Litwa on Marcion as ancient Mythicist

[Joseph D. L.]

This is interesting. Would Marcion think that the Jesus cycle existed/took place in a Platonic-esque world of forms? In that way it would be possible to say these things are real while also being ahistorical. His Gospel has Jesus coming down to a specific region in a specific time, but how much is supposed to be allegory and real? Maybe his Gospel is supposed to be more like an instructional manual to detail the hierophant's coming to Christ.

A side note, really liking the new avatar, Giuseppe. Don't know why but the colours are really suiting to your online personality.

[lsayre]

This is why I don't like Richard Carrier:

Litwa literally doesn’t know anything he is talking about.

"Literally." How can an expert "literally" not know anything about what he is talking about. The word "literally" literally makes the sentence incomprehensible. Typical American overkill "all in" exaggerated bravado. Bravado is a bad trait in a scholar. Hence I always co-write my papers. The world doesn't need Rambo the academic.

"Rambo the academic" is a perfect fit to Richard Carrier. I don't like him either. His ego allows no room for scholarship aside from his own. As annoying as Litwa can often be (from my perspective) I'd much rather listen to (or read) Litwa than Carrier.

[Joseph D. L.]

Carrier always came off as having an authority complex. When his books on historical Jesus studies came out he was quick to claim that he was the first credentialed scholar to undertake this topic (and to salvage it from the other mythicists who he says did more to discredit it), which shows a need to be recognized as an authority, and which Hansen proved he was not the first. His arguments however are good on their own, but he just puts me off with his arrogance.

[Giuseppe]

Dating Jesus to the time of Jannaeus is a mistake,
as I have discussed elsewhere.

you know the saying: "once thrown the stone, you can't hide your hand".

[Chrissy Hansen]

Litwa:

I’m on record as saying that ancient people never argued that Jesus didn’t exist. And I stand by this point.

But the Talmud placed Jesus under Janneus. The Jesus lived under Pilate was a myth, according to that Talmudic tradition.

Peter Schaefer has discussed this at length, but it was also recently discussed in Gavin McDowell, “The Alternative Chronology: Dating the Events of the Wagenseil Version of Toledot Yeshu,” in Toledot Yeshu in Context: The Jewish “Life of Jesus” in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern History, ed. Daniel Barbu and Yaacov Deutsch (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020), 59–80.

The major reason the "Jannaeus" time frame is chosen is basically because there were some loose stories they had floating around of unrelated people, but that they could easily fit Jesus into and create a polemical narrative with. Schaefer and McDowell both note for example the Jannaeus legends are absent in earlier textual recensions including the Jerusalem Talmud, indicating they were later additions. Notably, the Talmud also has no consistent timeframe in mind for Jesus and makes numerous such chronological errors:

Jesus ben Perachiah, for instance, as McDowell notes, was also not in those original stories. Why? Because he probably didn't live under Jannaeus either.

Notably, different recensions of the Toledoth Yeshu actually do place Jesus under Pilate. So no, it is the placing Jesus under Jannaeus which is both late, and errant. This is the broad consensus of academics dealing with these. McDowell also debunks the claims that Epiphanius has Jesus under Jannaeus, noting several problems including that Epiphanius was just a really bad writer in general and often created confusing tangles and messes, so we can't actually trust this is what he meant in Panarion, especially since he knowingly elsewhere gives Jesus as living under Pilate. It also cannot be the Nazorean sect that believed this since we actually have fragments of their gospel and other records of their belief system, all of which attest to them believing that Jesus died under Pilate.

[RandyHelzerman]

Looks like Marcion is in danger of being Overexposed....

[Giuseppe]

that they could easily fit Jesus into and create a polemical narrative with.

Abraham ibn Daud (d. 1180 CE) would disagree with you, insofar he wrote:

The historical works of the Jews state that this Joshua b. Perahyah was the teacher of Jesus the Nazarene. If this is so, he lived in the time of king Jannaeus. However, the historical works of the Gentiles state that he was born in the days of Herod and crucified in the days of his son Archelaus. Now this is a significant difference of opinion, for there is a discrepancy between them of more than 110 years. The Gentile historians indicate their chronology in several different ways, by saying that he was born in the year 312 of the Seleucid Era and crucified thirty-three years later; that he was born in the thirty-eighth year of the reign of Augustus king of Rome, in the days of Herod, and was crucified in the days of his son Archelaus. They argue this point so vehemently in order to prove that the Temple and the kingdom of Israel endured for but a short while after his crucifixion. However, we have it as an authentic tradition from the Mishna and the Talmud, which did not distort anything, that R. Joshua b. Perahyah fled to Egypt in the days of Alexander, that is, Jannaeus, and with him fled Jesus the Nazarene. We also have it as an authentic tradition that he was born in the fourth year of the reign of King Alexander, which was the year 263 after the building of the Second Temple, and the fifty-first year of the reign of the Hasmonean dynasty. In the year 299 after the building of the Temple, he was apprehended at the age of thirty-six in the third year of Aristobulus the son of Jannaeus.

https://hal.science/hal-03928867/document

So what is really 'polemical' ? Placing the death of Jesus exactly 40 years before the destruction of the Temple, in order to accuse the Jews of having gained the just reward for the death of the Son of God...

...or placing Jesus 100 years before for some obscure polemical reason?

Unfortunately for your defence of Litwa, there is no answer, Chrissy.

[JarekS]

I just got pieces of cheesecake all over my screen and keyboard. I haven't laughed so much in a long time. What is this David Litwa saying and based on what?
Marcion created the foundations of orthodoxy together with the Roman commune and later independently. The Romans benefited from his heritage, not the other way around. He was the first to select writings that were later expanded and supplemented. He offered the most earthly Jesus possible because that was what the recipients wanted, and he had no influence on it. This is what mass audiences are like.
That's why they tried to attribute some strange views to him because the Romans played the game he invented.
David Litwa talks nonsense in a field he has no knowledge of because it is not biblical studies but adapting the product to a mass audience. If it were as David says, Marcion's name would be unknown to us because he would not have built anything. Litwa judges Marcion through the writings of his enemies. You can't be more naive than that.

[StephenGoranson]

Without, for the moment, going into the, sometimes, rabbit-hole of Marcion debate,
I merely request that self-described engineer and content provider JarekS
stop asserting what others may or may not know.

[JarekS]

Stephen Goranson: David Litwa should know that he is presenting personal naive speculation on an alternative that simply has no solution using textual criticism methods. Why fiercely criticize someone who will destroy himself with a bad choice of story. The choice was good since the first church building as we know it was built by the parish of the Marcion church. Nobody remembered the Gnostics then.
Unfortunately, today's biblical studies blur the lines between speculation and research. Harper One, YouTube are only beauty contest arenas.