, who would be moved when they read or heard the text including the red stuff, who would feel their throat catching, who would feel, right at that moment, the cry for meaning welling up in themselves, on reading or hearing the text with addition? Whereas with Marcion's text, because of the "set up", and the dramatic transition from abstract "we", circling around the subject, to the sudden, direct "you", with the punchline of a cry from the heart, that makes you cry, that makes you feel the cry for your Father welling up inside you. It actually awakens the spirit - IOW it's the work of literary and religious genius. The added red stuff makes it the work of a pedant.

No pedant ever kick-started a religion.

Can be explained - yes, with that sort of epicyclic "explanation" typical of apologists

gurugeorge

The academic category is a bit fuzzy, I'll agree; it's also to a large extent a carry over from the Patristic critique of whatever-it-was as heretical.

We don't have original gnostic texts, but we've got something that's closer to original gnostic texts than we used to have, so we can have a fair idea of some kind of thread running through many of the ideas - and fundamentally, it's not your tendentious image of sundry Jewish/Greek versions of our modern Rolls-Royce-purchasing "gurus" running around conning dilettantes out of their parents' cash

There are enough reference in Paul to "revelation", to "mysteries long hidden in ages past now revealed" to "being caught up in the third heaven [etc.]" for a genetic link to be plausible. It's quite conceivable that some streams that came from Paul degenerated into baroquely complex systems. No doubt there's as much Gnostic twaddle as there is orthodox.

But the central message of the bit I've quoted gives a clear image of the bondage/freedom idea that's central to gnosticism, with Christ being directly responsible for the freedom; it gives clearly the idea that salvation comes not from believing in a story about something that happened in the past, but from direct knowledge, from the literal "Christ in you" calling to its Father, and redeeming you through that call.

Clouseau

Let's make no presumptions, and omit the pronoun. Slaves, yes, but slaves predestined to glory.

'Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ,

To God's elect, strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia, who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood.'

1 Peter 1:1-2 NIV

Sounds exactly like an epicyclic "explanation", to me. Maybe even a melodramatic one.

But you don't happen to have the time to prove that, I suppose. People do seem to find that happens.

gurugeorge

But we have to make the presumption according to your reading - according to which we're not slaves, but lost little princes, merely like slaves in respect of not having come to our estate!

Well, I admit I got a bit carried away, but I notice you don't have anything to say in response to my fairly straightforward analysis before that (other than to quote some Peter, Paul's supposed "enemy"!).

Anyway, if you honestly think that the laboured explanation of heirship and sonship in red actually supports, rather than contradicts Marcion's simple bondage-to-redemption line, and if you think it's more powerful, then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

(And yes the red stuff could be an excision by Marcion, but the point is that makes Paul a dull pedant - which doesn't actually make sense of someone who by all accounts, spread the religion far and wide in its initial stages and therefore must have been a powerful, charismatic and direct speaker.)

Clouseau

But I did. Maybe you need to visit the optician.

Yawn.

gurugeorge

Maybe I do, I missed it (commented on in corrected post).

Clouseau

According to Peter, and to Paul elsewhere- certainly not an isolated theme.