Kapyong's Jesus Myth Theory

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Ben C. Smith
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Re: Kapyong's Jesus Myth Theory

Post by Ben C. Smith »

MrMacSon wrote:I think Marcion is more likely than not to have been a real person based on all the data; but I have concerns about Ignatius (or, at least, Ignatius being an early 2nd century entity) and Irenaeus. I think one ought to address all these texts with an open mind, and consider where most knowledge of them is concentrated (often with Eusebius or later)
I do not think that most knowledge of Irenaeus is really concentrated with Eusebius, who quotes only a fraction of what is available to us in the Latin translation of Against Heresies and the Syriac of the Demonstration.

Furthermore, Tertullian both refers to Irenaeus (in Against the Valentinians 5.1) and apparently cribs from his work quite a bit. Tertullian wrote in Latin, and, as Andrew Carriker points out on page 262 of The Library of Eusebius of Caesarea, "he seems in general to have been ignorant of Latin literature," quoting only the Apology among all of Tertullian's works, and that in a Greek translation (History of the Church 2.2.4). Carriker surmises that Eusebius "possessed a Greek translation of Tertullian’s Apologia but none of his other works."

Hippolytus refers to Irenaeus twice in his Refutation.

And we have papyrus Oxyrhynchus 405, a fragment of the Greek text of Against Heresies, dated to about 200, only about 20 years after the purported composition of the work.

Interpret these data as you will, but know that there is much more to Irenaeus than just what we find in Eusebius.

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Re: Kapyong's Jesus Myth Theory

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Peter Kirby wrote:
MrMacSon wrote:
  • I think Marcion is more likely than not to have been a real person based on all the data
I agree, but that makes your position on the question of the value of Justin Martyr's reference harder to understand.
OK. Let's back up a bit. On the basis of you saying -
Peter Kirby wrote: ... Justin Martyr said that Marcion was around. If that's not good enough, we should probably look for a different sort of hobby.
I googled "Justin Martyr on Marcion". The thing that struck me most, in the first few findings, was what I posted above -
"Irenaeus tells us that Justin Martyr wrote a work against Marcion, which is now lost. Some authentic materials are preserved in the fragments of Justin quoted by other writers, although some of these fragments may be suspect."

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/justin.html
Now, my search of that google search did not come up with that passage in "First Apology", & I had forgotten about it ...

so of course my "hypothesis ... has no connection ... to what the passage says"

Peter Kirby wrote: ... I don't understand what your suggested interpretation is even supposed to look like. Can you walk us through what you imagine this text is intended to be saying, under a scenario where it isn't talking about a real Marcion? ...

I am speaking of course of these two sentences:
  • "And there is Marcion, a man of Pontus, who is even at this day alive, and teaching his disciples to believe in some other god greater than the Creator. And he, by the aid of the devils, has caused many of every nation to speak blasphemies, and to deny that God is the maker of this universe, and to assert that some other being, greater than He, has done greater works."
I don't understand how you interpret this to refer to something other than Marcion, a man of Pontus, who is alive at the time of the writer
Well, if 'Marcion' wasn't real, or wasn't alive when Justin Martyr wrote that but, say, was just a 'literary [mythical/fictitious] representative' of a sect named Marcionite or following Marcionism, then that text would be a misrepresentation by Martyr - rhetoric; or a later redaction, also as misrepresentative rhetoric.
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Re: Kapyong's Jesus Myth Theory

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Ben C. Smith wrote:
MrMacSon wrote: ... I have concerns about Ignatius (or, at least, Ignatius being an early 2nd century entity) and Irenaeus. I think one ought to address all these texts with an open mind, and consider where most knowledge of them is concentrated (often with Eusebius or later)
I do not think that most knowledge of Irenaeus is really concentrated with Eusebius, who quotes only a fraction of what is available to us in the Latin translation of Against Heresies and the Syriac of the Demonstration.

Furthermore, Tertullian both refers to Irenaeus (in Against the Valentinians 5.1) and apparently cribs from his work quite a bit. Tertullian wrote in Latin, and, as Andrew Carriker points out on page 262 of The Library of Eusebius of Caesarea, "he seems in general to have been ignorant of Latin literature," quoting only the Apology among all of Tertullian's works, and that in a Greek translation (History of the Church 2.2.4). Carriker surmises that Eusebius "possessed a Greek translation of Tertullian’s Apologia but none of his other works."

Hippolytus refers to Irenaeus twice in his Refutation.

And we have papyrus Oxyrhynchus 405*, a fragment of the Greek text of Against Heresies, dated to about 200, only about 20 years after the purported composition of the work.
  • * It includes a quote from Matthew 3:16-17
Interpret these data as you will, but know that there is much more to Irenaeus than just what we find in Eusebius.

Ben.
Cheers, Ben. I am as skeptical of the histories of many of these late 1st century & early 2nd century people being as accurate as we've been led to believe, including Hippolytus and Tertullian.

The history for Hippolytus seems flaky -
'Photios I of Constantinople [of the 9th century!] describes him in his Bibliotheca (cod. 121) as a disciple of Irenaeus, who was said to be a disciple of Polycarp, and from the context of this passage it is supposed that he suggested that Hippolytus so styled himself. However, this assertion is doubtful ... he was very probably reconciled to the Church when he died as "a martyr".

'Starting in the 4th century AD, various legends arose about him, identifying him as a priest of the Novatianist schism or as a soldier converted by Saint Lawrence. He has also been confused with another martyr of the same name.

Pope Damasus I [c. 305 – Dec. 384] dedicated to him one of his famous epigrams, making him, however, a priest of the Novatianist schism, a view later accepted by Prudentius in the 5th century in his "Passion of St Hippolytus".

Hippolytus's principal work is the Refutation of all Heresies.[2] Of its ten books, Book I was the most important.[6] It was long known and was printed (with the title Philosophumena) among the works of Origen. Books II and III are lost, and Books IV–X were found, without the name of the author, in a monastery of Mount Athos in 1842. E. Miller published them in 1851 under the title Philosophumena, attributing them to Origen of Alexandria. They have since been attributed to Hippolytus.

In 1551 a marble statue of a seated figure (originally female, perhaps personifying one of the sciences) was purportedly found in the cemetery of the Via Tiburtina and was heavily restored. On the sides of the seat was carved a paschal cycle, and on the back the titles of numerous writings by Hippolytus
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Re: Kapyong's Jesus Myth Theory

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MrMacSon wrote:
Peter Kirby wrote: ... I don't understand what your suggested interpretation is even supposed to look like. Can you walk us through what you imagine this text is intended to be saying, under a scenario where it isn't talking about a real Marcion? ...

I am speaking of course of these two sentences:
  • "And there is Marcion, a man of Pontus, who is even at this day alive, and teaching his disciples to believe in some other god greater than the Creator. And he, by the aid of the devils, has caused many of every nation to speak blasphemies, and to deny that God is the maker of this universe, and to assert that some other being, greater than He, has done greater works."
I don't understand how you interpret this to refer to something other than Marcion, a man of Pontus, who is alive at the time of the writer
Well, if 'Marcion' wasn't real, or wasn't alive when Justin Martyr wrote that but, say, was just a 'literary [mythical/fictitious] representative' of a sect named Marcionite or following Marcionism, then that text would be a misrepresentation by Martyr - rhetoric;
And if I'm the king of England, I'm entitled to certain privileges. But does that make any sense of the data? Would we expect that Justin would write in this way, at all, if this is what he was trying to say? Does such a hypothesis make any sense? Does it even attempt to interpret the text earnestly and faithfully to the original sense? Is it more than just a castoff suggestion that is contradicted, so much as anything can be contradicted, by what the text actually says?
MrMacSon wrote:or a later redaction, also as misrepresentative rhetoric.
There we go. At least this doesn't turn the meaning of the text into silly putty that we can craft as we will. However, if it were inserted later, or if it were part of a larger forgery, then it is not so much the meaning of the text here that changes, as it is the intent. The intent would be deception [... not that there is anything wrong with that].
MrMacSon wrote:Now, my search of that google search did not come up with that passage in "First Apology", & I had forgotten about it ...

so of course my "hypothesis ... has no connection ... to what the passage says"
Can I offer you some kind of easy exit from this perch? After all, you just said you made the suggestion without the text in front of you. Can't be blamed, right? (You are not your words; you can let them go at any time.)
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Re: Kapyong's Jesus Myth Theory

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Peter Kirby wrote:
MrMacSon wrote:or a later redaction, also as misrepresentative rhetoric.
... if it were inserted later, or if it were part of a larger forgery, then it is not so much the meaning of the text here that changes, as it is the intent. The intent would be deception.
Yes
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Re: Kapyong's Jesus Myth Theory

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MrMacSon wrote:
Peter Kirby wrote:
MrMacSon wrote:or a later redaction, also as misrepresentative rhetoric.
... if it were inserted later, or if it were part of a larger forgery, then it is not so much the meaning of the text here that changes, as it is the intent. The intent would be deception.
Yes
Okay. Cool. So it could be an interpolation. :goodmorning:

But should the mere possibility of interpolation stop us from saying that Marcion most likely existed (and also that Justin most likely mentioned him)?

If I understand you correctly, you don't think that it should, and I would agree.

(I have taken the interpolation argument up a few times before, but always with some hesitation and with something to back it up. There are undoubtedly some unevidenced interpolations out there, but most actual and particular suggestions for interpolation, sans evidence, are also undoubtedly incorrect, being merely crutches for the aid of various pet theories, assorted ax-grinding endeavors, and the occasional ill-considered off-the-cuff comment.)
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Re: Kapyong's Jesus Myth Theory

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Ben C. Smith wrote:And we have papyrus Oxyrhynchus 405, a fragment of the Greek text of Against Heresies, dated to about 200, only about 20 years after the purported composition of the work.
Andreas Schmidt: Der mogliche Text von P. Oxy. III 405, Z. 39-45 (The Possible Text of P. Oxy. III 405. 39-45) published in 1991, New Testament Studies

"variant of Matthew 1:22-25" i.e. not text written by Irenaeus. Do we know why it is thought by some that the text of Oxyrhynchus 405 contains an extract of Matthew 3:16?

Is it not the tradition to regard this as text of Irenaeus, based upon J.A. Robinson's identification? Was Robinson correct? Was he working with a Greek translation of the (? sixth century?) Latin copy of Against Heresies?

On page 86 of Eusebius "The History of the Church" translation from 1965 by Williamson, published by Dorset Press, writing about Simon Magus:
"This is Justin's version, and it is supported by Irenaeus, who in book 1 of his Heresies Answered gives a brief account....."

Is this another text, or an error in translation, or just another English version of the original Latin Translation of the original Greek title of Ireneaus? Is it possible that the Latin translation of Irenaeus, that we have today, differs from the Greek version used by Eusebius? Was Eusebius working with a Greek replica of the original text, or a Greek translation of the Latin translation of the Greek original?
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Re: Kapyong's Jesus Myth Theory

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Welcome to the forum! Some good questions here.
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Re: Kapyong's Jesus Myth Theory

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oleg wrote:
Ben C. Smith wrote:And we have papyrus Oxyrhynchus 405, a fragment of the Greek text of Against Heresies, dated to about 200, only about 20 years after the purported composition of the work.
Andreas Schmidt: Der mogliche Text von P. Oxy. III 405, Z. 39-45 (The Possible Text of P. Oxy. III 405. 39-45) published in 1991, New Testament Studies

"variant of Matthew 1:22-25" i.e. not text written by Irenaeus. Do we know why it is thought by some that the text of Oxyrhynchus 405 contains an extract of Matthew 3:16?
Hi, oleg. To answer your question, let me lay out the various fragments of papyrus Oxyrhynchus 405 as found in volume 3 of Grenfell & Hunt.

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 405.png
Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 405.png (86.16 KiB) Viewed 8043 times

Notice that there are 6 fragments presented (a-f), and that the line numeration runs across all 6 of them. (Grenfell and Hunt actually say that there are 7 fragments, but I have only ever seen the six; I am assuming that either two of them were fitted together like puzzle pieces before publication and assigned the same letter or one of the fragments contained no writing on it.)

I do not currently have access to the article by Andreas Schmidt, but I can already see in the abstract that he is dealing with lines 39-45 on fragment d, claiming that it represents Matthew 1.22-25 (and I can already see the Greek word for "virgin/maiden" there, even without analyzing the fragment very closely).

The extract from Matthew 3.16-17, on the other hand, comes from lines 15-22 of fragment a, which the abstract for that article does not mention. This quotation is both preceded (line 14 = line 56; see below) and followed (lines 23-27) by material which pretty clearly identifies the fragment as a bit of Against Heresies 3.9.3, which quotes Matthew 3.16 with the same "you are my beloved son" variant (instead of "this is my beloved son") that we find in the fragment.
Is it not the tradition to regard this as text of Irenaeus, based upon J.A. Robinson's identification? Was Robinson correct? Was he working with a Greek translation of the (? sixth century?) Latin copy of Against Heresies?
Robinson may have simply been working with the Latin translation itself, back translating into Greek himself. I do not think there was a known Greek quotation of this part of Against Heresies at that time.
Is it possible that the Latin translation of Irenaeus, that we have today, differs from the Greek version used by Eusebius?
Yes, I think it is fairly certain that there are differences between the Latin translation and the Greek text.
Was Eusebius working with a Greek replica of the original text, or a Greek translation of the Latin translation of the Greek original?
On what basis would we assume that the Greek text of Ireneaeus had been lost by that time, with only the Latin translation to make up for it?

At any rate, we now have the Greek text for Against Heresies 3.9.3, anyway, in the form of a quotation from a medieval florilegium of century XIII. This quotation confirms the Matthean variant "you are my beloved son" in the Greek, whereas the Latin has "this is my beloved son" (Greek text from Marcel Richard and Bertrand Hemmerdinger, Trois Nouveaux Fragments Grecs de l’Adversus Haereses de Saint Irénée, on pages 252-255 of Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche 53.3, 1962, quoting from the Florilegium Achridense, century XIII, page 145; the introductory line is from this same text):

Εἰρηναίου ἐπισκόπου Λογδώνου ἐκ τοῦ κατὰ αἱρέσεως βιβλίου·-Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, from the book against heresy:
«Ἔτι φησὶν ἐπὶ τοῦ βαπτίσματος ὁ Ματθαῖος· Ἀνεῴχθησαν αὐτῷ οἱ οὐρανοί, καὶ εἶδε πνεῦμα θεοῦ καταβαῖνον ὡσεὶ περιστεράν καὶ ἐρχόμενον εἰς αὐτόν· καὶ ἰδοὺ, φωνὴ ἐξ οὐρανοῦ λέγουσα· Σὺ εἶ ὁ υἱός μου ὁ ἀγαπητὸς, ἐν ᾧ εὐδόκησα. οὐ γὰρ τότε κατῆλθεν ὁ Χριστὸς εἰς τὸν Ἰησοῦν, οὐδὲ ἄλλος μὲν ὁ Χριστὸς, ἄλλος δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς, ἀλλ' ὁ λόγος τοῦ θεοῦ, ὁ σωτὴρ πάντων καὶ κυριεύων οὐρανοῦ και γῆς, οὗτός ἐστιν Ἰησοῦς καθὼς προεδιδάξαμεν, προσλαβόμενος σάρκα καὶ χρισθεὶς ὑπὸ τοῦ πατρὸς τῷ πνεύματι, Χριστὸς Ἰησοῦς ἐγίνετο, καθὼς Ἠσαΐας φησίν.»Adhuc ait in baptismate Matthaeus: Aperti sunt [ei] coeli, et vidit spiritum dei quasi columbam venientem super eum. et ecce, vox de coelo, dicens: Hic est filius meus dilectus, in quo mihi bene complacui. non enim Christus tunc descendit in Iesum, neque alius quidem Christus, alius vero Iesus, sed verbum dei, qui est salvator omnium et dominator coeli et terrae, qui est Iesus, quemadmodum ante ostendimus, qui et adsumtsit carnem et unctus est a patre spiritu, Iesus Christus factus est, sicut et Esaias ait."Still Matthew says on the baptism: 'The heavens were opened up, and he saw the spirit of God descending just as a dove and coming into him. And behold, a voice from heaven saying: "You are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased."' For Christ did not at that time descend into Jesus, nor was Christ one person and Jesus another, but rather the word of God, which is savior of all and lord of heaven and earth, who is Jesus, just as we have taught before, who took on flesh and was christened by the father in the spirit, became Christ Jesus, as Isaiah says."

Grenfell and Hunt, in their original publication of papyrus Oxyrhynchus 405, speak only of the extract coming from Matthew 3.16-17; they say nothing of Irenaeus; apparently that identification had yet to happen. But identifying the text as a Matthean quotation found in Against Heresies actually enables one to see that fragments a and f belong together.

Once one sees that line 14 of fragment a and line 56 of fragment f are actually the same line split into pieces, the phrase μὴ ζητούσιν comes into view, which would correspond to the last words of Against Heresies 3.9.2, right before the quotation in the florilegium above and therefore extant only in Latin: non quaerebant eum.

Ben.
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Re: Kapyong's Jesus Myth Theory

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Compare the CONSISTENT early Diatessaronic reading of Ephrem and many others "you are my Son and my beloved" https://books.google.com/books?id=PonbC ... em&f=false
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