Kunigunde Kreuzerin wrote: ↑Sat Nov 04, 2017 6:10 am .
I'm not sure what you mean with „many parallelisms“. You started with a tale of Anti-Marcionite propaganda by Irenaeus. Without further evidence I'm not inclined to think that Marcion thought that Cain and the Sodomites were saved.
We have evidence of Gnostic cainites even in Philo (see Friedlander's thesis).
Marcion is only the top of the iceberg called "gnosticism".
About the metaphor "Sheol=prison" we have enough examples in the same NT:
Revelation 2:10
Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Behold, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison (phylakē), that you may be tested, and for ten days you will have tribulation. Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life. 11 He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. The one who conquers will not be hurt by the second death.’
.1 Peter 3:19
For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, 19 in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison (phylakē), 20 because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water
And it is not difficult, for a Gnostic, to imagine the entire Creation as a prison made by the Demiurge.Luke 4:18
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
About the parallelisms, we have:
1) old prophet(s) in a prison in both the cases.
2) the question of the identity of Jesus, in both the cases
3) the skepticism by the old prophet(s) in both the cases, justified by the antithesis between old and new
4) the old prophet(s) are left in their prison in both the cases.
The only divergence is the presence of John's disciples as intermediaries between the old prophet and Christ in a tale and not in the other. Surely you can realize what means "rem tene, verba sequentur", applied in this context. What it means is that the general tenor of the Gospel episode is marcionite in essentia.
To think otherwise means to meet the same difficulty met by Tertullian: why was John so skeptical about the same identity of the same Christ prophetized by him?
