Is the Earliest Gospel an answer to Revelation?

[MrMacSon]

I agree that figures, historical or otherwise, are being divided threefold and fourfold, and vise versa. In fact a perfect example of this is in Acts, chapter 13. That chapter alone gave the show away for me. It revealed the underlying mechanics of how the tradition(s) worked. It's effectively a big knot of disparate threads.

Yep Acts 13 does give the show away.

Price has a chapter titled 'The Secret of Simon Magus', and he mentions Acts 13 there, and Marcion, Josephus's mention of a Simon who Price thinks is Simon Magus, and the pseudo-Celmentine Recognitions.

Here are some snippets -

Simon Magus sounds like a polemical caricature of Paul in the canonical Acts of the Apostles.


When Justin Martyr and others make Simon Magus the father of Gnosticism, do we not see a reflection of the fact that Gnostics hailed Paul as the founder of their faith? ...


F. C. Baur argued Simon Magus appears to have been a kind of satirical vilification of Paul.


Hermann Detering, in The Falsified Paul, carries F. C. Baur’s hypothesis a step further to turn the theory on its head. What if Simon Magus was the historical figure, and instead of Simon being the fun-house mirror reflection, Paul was the fictive character? What if Paul is a theological rendering of Simon? It appears that there actually was a Simon Magus, about whom some information survives in Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews [20.7.2].


Simon Magus is said by later writers to have come from Gitta, which is in Samaria but could have been confused with Kittim, the sea peoples of Cyprus. Josephus characterized the Samaritans in one instance as “Sidonians [Phoenicians] in Shechem” (12.4.5), which pretty much closes the gap. And, remember, Gitta was originally the Philistine city called Gath, the home town of Goliath.


.. Acts 13 looks like a clumsy attempt to untangle Paul from someone closer to Simon, a Catholicizing attempt to exorcize all that was later perceived as unorthodox in Paul in order to sanitize him for popular consumption.

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.. Acts 13:9 says simply, “But Saul, who is also Paul” and leaves it ambiguous whether Saul received a second name, Paul, to be used henceforth, or whether he, like Sergius Paul (proconsul of Cyprus), was already generally called Paul. The Saul character literally morphs into Paul before the reader’s eyes in a demonstration that the author has probably created a fictional opponent for Simon Magus, Paul’s alter ago.

At the same time, in a narrative game of musical chairs, Acts’s author drives a wedge between Paul, the ideal orthodox hero, and Simon Magus, the hero’s shadow and Saul’s historical prototype. The story drops an important hint by telling us that the name Paul was secondary. I think his name may have been Simon, and when the Paul persona was spun off into a separate character, the redactor preserved the original consonant. In musical chairs, the whistle blows and the players drop into place, Saul sitting in Sergius Paul’s chair and henceforth bearing his name, and Elymas, or Simon Magus, sitting in a chair he had been sharing with Saul. Sergius may be sitting in a chair that was originally engraved with the name of Felix.

Or perhaps it would be better to say that Felix is sitting in Sergius’s chair to conceal the particulars of the story of Simon, Felix, and Drusilla. Josephus intimates that Simon was originally a mystagogical guru. The scene of Paul’s audience before Felix and Drusilla in Acts 24 is a doublet of his appearance before Herod Agrippa II (Marcus Julius Agrippa) and sister-wife Berenice in Acts 25-26.

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The Gospel of John is heavily Marcionite: Moses and the Jews knew nothing of God. Despite all that Deuteronomy says about Moses seeing God face to face, John denies that any mortal has ever seen the true God (John 1:18). Jesus’s Father is not the same God the Jews worship (8:54-55).


... the composition of Gospels, being rewrites of the Old Testament, was a counterblast to the Marcionite rejection of the Old Testament. Once the trend began, Marcionites made their own contributions to it, and thus to the process of historicizing an originally mythic Jesus.[57] Marcion himself, then, had no Gospel. It must have been subsequent Marcionites who ascribed the choice of one to him. Even the invidious contrast, always attributed to Marcion, between the Twelve and Paul must be a later apologetic since it presupposes a late redefinition of the originally unrestricted apostolate to an exclusive dozen.


Price, Robert M.. The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul (Kindle Location 3962-4511). Signature Books. Kindle Edition.
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[Giuseppe]

But that doesn't necessitate a Gentile source. After all, the Old Testament speaks many times of the ills and transgressions of the Jews against God and his prophets, and of there punishments therein. And if the original Evangelion was as a new Torah, than it makes it more appropriate for the Jews to kill Jesus, so as to procure their eventual forgiveness and salvation. Even in GMarcion, it's not Jews but Gentiles, the Romans, who actually carry out the death of Isu Chrestus.

So the great mythicist Rylands (and he is very surprising!):

The actual date of the Gospel according to the Hebrews is probably nearer 100 than 65. That Gospel itself is, of course, derived from an earlier one, as all the Gospels go back to a single primitive Gospel; and since it was written more particularly for Jews, and was current in the Jewish Christian communities, it follows that episodes derogatory to the Jewish apostles were not the inventions of the writer of it, but that he, like Matthew, found them in the earlier Gospel which he used. This conclusion points to the fact that the primitive Gospel, like Marcion’s Gospel, was anti-Jewish, and further suggests that, also like Marcion’s Gospel, it was a Gnostic production. This inference is so fully confirmed by what we know of the Gospel according to the Hebrews as to raise it to complete certainty. vT The episode of Peter’s denial of Jesus was included in the Gospel according to the Hebrews, an episode so shameful for Peter that no Jewish Christian could have invented it. The motive of it is the same as the one we have already seen in operation. The denial of Jesus by Peter symbolizes the rejection by the Jewish Christians of the Jesus whom Paul preached. Whence it follows that the primitive Gospel must have been Pauline and Gnostic.

(Evolution of Christianity, p. 178)