On the Marcionite hate against the Jewish God

[Secret Alias]

I would even go one step further than merely saying that Marcion was Jewish. Is the Christian Church Father Papias preserved in the Mekhilta? https://books.google.com/books?id=SJxhm ... 22&f=false

Here is the original Hebrew and English translation - https://books.google.com/books?id=eaymy ... 20&f=false

[Secret Alias]

My theory would be that before Irenaeus Jews and Christians and Samaritans were all engaged in dialogue with one another. I am not even sure that 'Christians' were so-called. There were just Jews, Samaritans and proselytes who (a) preserved the understanding that there was a second power made visible on Sinai and (b) who visited humanity before the destruction. That's all. Did Papias even use a narrative 'gospel' like ours? Did he have a 'New Testament'? What do we really know that prevents us from understanding that he is preserved in the Mekhilta debating with Akiba?

[andrewcriddle]

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It should be noted that one of Vinzent's most influential papers is Marcion the Jew https://www.academia.edu/7547506/Marcion_the_Jew. The fact that Marcion's Jewishness hasn't made a dent in your understanding of Marcionism speaks more for the seriousness of your mental impairment (and hatred of 'orthodoxy' whether 'Catholic' or 'Jewish'). Again I don't think I will ever change your mind given your pathology but I say this for others who might be impacted by the repetition of sheer nonsense on your part.
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What Vinzent seems to be saying IIUC is that Marcion was sympathetic to the Jews as a group but hostile to the Jewish God, the World Creator.

Andrew Criddle

[Secret Alias]

What Vinzent seems to be saying IIUC is that Marcion was sympathetic to the Jews as a group but hostile to the Jewish God, the World Creator.

But it is still a step in the right direction. This whole notion of 'hating' someone or a group of people when you really disagree with them (or better yet put something or someone else as 'better' than them) has been the sustained argument throughout my posting in this thread. I made reference to Jews in this day and age who 'disagree' with the official policies of the state of Israel are similarly attacked as 'hating themselves' or even hating Jews and Judaism. The same warped situation clearly existed in antiquity with respect to Marcion IMHO.

Let's note some other things that the Marcionites are accused of 'hating' in Tertullian's work. From the end of chapter 14:

You are hostile to the sky: yet in your houses you plan for a free view of the sky. You despise the earth, from which was born that flesh of yours which you hate: yet you forcibly extract all its richness for you to feed on. You disapprove of the sea, yet stop short of its contents, which you account a holier kind of food. If I offer you a rose, you cannot despise its Creator. Hypocrite: even though by starving yourself to death you should approve yourself a Marcionite, which means, a repudiator of the Creator—for you ought to have made some pretence of this, as a substitute for martyrdom, if you had really disapproved of the world—into whatsoever material you are to be dissolved, you will be making use of the Creator's possessions. How perverse is this austerity. You despise as worthless those very things on which your life and death depend.

Let's go through the checklist. Taken at face value the Marcionites 'hated' the following:

1. the sky
2. the earth
3. the sea

Come on surely the Marcionite 'hatred' of the 'Jewish god' derives from the same hyperbole and exaggeration as this nonsense! But we should note this statement - You are hostile to the sky: yet in your houses you plan for a free view of the sky (Adversaris caelo, et libertatem caeli in habitationibus captas). This is absolutely in keeping with the Dositheans (and later the Christian) objection of permanent houses of worship like the temple). Four walls and a roof = a permanent structure. More on this discussion in my friend I R M Boid's monograph about the Dositheans.

Actually I don't have access to the article in scanned form right now but Pummer makes reference to at least part of his evidence - a statement in Epiphanius's Panarion:

https://books.google.com/books?id=dhDlz ... em&f=false (in order to access all the information you have to go to this 'table of contents' and click on p. 132 and then go down to the rest of the discussion).

The point is that elsewhere the Marcionite houses of prayer are called 'synagogues.' Here their antiquity and specific 'Jewishness' is reinforced by Tertullian's source.

[Secret Alias]

I have found a few personal correspondences with Boid about the Samaritan 'roofless' houses of worship:

At this point I have to thank you for forcing me to think these questions through, because I suddenly realised the significance of some ancient data on the Dositheans. The Dosithean reformer Sakta [Aramaic adaptation of Sextus], who can be dated to just after John the Baptist, set up a booth on the Balata Meadow. It is known that a pun was made on his name or title Sakta and the very similar Hebrew and Aramaic words meaning a booth. It is recorded that he declared the Mountain to be profane without the Tabernacle. This is only a repetition of the essential Dosithean dogma. He then said “From this booth we will go up to Mt. Gerizim”. A variant in the mss. has “Whoever has this booth will go up to Mt. Gerizim”. The text is an Arabic translation from Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek, from an old document fragments of which were known to Origen secondhand or thirdhand. Graphically in Arabic the two sentences are nearly the same. Without having collated all the mss.in regard to this passage yet, my first impression is that the second form is the original. Either way, what is meant is that he and his followers will be able to go up to Mt. Gerizim because the sacred place will have become holy or will be about to become holy. The significance of the booth is (a) that it is not a stone building; (b) That it is not an enclosure; (c) that being in it is a prerequisite for the manifestation of the Tabernacle on the Deuteronomic sacred place, or for the manifestation of the Vessels, which can be put in a newly made Tabernacle. Now it is known that all Samaritan denominations regarded the title “the Gate of Heaven” as belonging to the most holy part of the Mountain, the higher of the two peaks, said to be only fifteen cubits (exactly twenty-two and a half feet or fifty steps of convenient height) from the lowest heaven. Modern orthodoxy says Jacob’s words “This is the House of God and this is the Gate of Heaven” mean that the House of God is the designated place for the Sanctuary on the Mountain, near where where Jacob was standing (but not exactly the same place), and the Gate of Heaven is the top of the higher peak. The two are not the same place, otherwise Jacob would have said “This is the House of God and Gate of Heaven”. Obviously putting Jacob on the mountain goes against the implications of the text. Any natural reading must set him and Bethel on the Meadow with the steep slope of the mountain just before him. This means that some people could have maintained they had a prooftext for locating the Unique Place on the Meadow, and identifying Bethel with the Unique Place. This would explain the roofless sanctuary seen by the source behind Epiphanios. My guess is that we now have confirmation of a statement in old but undatable Samaritan sources, that there was a false Bethel set up by Jeroboam, and a true Bethel on the mountain. It would be natural to suppose this other Bethel to have been on the Meadow, where the narrative most naturally puts Jacob. I therefore take back my naming of the sanctuary described by Epiphanios as Dosithean, because what the Dositheans had on the Meadow was deliberately and symbolically a temporary structure. They clearly located the Unique Place on the Mountain. The warning to Jacob in Jubilees, that the place is indeed sacred but not to be enclosed because it is not the Unique Place, could be Jewish in origin, but is more naturally seen as written by a Samaritan warning against the error of setting up the enclosure on the Meadow still standing in the first c. A.D. and described secondhand by Epiphanios. Both the Dositheans and their opponents would have agreed on the form of the warning. It would not have been written by a Jew because a Jew would not have thought it necessary to make the statement or put the statement in the form of a warning. A Jew would have been thoroughly aware of what was claimed for the Mountain, but would not naturally have thought about any sanctuary on the Meadow. Besides, the wording is abrupt. A more detailed statement with a reference to the future after the time of the Judges would be expected if the author had been a Jew, and some kind of supporting statement elsewhere in the book and connected with Moses would have been expected. I get the impression the author didn’t want to speak at all about the sanctuary on the Meadow, and says as few words as he can manage.

and again when I wrote to him about a question regarding the Hebrew word spelt HE-YOD-KAF-LAMED (hêkal, Masoretic hekhal), translated "Temple" by Macdonald in his English rendering of the Memar Marqe:

Hekal means "pattern" or better "lay-out". It refers to the set of enclosures making up the Sanctuary, made up of curtains hanging from rods resting on poles, the whole being collapsible and therefore portable. See the elaborate description in the second half of Exodus. This passage is a word for word translation from the Arabic book of 1875, which simply reproduces an authentic old section of the Arabic Book of Joshua, as in Juynboll's edition, translated from Aramaic with the Aramaic being an abbreviated translation from a lost Hebrew original. The Arabic original of this passage has haykal, an absolutely unambiguous word in Arabic that does NOT mean any kind of building, but "skeleton", "plan", "lay-out". This is what is meant by the Hebrew TAV-BET-NUN-YOD-TAV tabnit in Exodus, Masoretic tavnit, meaning a detailed lay-out or set of drawings for such a lay-out, i.e. blueprints. The Jewish usage of "hekhal" to mean a building is secondary. The Jerusalem temple's courts were a stone reproduction of the pattern of curtains, so Jewish usage shifted. No Samaritan text uses the secondary meaning. Of course the lay-out set up is elaborate and detailed, because the prescriptions in Exodus say so. IT REMAINS THAT WHAT IS BEING DESCRIBED IS A SET OF COURTS MARKED OFF BY CURTAINS HANGING FROM RODS. Only the Tent of Meeting had a roof, but it was still a tent and the roof was cloth. In the Jerusalem temple it was a stone cube with a solid roof. I told you how inaccurate Macdonald's introduction was. All this is set out in Boid's article Use Authority and Exegesis.

I repeat that Stephen was murdered for stating that there is no prescription for a stone building in the Torah.

Please note that this is not a matter for disagreement between individuals. The fact is that although Macdonald knew of mss. of the Arabic book of 1875, he never consulted it; and although he lists Yahuda's article in his bibliography, he never consulted that either. The proof is that he shows no evidence of knowing the content of either.

It is true that there is a word in Aramaic spelt h-y-k-l that means a temple building, with an obvious cognates in Babylonian-Assyrian and in Ethiopic in the same meaning. On the other hand, the Arabic cognate has a different meaning. While it can mean the Jerusalem temple in mediaeval and modern usage, this usage is Christian and Jewish in origin and is a loan-translation from the Hebrew word. Its original meaning, still the main meaning even in modern Arabic, is a framework. This leaves the question of the meaning in Hebrew open.

First, note that this is not a Semitic word in origin. It is Sumerian. If it is found in several Semitic languages, that means it has been borrowed into each one, from Babylonian-Assyrian or from Aramaic. It has not stayed in each one from the time of Proto-Semitic.

Now, the usage in Biblical Hebrew is ambiguous. It is not used in the Hexateuch, that is, the Torah and Joshua. It first refers to the sanctuary at Shiloh, which admittedly had doors or gates with hinges; but this is still not necessarily a building, a fact apparently registered from the context by the author of the well-known 19th c. hymn. It is also referred to Solomon’s temple and palace, but as said before, this is another matter. In modern Samaritan Hebrew (1907 is modern) it still does not mean a stone building. The translator working in 1907 made a bad choice when translating this passage into Hebrew from the Arabic book of 1865. To him, the meaning of the Hebrew word would have been what the Samaritans maintain was the original Hebrew meaning, which is the same as the Arabic meaning. Unfortunately, he forgot that the purpose of the book was to turn a well-known voluminous Arabic book into a concise Hebrew book. The book had to be concise because it was composed to be copied out over and over and over and sold to Europeans for ready cash. It had to be in Hebrew so as to sell more copies. It forms a companion work to the well-known book on Samaritan theology and salvific history and dispensations known under many titles and erroneously called the Hilluk by Gaster. This was first composed in Arabic for a visiting scholar from Oxford in 1895. It was translated into Hebrew in 1907 and copied over and over and over. Both books have been what is commonly termed “nice little earners”. There was never any deception. The books were presented as two compendia of essential knowledge, no more. There is complete transparency in the colophons of the mss. (See my book Principles of Samaritan Halachah, Leiden 1989, in the introduction). No Samaritan text refers to Solomon’s temple by the word hêkal (Mas. Hêkhal), because in Sam. usage, the word would not have fitted. It is most often called the Hebrew b-y-t m-k-t-sh, bit maktash (Masoretic bet makhtesh), meaning “the acropolis building”. This name is used regardless of the language of the book. The Aramaic equivalent q-r-m-t. has turned up for the first time in the text to be published in my forthcoming monograph. (Gaster thinks the name to be no more than a deformation of the Hebrew b-y-t m-q-d-sh with some connection with leprosy. It is certainly a pun, but it is an objective description. A name meaning the house of the sanctuary would have been a contradiction in terms, as said earlier, well as being a false term).

It is true that the book says Joshua BUILT this hêkal and put everything inside. The main reason this message is being sent today is that it occurred to me after sending the original hasty message that it must have seemed that I was wilfully misreading the plain wording so as to push my own barrow. As said before, I never force the meaning of any text. This is a matter of professional and personal integrity. What Joshua BUILT according to the author was the stone fences and stone boundary markers of the designated sacred area IN which the curtains and Tent of Meeting were then put.

For the sake of completeness, let me repeat that all Samaritans of all denominations since the earliest documentation have agreed that this sanctuary was only intact for about 120 years. After that, there was only the stone boundary markers. The general falling away noted in the last verse of the book of Judges enabled Eli, not of the line of High Priests, to set himself up at Shiloh. (Eli was descended from Ithamar, not Phineas. The Rabbinic texts show great disquiet over this break in legitimate succession. This is the importance of the appointment of Zadok as High Priest by Solomon. Zadok was of the line of Phineas. Händel had read the Torah and seen the significance before writing his oratorio). The same general falling away led to the necessity of the occultation of the curtains and vessels from the earthly plane a few years later.

and on another occasion:

The book of Jubilees has an expanded version of Jacob’s second visit to Bethel [Jubilees XXXII: 16-36, an expansion of Genesis XXXV: 7]. The most notable addition is a statement that Jacob had intended to make the place a permanent sacred shrine, but was told by an angel not to do so. The angel’s words were: “Don’t build anything here, don’t treat this as a permanent sacred place, and don’t stay her. This is not the place”. There can be no doubt as to the precise meaning. The angel says that Bethel is not the unique place chosen by God as the permanent site for the Sanctuary [Mikdash] and Tabernacle [Mishkan]. He is not to go beyond what has already been done, the building of an altar, with the implication that even this is not to be permanent. What is not nearly so certain is what the author of the Book of Jubilees regarded as the rightful permanent sacred place. It is generally supposed that the implication is that it is to be Jerusalem, but this is a facile assumption not borne out by the wording. All that is said is that Jacob had intended to mark off the sacred ground by a permanent stone fence or set of stone markers. Nothing is added to imply that the construction would later be made more elaborate. “Jacob decided to set up an enclosure to the sacred ground, and to sanctify it as permanently holy”. [verse 22]. The implication of the words is that Jacob envisaged the eventual construction of a fane, not a temple. This emphasis on the sacredness of the ground rather than the sacredness of any permanent structure recalls the Samaritan viewpoint more readily than the viewpoint of a Jewish author.

The orthodox Samaritan position is that it is offensive to put up a stone building and call it by the Pentateuchal terms the Mishkan (Tabernacle) or the Mikdash (Holy Place). The offence of the Jerusalem Temple was compounded, in this view, by actually CALLING it Bet ha-Mikdash, the Sanctuary Building, a contradiction in terms. It is acceptable and in fact appropriate to put a stone wall round the sacred ground. At this point the Dositheans would have said the ground is only potentially Sacred without the Tabernacle, but would probably not have objected to it being marked off. It is acceptable and in fact necessary for practicality to put some kind of roof or awning over the Tabernacle. In short, any stone structure and any roof or awning is only to mark off the sacred courts and protect the Tabernacle from the weather. Samaritan orthodoxy says there never was a Samaritan temple, because their ancestors would not have been misguided enough to build such a thing. According to this view, the accounts of the destruction of the Samaritan temple are actually accounts of the destuction of the boundary fences and protective awnings and rooves. The archaeological evidence supports this view.[LONG NOTE HERE]].

The wording in Jubilees is unexpected. Why not a simple statement that an angel appeared to Jacob and told him the site of Bethel was not the site of the unique place? Why say Jacob formulated an intention that had to be explicitly rejected? It would be reasonable to read into the choice of expression a rejection of some sacred place known to the author. This is an effective way of strongly denying the validity of such a sacred place without naming it and without letting the reader know it actually exists and is connected with Jacob by those that recognise it. There is in fact ample attestation of sanctuaries on the Meadow.

The Dosithean reformer Sakta [Aramaic adaptation of Sextus], who can be dated to just after John the Baptist, set up a booth on the Balata Meadow. [[NOTE TO PROVE THE DATING]]. It is known that a pun was made on his name or title Sakta and the very similar Hebrew and Aramaic words meaning a booth. It is recorded that he declared the Mountain to be profane without the Tabernacle. This is only a repetition of the essential Dosithean dogma. He then said “From this booth we will go up to Mt. Gerizim”. A variant in the mss. has “Whoever has this booth will go up to Mt. Gerizim”. The documentation in Abu ‘l-Fateh. ابو الفتح here is translated from Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek, from an old document fragments of which were known to Origen secondhand or thirdhand. [[NOTE TO PROVE THIS STATEMENT]]. Graphically in Arabic the two sentences are nearly the same. My impression is that the second form is the original. [[NOTE ON THE READINGS OF THE MSS.]]. Either way, what is meant is that Sakta and his followers will be able to go up to Mt. Gerizim because the sacred place will have become holy or will be about to become holy. The significance of the booth is (a) that it is not a stone building; (b) that it is not an enclosure; (c) that being in it is a prerequisite for the manifestation of the Tabernacle on the Deuteronomic sacred place, or for the manifestation of the Vessels, which can be put in a newly made Tabernacle. Now it is known that all Samaritan denominations regarded the title “the Gate of Heaven” as belonging to the most holy part of the Mountain, the higher of the two peaks, said to be only fifteen cubits (exactly twenty-two and a half feet or fifty steps of convenient height) from the lowest heaven. Modern orthodoxy says Jacob’s words “This is none other than the House of God and I didn’t know, and this is the Gate of Heaven” mean that the House of God is the designated place for the Sanctuary on the Mountain, near where where Jacob was standing (but not exactly the same place), and the Gate of Heaven is the top of the higher peak. The two are not the same place, otherwise Jacob would have said “This is none other than the House of God and Gate of Heaven, and I didn’t know”.

I would guess that Sakta set Jacob and Bethel on the Meadow, set the sacred place designated to hold the Tabernacle on the Mountain where all other Samaritans set it, and set the Gate of Heaven on the higher peak where it was set by everyone else. Exegetically this works perfectly. If Jacob had meant to say that where he had slept was the House Of God and the peak was the Gate of Heaven, he would most naturally have said “This is the House of God and that is the Gate of Heaven”. It is exegetically necessary to take the second “this” as meaning “yon”, so we have to take the first “this” as meaning “yon”. So in Sakta’s view Jacob was not on the Mountain, so Bethel is not but on the Meadow, and Bethel is not the name of the Unique Place. Historically it is true that the word bethel can refer to a stele, and does not have to be a placename. [[ADD NOTE ON GREEK BORROWING BETYLOS]]. The view that Bethel was on the Meadow must once have been vey widespread, since the Samaritan Arabic Version calls the Meadow Marj al-Bahâ’ مرج البهاء “the Meadow of the Kavod”. [Glory in conventional translation. Epiphany of the Creative Power].

There remains the question of the function of the booth. My guess is that it was a physical necessity which for symbolic reasons could not be a stone building or even a tent, because a tent could be confused with the Tabernacle. (In Aramaic the same word has both meanings). Why it was needed was that Sakta had to be on the site of Bethel, waiting for something like what Jacob saw, as a signal that the Tabernacle was manifesting. This would explain why the hostile narrative emphasises that he never went up. As Jacob slept in the open, the most shelter that Sakta could have was this booth, if he was to emulate Jacob. The word sukkah when used in reference to the Festival of Sukkot, Tabernacles, Booths, means something that by definition is not completely weatherproof. The narrative says, as if proving Sakta’s error, that he never went up the mountain all his life. A more sympathetic statement might have been that his lifelong prayer was for the end of the Time of Turning Away, and that he was willing to sleep in rough shelter every night as part of his regimen. The account in Josephus mentioned in one of the notes to my article The Transmission of the Samaritan Joshua-Judges emphasises the gathering on the Meadow in preparation for the ascent. [[INSERT REFERENCE AND RE-WORD THE SENTENCE BEFORE]]. It does not actually say this was an immediate expectation. It only says their leader said he would take them up at an unspecified time and the Mosaic Tabernacle Vessels would appear at an unspecified time. It would not be incompatible with the wording to suppose they gathered every Pentecost [the date of the giving of the Torah] or on the first day of the first month [the date of inauguration of the Tabernacle] or on the date of occultation of the Tabernacle, and prayed for the end of the Time of Turning Away or Time of Error.

When the Priest Eli set up his sanctuary at Shiloh on the Meadow, he attracted very many supporters. [[SOURCE REFERENCE FROM SAMARITAN CHRONICLE AND I SAMUEL]]. His possession of what he said was the Ark is explained in the Samaritan narrative by saying it was a counterfeit. What is anomalous is that the narrative does not tell us how anyone could have imagined the Ark would be in a place other than the original. Even in the Jewish account in I Samuel there is no explanation of how the Ark was moved to Shiloh. The only workable solution to the Samaritan account is that Eli claimed that the place where Jacob had been standing was the same placre referred to in the words “This is none other than the house of God”. Why then are we not told this by the Samaritan chronicle? A reasonable supposition would be that even saying this would raise the question of whether the claim might be exegetically correct. It would also remind the reader of what I have argued must have been Sakta’s exegesis, setting Jacob and Bethel on the Meadow. Sakta’s exegesis would not have been a great threat, because he still agreed that the permanent place was on the Mountain. There was, however, one very visible sanctuary on the Meadow in the time of composition of the Samaritan chronicle, and visible in the time when Jubilees was composed. This one duplicated the form of the permanent sacred place. Its very existence raised the possibility of a line of exegesis that could equally have been applied to the Shilo sanctuary. [[QUOTE DETAILED DESCRIPTION COPIED BY EPIPHANIUS. QUOTE PROOF OF DATE OF ORIGINAL DESCRIPTION BEFORE 50 A.D.]]. We are not told how this sanctuary was regarded in its time, but that can be surmised with high probability from the earlier existence of an elaborate sanctuary called Bethel and identified with the place where Jacob slept. This structure called Bethel was standing in the time of Hosea. Its identification by those that recognised it with the place where Jacob slept can be deduced from Hosea XII: 5 “He (God through an angel) then finds him (Jacob) at Bethel, and there he speaks with us”. [[NOTE ON FUNCTION OF IMPERFECT TENSE HERE, and on the variant “with him” NOTE ON THE MANY FRAGMENTS OF THE BETHEL LITURGY IN HOSEA. NOTE ON THE IMPLICATIONS FOR FINDING THE ORIGIN OF THE LORD’S PRAYER IN THE LITURGY OF BETHEL]]. Whether the sanctuary called Bethel and visited by Hosea was in the same place as the structure described at secondhand by Epiphanius is uncertain, but either way, the antiquity of the identification of the place where Jacob stood, Bethel, with the site of the main permanent sanctuary is certain. The antiquity of the exegesis of Jacob’s words setting the permanent sacred place at Bethel, the place where Jacob slept, is therefore certain. The absolute date can be said to be as early as the first composition of the verse.

It has been said that the existence of two sacred places can be seen in the wording of the Book of Jubilees, with its strongly worded denial of the validity of a place that is quite literally unspeakable, because mentioning it even so as to deny its claims strengthened its claims. This wording seems to demand the assumption of a place regarded as illegitimate on the Balata Meadow, and a place regarded as legitimate on Mt. Gerizim. The date of Jubilees is uncertain. Its use of an otherwise unknown recension of the Torah, differing from the text now called Samaritan, and differing from MT and LXX, puts it no later than the start of the first c. B.C. The author must have known of the sanctuary described by Epiphanius and must have known the exegetical question related to its claim of legitimacy. It seems more attention needs to be given to the data in the section of the Samaritan chronicle corresponding to I Samuel but differing in detail. There is no need to go into the historicity of Eli or Jeroboam, or anything else in Samuel and Kings. The data in the Samaritan chronicle are ancient. Ancient is a relative term, but the general statement can be made that the chronicle belongs to the era that produced I Enoch and Jubilees.

and on yet another occasion:

The orthodox Samaritan position is that it is offensive to put up a stone building and call it by the Pentateuchal terms the Mishkan (Tabernacle) or the Mikdash (Holy Place). The offence of the Jerusalem Temple was compounded, in this view, by actually CALLING it Bet ha-Mikdash, the Sanctuary Building, a contradiction in terms. It is acceptable and in fact appropriate to put a stone wall round the sacred ground. At this point the Dositheans would have said the ground is only potentially Sacred without the Tabernacle, but would probably not have objected to it being marked off. It is acceptable and in fact necessary for practicality to put some kind of roof or awning over the Tabernacle. In short, any stone structure and any roof or awning is only to mark off the sacred courts and protect the Tabernacle from the weather. Samaritan orthodoxy says there never was a Samaritan temple, because their ancestors would not have been misguided enough to build such a thing. According to this view, the accounts of the destruction of the Samaritan temple are actually accounts of the destuction of the boundary fences and protective awnings and rooves. As far as I know, archaeology supports the orthodox view. There are scholars that say there was once a temple building, citing some conflicting archaeological evidence and depictions on coins. While admitting I haven’t had the time to read the material properly, it does seem to me that what might well have looked like the front of a typical Temple building, looking much like the front of the State Library of New South Wales or the National Museum of Australia [I like the name!] in Sydney, with steps leading up to a porch behind pillars and elaborate bronze doors, could still have been regarded as a convenience to keep the congregation dry. It was in fact a fane. Stephen was murdered for saying all this.

Now you will see why Coptic churches have stars painted on the ceiling, or why some Anglican churches have stars painted on the ceiling over what is actually called the Tabernacle, except that this is a box. Normally over the High Altar in an Anglican church there is a wooden replica of an awning held up by posts. Without going into detail here, the designs of such churches resemble the variety of Samaritan synagogue that was modelled on the Tabernacle and its courts.

Now, to get back to Jubilees. The point is that there are only three physical forms marking a sacred place known to the author. The first two are an altar or a stele. These don’t mark a unique place. What marks the unique place, the Deuteronomic Place Chosen by God, is its boundary fence. This is of course the attested Samaritan view.

At this point I have to thank you for forcing me to think these questions through, because I suddenly realised the significance of some ancient data on the Dositheans. The Dosithean reformer Sakta [Aramaic adaptation of Sextus], who can be dated to just after John the Baptist, set up a booth on the Balata Meadow. It is known that a pun was made on his name or title Sakta and the very similar Hebrew and Aramaic words meaning a booth. It is recorded that he declared the Mountain to be profane without the Tabernacle. This is only a repetition of the essential Dosithean dogma. He then said “From this booth we will go up to Mt. Gerizim”. A variant in the mss. has “Whoever has this booth will go up to Mt. Gerizim”. The text is an Arabic translation from Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek, from an old document fragments of which were known to Origen secondhand or thirdhand. Graphically in Arabic the two sentences are nearly the same. Without having collated all the mss.in regard to this passage yet, my first impression is that the second form is the original. Either way, what is meant is that he and his followers will be able to go up to Mt. Gerizim because the sacred place will have become holy or will be about to become holy. The significance of the booth is (a) that it is not a stone building; (b) That it is not an enclosure; (c) that being in it is a prerequisite for the manifestation of the Tabernacle on the Deuteronomic sacred place, or for the manifestation of the Vessels, which can be put in a newly made Tabernacle. Now it is known that all Samaritan denominations regarded the title “the Gate of Heaven” as belonging to the most holy part of the Mountain, the higher of the two peaks, said to be only fifteen cubits (exactly twenty-two and a half feet or fifty steps of convenient height) from the lowest heaven. Modern orthodoxy says Jacob’s words “This is the House of God and this is the Gate of Heaven” mean that the House of God is the designated place for the Sanctuary on the Mountain, near where where Jacob was standing (but not exactly the same place), and the Gate of Heaven is the top of the higher peak. The two are not the same place, otherwise Jacob would have said “This is the House of God and Gate of Heaven”. Obviously putting Jacob on the mountain goes against the implications of the text. Any natural reading must set him and Bethel on the Meadow with the steep slope of the mountain just before him. This means that some people could have maintained they had a prooftext for locating the Unique Place on the Meadow, and identifying Bethel with the Unique Place. This would explain the roofless sanctuary seen by the source behind Epiphanios. My guess is that we now have confirmation of a statement in old but undatable Samaritan sources, that there was a false Bethel set up by Jeroboam, and a true Bethel on the mountain. It would be natural to suppose this other Bethel to have been on the Meadow, where the narrative most naturally puts Jacob. I therefore take back my naming of the sanctuary described by Epiphanios as Dosithean, because what the Dositheans had on the Meadow was deliberately and symbolically a temporary structure. They clearly located the Unique Place on the Mountain. The warning to Jacob in Jubilees, that the place is indeed sacred but not to be enclosed because it is not the Unique Place, could be Jewish in origin, but is more naturally seen as written by a Samaritan warning against the error of setting up the enclosure on the Meadow still standing in the first c. A.D. and described secondhand by Epiphanios. Both the Dositheans and their opponents would have agreed on the form of the warning. It would not have been written by a Jew because a Jew would not have thought it necessary to make the statement or put the statement in the form of a warning. A Jew would have been thoroughly aware of what was claimed for the Mountain, but would not naturally have thought about any sanctuary on the Meadow. Besides, the wording is abrupt. A more detailed statement with a reference to the future after the time of the Judges would be expected if the author had been a Jew, and some kind of supporting statement elsewhere in the book and connected with Moses would have been expected. I get the impression the author didn’t want to speak at all about the sanctuary on the Meadow, and says as few words as he can manage.

There remains the fact that any natural reading of the narrative puts Jacob and Bethel on the Meadow. I would guess that Sakta set Jacob on the Meadow, set the House of God on the Mountain where all other Samaritans set it, and set the Gate of Heaven on the higher peak where it was set by everyone else. Exegetically this works perfectly. If Jacob had meant to say that where he was standing was the House Of God and the peak was the Gate of Heaven, he would most naturally have said “This is the House of God and that is the Gate of Heaven”. It is exegetically necessary to take the second “this” as meaning “yon”, so we have to take the first “this” as meaning “yon”. So Jacob was not on the Mountain, but on the Meadow, and Bethel is not the name of the Unique Place. Historically it is true that the word Bethel can refer to a stele, and can be a description rather than a placename. This is the explanation of an anomaly in the orthodox exegesis, which, although setting Jacob at Bethel on the Mountain, does not identify Bethel with the place where the Sanctuary is meant to be.

There remains the question of the function of the booth. My guess is that it was a physical necessity which for symbolic reasons could not be a stone building or even a tent, because a tent could be confused with the Tabernacle. (In Aramaic the same word has both meanings). Why it was needed was that Sakta had to be on the site of Bethel, waiting for something like what Jacob saw, as a signal that the Tabernacle was manifesting. This would explain why the hostile narrative emphasises that he never went up. As Jacob slept in the open, the most shelter he could have was this booth. The word sukkah when used in reference to the Festival of Sukkot, Tabernacles, Booths, means something that by definition is not completely weatherproof. The narrative says, as if proving his error, that he never went up the mountain all his life. A more sympathetic statement might have been that his lifelong prayer was for the end of the Time of Turning Away. The account in Josephus mentioned in one of the notes to my article The Transmission of the Samaritan Joshua-Judges emphasises the gathering on the Meadow in preparation for the ascent. It does not actually say this was an immediate expectation. It only says their leader said he would take them up at an unspecified time and the Mosaic Tabernacle Vessels would appear at an unspecified time. It would not be incompatible with the wording to suppose they gathered every Pentecost [the date of the giving of the Torah] or on the first day of the first month [the date of inauguration of the Tabernacle] or on the date of occultation of the Tabernacle, and prayed for the end of the Time of Turning Away or Time of Error.

The point of course is that the curious mention in Tertullian demonstrates that the Marcionite 'roofless' houses of worship (called 'synagogues' in other sources) fit within the pattern of Samaritan and specifically Dosithean synagogues.

[spin]

FWIW, my guess about Markion's rejection of the Jewish god is that it was based on reasoning regarding the apparent failure of the covenant the Jews had with their god. The good god wouldn't need to fix the mess by making a second covenant because the first didn't work so well. Hence Markion opened a different can of worms.

[Secret Alias]

... or perhaps more specifically (and more in keeping with what the rabbinic sources say) the Jews and Samaritans eventually took Moses's Torah (the 603 utterances beside the ten commandments) a man-made law to be equal with what was given by god on the mountain. I think this is what is behind Paul's 'according to man' business in the letters as well as his disdain for circumcision (which is famously NOT in the Torah given by god on Sinai). On some level there is a Christians only regard the ten utterances as holy (which continues to this day in courthouses in Alabama). But I think if Jesus = the god who was seen by the Israelites on Sinai then he must have also established something beyond the ten as a mystery with his inner circle and this became the pathway for a new priesthood in light of the destruction of the temple. But at bottom Marcionism (= pure Paulism) is not absolutely hostile to the 'Jewish god' (after all the Jews originally worshiped 'Jesus'/Ishu the lower god as opposed to the Most High who was universal in his love and kindness for humanity). Jesus/Ishu must have on some level seen the failure of his original covenant or the wickedness/hard-headedness of his adherents (the Israelites) and offered a more perfect communion through his death/repentance. Something like that. But those who denied the binary nature of the godhead covered up/obscured the antiquity of the Marcionite position/tradition and made it seem like an innovation which it was not. It was the/went back to the older/oldest/original form of Israelite religion.

[Secret Alias]

I have to get ready for another football (soccer) match but I will say that the fragments which exist of the Marcionite/Clement of Alexandria narrative where the ten commandments are examined culminating in 'do not lust' and the rich youth saying this is too hard and either walking away or dying or both (the original Mark 10) seems to me at least to be the source of the original revaluation of the traditional Israelite cult. I don't think that you can reconstruct from this a 'rejection' of the ten commandments. After all Jesus says that from these 'life' is secured. But I think on some level what the Marcionites and early Christians were after was something better eternal life, the life in the stars/aeon = עלמ. In order for this to appear the old imperfect covenant had to disappear. This occurred with the destruction of the bad temple constructed by Herod which was a permanent structure (with a roof presumably). The Dositheans like Stephen must have clamored about what an 'abomination' this permanent structure was and how it diverged from the true tabernacle etc. The author of Christianity (presumably Mark or whomever you think wrote the first gospel) then turned on its head the national tragedy of 70 CE into a positive development. It wasn't the Romans who ended the abomination but God directing the Romans. The imperfect/bad experiment was over. Perfection had finally been established through Jesus's death. So on some level I think spin is correct.

[Blood]

Democritus may or may not have said something or other, but this quote is fake. Its date belongs to the 20th century. Some people* have (more responsibly but ambiguously) quoted Joshua Trachtenberg's book (The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism, p. 126). From there someone has cast it into direct speech and assigned it to the Maxims.



This is the reference (footnote 8):

Reinach, Nos. 60, 61, p. 121; Josephus, Against Apion, II, 8.

* Here's an example that is ripe for misunderstanding: http://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/40 ... xcerpt.pdf

OK, this helps to clarify. The quote does not come from Democritus at all. It originates from Apion and is paraphrased by Josephus in Contra Apion:

2.8.93 ff. He said, reports Apion, that he was a Greek, and that, while traveling through the province on account of his livelihood, he was suddenly kidnapped by strangers, taken to the temple and shut in there, where he was seen by nobody, but fattened up by the provision of all sorts of feasts ... when he finally asked the slaves who had access to him, he heard about the unmentionable law of the Judeans, on account of which he was being fed, a practice that they repeated every year at a certain set time. They would capture a Greek foreigner and fatten him up over a year, then take him out to a certain wood and kill the man and sacrifice his body in accordance with their rites, and eat from his innards, and whilst sacrificing this Greek, would swear that they would nurture hostility towards Greeks, then they would throw the dead man's remains into a pit." (Barclay translation)

[Giuseppe]

FWIW, my guess about Markion's rejection of the Jewish god is that it was based on reasoning regarding the apparent failure of the covenant the Jews had with their god. The good god wouldn't need to fix the mess by making a second covenant because the first didn't work so well. Hence Markion opened a different can of worms.

spin, can you say me, as basically a not-expert, what do you think about the relation between Marcion and the god of the Jews? Was it hate or love?

Have you considered the idea that Marcion thought that the Creator God would have to send his Jewish Messiah in the future, therefore there was not really a ''failure of the covenant the Jews had with their god'' (and therefore the Jews had to continue to adore their god) ?

It is also possible this way of compromise (in any case still distant from the radical views of Secret):

1) the God of the Jews may still be good an faithful only with the Jews, therefore the Jews should continue to be Jews, IF they are not Marcionite Christians.

2) the Pagan Gods are bad and unfaithful with their subjected people, the Pagans, therefore they should be rejected in toto by Gentiles, because otherwise they will be punished rightly by the God of the Jews.

Serious scholarship has recognized from much time that Marcion didn't hate the Jewish God, but only thought that the Jewish God was simply not worthy of adoration.

A JUST God is not hated (he is still JUST), but is simply not adored. Think about Moby Dick of the great Melville (an American writer I like a lot): he is not truely hated by the author, but is in any case a symbol of the Demiurge, unworthy of true adoration.

The Gnostics were more radical: they hate really of pure heart the God of the Jews as Satan in person.

I suspect in all modesty that Secret Alias is making a fallacy of false dicothomy:

the Jewish God is hated by Marcion versus the Jewish God is loved by Marcion

A middle way of compromise would be:

the Jewish God is simply not loved by Marcion.

The negation of ''love'' is not necessarily ''hate'', in a constructivist logic.