Bernard Muller

False address, minor official? You are making things very difficult.
Why do you think "Luke" had somebody like a minor official in mind. I bet we know very few governors from Achaia, Macedonia or Asia in the years 50-90. And those were not to be considered minor officials.
("Luke" might have been thinking about a governor because the use of "excellency" in Acts for governors, as I recall)
So except for the successive emperors, major administrators below them were not all known, far from that.

Did you try to find any non-Christian/Jew called Theophilus in the first century Roman world?
I think there are very few of those, if any.
And Theophilus, "lover of god" is very suspect.

Let's take the dialogues with Trypho, from Justin Martyr.
Justin represented that as a true thing, which really happened, but is it so?
Could he remember many years later, the deluge of words verbally exchanged between him and a Jew?
Could that Jew be so nice, so tolerant, so cooperative, so patient, so friendly while being subjected to masses of Christian apologetism?
It is really realistic?
And then, at the end of the work, we learn that actually the whole thing is addressed to a Roman:
"When I had said this, dearest Marcus Pompeius, I came to an end."
Who is that guy? Somebody minor I guess, despite the impressive name, certainly not the emperor of the day.
So now we have a likely fictional long conversation, representing Justin apologetic thought in its prime, allegedly administered to a minor Roman (who, if existing, had to be very gullible).

Best regards, Bernard

Layman

I know this meaning of Theophilus is well accepted and I generally accept it. But what are our sources for the meaning of the name? When did it gain this meaning? Sometimes the devil is in the details.

Thanks

Bernard Muller

Layman wrote:
I think Hengel's point is a good one.
Is the Gospel of Luke "less judaic" than the Gospel of Mark? Not really. And there would have been much less to excise if he'd used Mark. Mark has no birth narrative--something that Marcion's theory demanded had to be excised from the Gospel of Luke. Marcion had to cut away the first two chapters of the Gospel of Luke in their entirety.

The gospel of Mark is very basic, badly written and started to be branded as not in order (Papias) and certainly short.
"And there would have been much less to excise if he'd used Mark"
How many minutes that would take to do cut and paste? That's a no issue.
You forget that Marcion also cut-off JohnB's baptism and the temptation, which he would also have to do on GMark. So there is no less work here than working on GLuke.

He also cut away several other passages in Luke that are overtly Jewish. So it seems he made his excising task more difficult, not less, by choosing Luke over Mark.

So here we are: Marcion would have chosen GMark over GLuke (if not knowing Luke was GLuke author) to save him minutes of work.
Let's be realistic. I do not think Marcion did cut & paste truly, he did recopy, sometimes changed the wording, most of GLuke. Ya GLuke is longer than GMark, but I do not think Marcion would have chosen GMark just to save him one hour or two!

The best explanation for his preference of Luke over Mark is that Luke was associated with Paul and Mark was associated with Peter.

Pure speculation

Best regards, Bernard

Peter Kirby

I wrote: "The idea that Luke-Acts was originally anonymous is implausible speculation."

Bernard wrote: "Where is the evidence?"

I wrote: "To assume that the title is not authorial is speculation because there is no manuscript attestation or tradition about another superscription, but simply being speculative is not so bad. It is implausible because, as I said before, the author of Luke-Acts was clearly well-read and would know that works were given titles, whether by the original author or not, and would probably want to make the decision himself for the magnum opus he had labored over; and, being that there were accounts from different people before him, of which he was aware, the author must have given his work a title to distinguish it from the many others."

Bernard wrote: "Speculative blablablah. Where is the beef?"

That may be the worst refutation I have ever seen on IIDB. Are you actually interested in discussion?

Peter Kirby

Layman

Is the Gospel of Mark any shorter than Marcion's mutilated Luke?

No, but if Marcion was looking for a gospel that was closest to his own theology--which he was--then picking one the two gospels that most emphasized the point he most despised (a physical birth of Jesus-yuck!) is a challenging fact.

Work is not really the issue. Compatability is.

No, not to save minutes of work. To choose a gospel that was less offensive to him. I suspect that Marcion thought he really was "restoring" the true gospel, not making up a new one. The birth narrative would have been extremely offensive. Perhaps you do not realize how much Marcionites detested the idea.

There's no need to be insulting.

Nope, but the question is why he chose a gospel that contained more offensive language than Mark or John.

Much of history is informed speculation.

Toto

It's a direct translation - just a Latinized version of the Greek:

theos = god philos = friend (or love)

(Theophilus is also translated as "friend of god".)

In Latin it would be Amadeus.

Layman

Is it also a known name? Or is the argument that it's a made up name? Many names have these meanings. If Luke had written this to me, he'd be quickly suspect because my name literally means "Follower of Christ."

Toto

I think that the problem is not that it is made up, but that it's just too convenient that Luke should be writing to someone named "Lover of God". Combine that with the lack of an ID for Theophilus, and a tendency for fictional literature of the time to use names that were meaningful, and it is plausible that there was no actual Theophilus, and that the reader was expected to know this.

But it certainly doesn't prove anything one way or another by itself, and I don't see how we will ever know for sure.

Layman

Why is it convenient?

Why would Luke have to identify the person to whom he was writing any more specifically than by their honorific and name? Would not have Theophilus have known who he was?

Bernard Muller

I search the Perseus Roman/Greek collection for Theophilus and it came with only one result:
From Pausanias' work, and he was an archon from Athens during the Macedonian conquest of Greece.
Josephus' Wars has no Theophilus, but 'Antiquities', from Alexander the Great, has 4 occurences, all Jews and high priests (or related to them).
Best regards, Bernard