Giuseppe wrote: ↑Thu Dec 20, 2018 7:14 am
Stuart wrote: ↑Wed Dec 19, 2018 2:00 pm
Giuseppe,
You are working with the wrong premise for the origin of the Marcionite gospel and it's focus, and I also think to a lesser extent it is an error in Vinzent's work as well (although he does not carry it so far). This premise is that Marcionite literary priority means Marcionite theological priority. But this is not the case.
The Marcionite gospel was developed from a prototype gospel...
...
So what I am inquiring is about
who precisely introduced the first time this logo, after the birth of the variour (sic) rival theologies and sects.
Therefore, Stuart, when you say that a Gospel was already written before Marcion's Gospel, your basic premise is that someone (probably a
Jewish-Christian writer) invented the Gospel Jesus as the logo for the his Jewish-Christian theology. But then you should explain what was the need, for this Jewish-Christian, of inventing the idea of an earthly life for the deity named Jesus.
...
Your reading comprehension is off here on what I am saying, as if you did not grasp my digression on the subject. I will attempt to address the two points above.
First, in my digression I make it clear that what is referred to in scholarship as a "prototype gospel" is not a gospel. Let me repeat that: a prototype gospel is not a gospel.
What do I mean? A gospel, as I explained, came into existence to evangelize, to preach. The prototype(s) were shorter than any of the gospels we have today (Mark, which in my model is built on two prototypes was easily a third larger than either of those prototypes). They were
a literature which was developed and used for a different purpose than evangelism. Let that sink in for a minute.
What do we know and what can we infer about these prototypes? And we need to ask that question before looking for who wrote them. First we are delving into the prehistoric era of Christianity - and I mean that literally, as history begins with writings; before evangelism there were no Christian writings, no Churches, no Church Fathers.
Christianity was incubating, most likely in isolated and intensely devotional communities; they had to be as you needed devoted missionaries for evangelism to happen. Were Christianity developed among common folk, as the gospels would have you believe, it would have lacked the shock troops necessary for evangelism. A monastic community seems more likely to be the incubation and birth place for Christianity and Christian Evangelism. This would have been an environment sufficiently isolated to allow a new philosophy/religion to develop, intense enough in devotion to create missionaries, and trained and educated enough to produce the literature.
Understanding the above we can now make some inferences about the prototypes. These developed within these communities. They circulated from one community to another, as they all knew the story. Variant versions developed in different communities - just as different communities had different leaders and developed distinct theologies which became distinct sects with distinct teachings.
The prototype must have had a function which all these communities found useful, or else it would have died out. Evangelism -- not just recruitment of monks and nuns for the communities -- was something that was yet to happen. So what were these prototype "gospels" used for, why did they proliferate within these communities? My best guess is the prototype gospel was a play acted out by the monks and nuns. Religious teaching often took the form of a play in ancient Greek culture, and these communities were Greek (they may have started out life as Greek speaking Jews in diaspora, but by the time Christianity erupted the genetic makeup of the community was almost certainly overwhelmingly if not entirely Gentile).
So what of the theology? The theology was even blander than Mark. None of the polemic sectarian material of the Marcionite Gospel nor of Matthew, John and Luke was present. It's core story was acceptable to all the sects. Hardly a single direct LXX quote was to be found. The proof text was not part of it. We know this because the gospels of Mark and Marcion almost completely lack these. But then again it was a play, not an exegetical reading (which the community undoubtedly did with the LXX "Scriptures").
When the Marcionite writer took his prototype "L" and built his gospel on top of it, he expanded it greatly, easily doubling the number of words and adding many stories of his own. Matthew built upon prototype "M" and also drew from the Marcionite gospel as well as adding his own material and an extensive set of LXX proofs, a new invention for the gospel. The prototype backbone makes up an even smaller portion of Matthew. So when you ask what the prototype author's theology was, first you have to strip away all the Lukan and Marcionite material from Luke to find "L", and then you have to strip away all the Matthew and borrowed Marcionite material from Matthew to find M (note helps to work with Mark in both cases to find the common parts). Only after you have done that can you examine what is left and ponder what the prototype author thought.
But I think it's even more complicated than what I presented in the paragraph above. As I noted Christianity incubated in these communities for likely many generations, and the prototype could be more than a few generations old when it was first used as the backbone of a gospel. What is more this prototype, as a play, was not sacred and was subject to adjustments and so accumulated material from many sources and many hands. We can see this in the fusion of the feedings of the 4000 and the 5000 in "M" (common to Mathew and Mark) complete with a summary commenting on the two stories. This says enough time and distance occurred for the feeding story to branch into a 4000 in one locale and 5000 in another, and then some time in the future merged back together and then edited by a single hand to fuse into one story look with a summary. This suggests we are looking at a time frame of over a generation just for that element to be completed and stable in the prototype, and at least three hands (note Matthew and Mark differ in language slightly for that section, suggesting they had variant versions of M, with Mathew's source being perhaps more primitive -- this does not mean Matthew is older, just that his copy of M is older than the copy Mark found).
To summarize, you have multiple hands and a couple of generations if not more for the prototype gospel material to accumulate. The theology is for the most part bland (more bland than Mark), acceptable for the most part by all the Christian sects, devoid of sectarian additions (I have not identified any) . John the Baptist and the calling of the fishermen may be relatively late elements.
“’That was excellently observed’, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken.” - Jonathan Swift