avi

Thank you very much Bingo, the link to Jake Jones IV, was much appreciated. His explanation is really erudite, and well expressed.

I appreciate your taking the time to help someone who is not a component of the "common knowledge".

cheers,

avi

Bingo the Clown-O

Yep. Yer welcome. Jake Jones IV completely rawks. He appears to know more about early Christianity than everyone else combined. IMHO everyone else should just shut up; go read what he’s written, and then come back when they’re ready to have an intelligent conversation.

Seriously.

Adam

Marcus Vinzent is not a reliable authority. Academic journals give books a two-page review at most, but it got a thirty-page feature article from James Carleton Paget in the Sept 2012 Journal for the Study of the New Testament (35, I, 74-102). Paget attacked fundamentally Vinzent’s idea that everything was focused on Marcion, however little he was actually mentioned. This assumption is undermined by more sober early dates for Ignatius and I Peter and the paucity of mention of Marcion even in later writers. Justin does not say Marcion mutilated Luke (76). Vinzent particularly misread Tertullian, who does not say that Marcion claimed that Judaizers had falsified his gospel, but actually said they had falsified Luke (94). There is no evidence for following Goulder on Samaritan Christianity (91). His case for Sadducean Christianity is even weaker, as the gospels oppose the Sadduccees more than any else (90). Christianity was not a (sacrificial) death-based Samaritan off-shoot.

stephan huller

You know I hate this whole 'if they agree with me they're reliable, if I don't like what they say they're not qualified' thing. You don't get to where Vinzent has gotten in life through luck. You might not agree with what he has to say but many people involved in the theology business have this annoying way of thinking there is just one answer to everything. Some people wonder why I keep going over the same material over and over and over again. It may be owing to an inherent intellectual short-coming on my part or it might be that I firmly believe there is no right answer any more to any of this stuff. How do you measure before or after when there is so much we don't know?

Stuart

Criddle's opinion is a bit like Peter Head's, in that he never addresses the vocabulary issue with Marcion.

But as for an ür-Mark, the concept is based on the idea, going all the way back to Marsh in 1802, that Mark conflated two primitive Gospels that are lost, but form the backbone of Luke (L) and Matthew (M). ür-Mark is mostly associated with (M).

The principle it addresses are two fold

1) the concept that accretion is the preferred and more likely form of redaction
2) that Mark can have elements of both Matthew and Luke without knowing Q

There is a third principle which the concept addresses, which is Christianity accumulated material overtime, which found its way into documents that eventually became sources.

Now, in Marcion priority, Luke is replaced by the Gospel of the Lord, and Matthew need only know that, the Marcionite Antithesis (chapter 5 is built on it) and ür-Gospel (M).

The problem with Criddle and Head's opinion of Marcion is they never address the issues brought up by Knox and others about vocabulary. Words are missing in the Marcionite text completely which are present in Luke-Acts, and our editions of Paul. Many have little or no theological value and some are stylistic improvements. Why are they missing? Why does Marcion never use "TE" or "PARACRHMA"?

Head goes to great extreme to claim that a large block of Marcion in chapter 22 is not extant, I suppose because Tertullian only says a few words in passing (betrayed by a kiss, etc) to claim that P69 is not Marcionite. But such an argument from silence is one that has to be very carefully used, and with a full exegesis of the entire passage to explain why each verse is missing, Head does not do this, so his analysis is very incomplete and not persuasive. Head has elsewhere made the incorrect claim that Marcion has a Western text, something Clabeaux decisively demonstrated was false.

Personally I throw P69 into the category of additional witness to an early text without Jesus praying, and not necessarily Marcionite. It could be and probably was missing from the ür-Gospel Marcion (and Luke) used. The concept seems to be from an Adoptionist theology like Luke (whose books seem very similar in beliefs to those of Capocrates and Cerinthius as described by Irenaeus, except that YHWH is the father) who had Jesus a human being so able to pray to a separate entity than himself. It is definitely not a Trinitarian nor Marcionite nor Patripassionist theology here.

stephan huller

What is Andrew's position?

andrewcriddle

I'm not sure we know Marcion's text accurately enough to make such claims.
To say that Marcion never uses "PARACRHMA" assumes that the Jairus' daughter/woman with issue of blood episode was not in Marcion's Gospel. Hesitantly I think it was.

Andrew Criddle

andrewcriddle

I think that most of the differences between Marcion's Gospel and canonical Luke come from Marcion omitting passages he thought were interpolations.

Stuart IIUC believes that most of the differences come from later expansion of canonical Luke.

Andrew Criddle