luke 21:12

[Stuart]

Tertullian is always using OT passages to explain the meaning of texts as he sees it and to bend the meaning to the orthodox, even when the wording is not present. You have a singular view on Tertullian. And I don't accept it.

[Secret Alias]

So whereas the current editor of AM knows about the original order of a lost gospel (in this case placing Luke 20:41 - 44 within Luke 18:39 - 43) this knowledge is obscured by a wholesale recasting of the text not as a commentary on the original lost gospel but cut and rearranged to match our canonical gospel of Luke. To this end, Luke 20:41 - 44 is now placed just before the apocalyptic section in Mark 13 (variously preserved).

I am not sure whether the Marcion = anti-Christ formulation which appears here and elsewhere was originally a consequence of the author 'following' the order of the gospel as much as it was an attack on the heretical gospel's clear denial that Jesus was the awaited Christ of the Jews. Look again at what follows. The transition from Luke 20:41 - 44 to the little apocalypse material reads:

We have already reached agreement on the rightful ownership of the names, that it appertains to him who first proclaimed his own Christ among men, and changed a name to Jesus. Thus we shall also be in agreement concerning the presumption of one who says that many will come in his name, when it is not his name if he is not the Christ and Jesus of the Creator, to whom the rightful possession of the name belongs, and when, what is more, he forbids our acceptance of others who are in like case with himself, seeing that he, no less than they, has come in a name not his own—unless it was his purpose to forewarn the disciples against lying claimants to the name, he himself through rightful ownership of the name possessing the truth of it.1 So then those people will come, saying I am Christ.a You, will receive them: you have received one exactly like them. For this one too has come in his own name. What then of the fact that there is still to come the real owner of the names, the Christ and Jesus of the Creator?

What is curious here is that we may have a solution to the 'we have already reached agreement' business. The lost gospel clearly identifies Jesus as the god who "first proclaimed" Christ and "changed a name to Jesus" (i.e. god in the Torah who made Hosea 'Joshua'). I wonder whether this is a clear example of the second editor 'agreeing' with the author of the commentary on the lost gospel rather than Marcion per se.

The next sentence shows the author trying to engage that author (Justin?) before moving on to a stock attack against the Marcionites for receiving Marcion as a false Christ. But the original reference might have been more generic (i.e. to a heretical teacher as such). The point is that I am not sure whether or not the original reference might have been a consequence of denying Jesus as the Christ as it was laid out in the Catholic gospel of Luke or perhaps the Catholic gospels as such. The editor likely argued that by not recognizing Jesus as the Christ the author or perhaps the Marcionites 'fell' for an anti-Christ.

[Secret Alias]

It is worth noting that what we may call a 'monarchian' reinterpretation of the original text follows from our last cited section in AM 4:39:

What then of the fact that there is still to come the real owner of the names, the Christ and Jesus of the Creator (Christus et Iesus creatoris)? Shall you reject him? But how unfair, how unjust, how unworthy of a god supremely good, that you should not receive him when he conies in his own name, when you have already received another in his name. Let us see also with what signs he marks the times.

The heretics who used the lost gospel did not think that Jesus was 'the Christ' the son of David. Marcion put forward a distinction between the just god and the good god. In this passage all becomes blurred with respect to a single being who is alleged to have been 'Christ and Jesus' of the Creator. But we know that Irenaeus tells us that the (first) users of the Gospel of Mark assumed a juxtaposition between 'Jesus' and 'Christ.'

It is interesting that Irenaeus is the first witness to the long ending of Mark. If we suppose that the addition of Psalm 110 is not accidental it might stand to reason to accept Mark as the focus of his transformational efforts. In other words Matthew and Luke were established because of Deuteronomy 19:15 "A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses."

But (ur)Mark was always lurking as the original gospel, the text Irenaeus was trying to subvert.