Is Irenaeus citing from a Marcionite canonical text?

[bcedaifu]

And why do I think people pursue the answer in the synoptic texts? Because human nature likes dealing with certainties or at least perceived certainties. The same psychological phenomenon that is attending church is at the bottom of developing models for the gospel out of a false canon. It's there and that's all we got. Just pretend its real and continue to engage others "faking it" and you can have a job with authority and you can publish stuff and be respected. But its all bullshit. Marcion was first and anyone who has ever thought about Marcion for more than hour knows its true. They're just scared of losing that most sacred of human commodities = security

In my unlearned opinion, it would be wise to repeat your title, or the theme of your intended "paper", that is, the publication, the abstract, the text of what it is you intend to present to the conference in England.

Juxtaposing your sentences highlighted above, with this, more recent quote of yours,

The paper is coming along. As it stands I don't think I will even be mentioning Marcion....snip

one understands Peter's question, a couple pages back, inquiring about the theme of your presentation. Certainly, the title of this thread is misleading, if you delete reference to Marcion in your paper. We don't need the whole essay. Just a couple of key words, and the proper title, would go a long way towards relieving the stress and strain of burrowing through these umpteen pages of random ruminations.

I am not submitting this rejoinder to ridicule, or criticise, but rather to help. That, too, in my opinion, was the thrust of David's rhetorical flourish regarding the weather on your planet.

Please step back, just for a bit, and jot down the two or three MAIN POINTS you wish to emphasize in Great Britain, and why those points are important, and which particular texts support or challenge your hypothesis, with links, as urged by David.

I think you would be wise to ignore "Marcion", as we have no text written by him, and, further, when you state that Biblical scholars prefer the Greek texts of ancient "fathers", instead of the less well known Coptic, or Armenian, or Syriac texts, because of insecurity, I think you are on thin ice, about to fall in a cold lake. If we should uncover a treasure trove of ancient texts, buried in the sands anywhere in the world, WRITTEN IN ANY LANGUAGE, scholars will be all over them like bees to nectar.

It would seem, unless you do abandon your references to "Marcion", that you prefer the texts of Tertullian and a couple of other authors, over the known texts of tradition, i.e. the gospels. Our opinion of what Marcion wrote, is based entirely on what others claimed he had written. I doubt that orthodox biblical scholarship is fearful of Tertullian et al, I think they are bemused by the idea that a known fence sitter, Tertullian, having embraced the heretical Montanist ideology, and having rejected the authority of Rome, and Trinitarianism (a concept he had championed), should be perceived, seventeen odd centuries later, as having painted a more compelling portrait of earliest Christianity.

I think it is also a bit banal to argue too forcefully about presbyters singular versus plural. There are so many instances of scribal errors, both genuine and contrived, in the ancient texts, that it is relatively futile to focus on something so easily misrepresented through fatigue or carelessness. If this distinction is critical to your presentation, then your working draft may well benefit from a three sentence paragraph, signaling the justification for focusing on this (minor?) grammatical snafu, in the face of far more significant hurdles, including absence of provenance, and errors resulting from translation misunderstandings.

[Stephan Huller]

Well I am currently working on it. Maybe it will mention Marciom but as the song says, something's gotta give ...

I'm digging the paper today. I think everything in my life depends on how much sleep I get.

[Stuart]

Stephen,

The passages from Paul that Irenaeus quotes in this section are entirely the Catholic form, many of them not found in the Marcionite in any form (although a few are the same). It provides good ammunition to explain the reasons a Catholic editor would want to insert them.

I think the "elder" either refers to a person who had the status of "brother" (IMHO brother only refers to church officials). I rather doubt there was a Marcionite book of that title. More likely the title could be an allusion to the OT as source, as from AH 4.24 "These things, too, were preached to the Gentiles by word, without [the aid of] the Scriptures."

Anyway, good luck on your paper.

[Stephan Huller]

I hope to post the first draft before I fly to Toronto next week. Any constructive criticism would be appreciated.

[Stephan Huller]

Things I'd like to say in the article but can't:

"Aside from his seeminly unquenchable anger, Irenaeus's indifference to the feelings and concerns of his readership often makes Adversus Haereses feel like the literary equivalent of battery or even rape albeit with the assault taking place in the reader's soul."

[Stephan Huller]

More garbage removed from editing:

Indeed Loofs’s comment that 'Irenaeus ist als theologischer Schriftsteller viel kleiner gewesen … .. . noch kleiner wird Irenaeus als Theologe’ effectively identifying the Church Father as a second rate theologian who drew his material from earlier sources, raises an even more interesting question - was Irenaeus even a theologian at all? Did he even have to even be a Christian at all? The fourteenth century Samaritan chronicler Abu’l Fath cites from a near contemporary text documenting Alexander of Aphrodisias’s struggle to make the leaders of the Samaritan community embrace true monarchia. The text documents the persecution and book burning that ultimately result from the failure of the community to embrace his ideas. Under the guidance of Loofs’s portrait of Celsus as little more than a editor of previous ideas, Adversus Haereses could just as well be the survival of the syntagma Celsus apparently promised at the close of his Alethes Logos “as a sequel to this one, in which he engaged to supply practical rules of living to those who felt disposed to embrace his opinions.”

We needed go as far as this in order to acknowledge that Adversus Haereses is a very baffling text. At best it can be described as a Patristic ‘scrapbook’ where a series of discussions have been ripped out of their original context and arranged as a series of literary vignettes. This is especially true in the case of Book Four. There have been a steady stream of commentators ranging from Bousset, Harnack, Loofs, Grant and Quispell who have attempted to identify external sources for this extremely disjointed narrative. In this paper we will focus our efforts on identifying the grounding of Irenaeus’s repeated allusions to the Elder in 4.26.1 – 4.32.2. Instead of looking to external source we shall simply make the case that the present fragment was authentically Irenaean but ripped from its original context immediately following another long fragment elsewhere in Adversus Haereses. Once the two halves are restored we can at long last identify the elusive Elder.

[Stephan Huller]

Page 1:

Papias, The Elder and Irenaeus’s Literary Borrowings in Adversus Haereses

[First Draft]

By Stephan Huller

Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses is properly defined as a synthetic text – that is, it was made through the combining of a number of constituent elements, separate material or abstract entities into a single or unified entity. As the title suggests it was written by a late second century Church Father ‘against heresies’ or against a plethora of number of philosophical schools that had varying degrees of influence over the contemporary Christian landscape. Indeed after establishing a syntagma of those heretical groups in Book One, the more detailed rejection of heretical beliefs that follows is organized according to a four broad ‘categories’ that make up the remaining four volumes of this five book set. Yet within these editorial constructs the actual content which makes up each book is confused and often difficult to follow.

Over the last two centuries commentators have struggled to find the right adjectives to describe Irenaeus’s writing style. Bacq has successfully demonstrated that the material is organized, and each book has a plan.[1] But this isn’t what Bousset, Loofs and others have found problematic about the work. Adversus Haereses can be called ‘ordered’ in the way a student might ‘copy and paste’ a series of articles with only the most superficial attempts to ‘streamline’ the resulting disjointed narrative.[2] The real question in any serious analysis of Irenaeus’s work is whether a particular section of text is properly contextualized in its present setting. In other words, did it originally come from someone or somewhere else?

If we were to take a stab at the problem of how the Adversus Haereses crystalized in its present form, we might look to Brent’s suggestion of the house schools associated with Hippolytus.[3] Photius’s statement regarding a syntagma attributed to ‘Hippolytus’ developed in part from Irenaeus’s lectures (ὁμιλοῦντος) is certainly suggestive of the mileu which produced Adversus Haereses. Moreover the Philosophumena represents yet another example of a patchwork heresiological compendium in developed from the works of ‘the blessed elder Irenaeus’ (Phil. 6.37, 50). Indeed with this text we can perhaps even see the situation in the literary workshop a little clearer still.

In the middle of Book Six of the Philosophumena its anonymous editor acknowledges that the accuracy of Irenaeus’s reporting was challenged by one of his subjects – the Marcites. The editor plainly states that these complaints may in fact have some merit as Irenaeus, in his words, “approached the subject of a refutation in a more unconstrained spirit, has explained such washings and redemptions, stating more in the way of a rough digest what are their practices.” This means in effect that Irenaeus’s original reporting got into the hands of the Marcites. They communicated their displeasure ‘denying’ what he said and now the editor in the Philosophumena has ‘corrected’ the original text accordingly.

The difficulty of course is that it is difficult to see how what now appears in the Philosophumena is a correction of what appears in Adversus Haereses 1.21.1 – 4. The Marcites didn’t have the report that now appears in Adversus Haereses but the original and now lost Against the Marcites which stood

1. Bacq De I'ancienne a la nouvelle Alliance selon S. Irenee: Unite du livre IV de I'Adversus Haereses
2. F. Loofs, Theophilus von Antiochien adversus Marcionem und die anderen theologischen Quellen bei Irenaeus, Texte und Untersuchungen, Vol. XLVI. 2. Leipzig, 1930.
3. A. Brent, Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century (Leiden: Brill, 1995).

[Stephan Huller]

p. 2

behind a great number of variant text including his own.[4] Indeed if we were to attempt to retrieve all the lost testimonials associated with this group we would have to cast a net much wider than mere explicit citations of Irenaeus. The Anonymous Treatise on Baptism preserves an important parallel to the Marcite justification for their second baptism from Luke 12:50 and Mark 10:38 as well as a more sensible variant with respect to the origin of the rite out of the magical practices of Anaxilaus.

The fact that the description of the Marcites in Adversus Haereses immediately follows the Valentinians is used to argue for the former sect as being an offshoot of the latter. But appearances can be misleading. The very synthetic nature of Adversus Haereses should raise doubts about any inference developed from the ordering of passages with each book. The editors likely had at their disposal a great number of treatises from the previous century – those written by Irenaeus and perhaps even other authors – and material was arranged to suit the stated purpose of each book. No consideration was given to maintaining the literary context from which those passages were drawn.

It is a simple fact of life that ancient editors didn’t treat their sources with a great deal of respect. The explicit mention of Irenaeus in the Philosophumena is the exception rather than the rule. When Tertullian decided to loosely translate the original source behind Adversus Haereses’s description of the Valentinian sect he doesn’t even so much as acknowledge his plagiarism.[5] Similarly Adversus Marcionem III and Adversus Iudaeos’s parallel borrowing of an early source borders on literary rape. It isn’t just that verbatim passages are used to apply to radically opposing groups (the Jews and the Marcionites) but rather that the same source material is split apart into smaller components and integrated into wholly dissimilar streams of thought that should draw out attention when tackling the origins of the fragments associated with an unnamed elder in Adversus Haereses 4.26.1 – 4.32.2.[6]

The identity of the elder of Irenaeus has been the subject of much speculation. Yet all studies have run up against a number of important difficulties. Previous studies have found it difficult to know where the citations from the elder stop and Irenaeus’s commentary begins. Moreover, in spite of the fact that explicit citations from the elder (i.e. where Irenaeus says ‘the elder said’) demonstrate clear thematic consistency a noticeable change in context occurs within Irenaeus’s commentary which has puzzled a number of contemporary commentators.

Moll goes so far as to divide the portions of the text which tackle Marcion from what comes earlier which does not seem specifically interested in the heretic.[7] Yet the problem goes much deeper than Marcion. As we just noted, while the fragments seem all closely linked together, the commentary that develops around the fragments never stops changing. Bacq identifies the overarching theme of the Book Four in terms of ‘two testaments.’ Yet this is not quite accurate. He ultimately ignores the implications of the subtle difference between the Greek diatheke and the Latin testamentum. In other words, the actual glue that holds Book Four together is the rejection of the Marcionite distinction


4. Tertullian’s use of Irenaeus the ‘eager discoverer of all doctrines (of the Valentinians)’ (Adv Valent. 5) in his own treatise Adversus Valentinianos is better fits an earlier lecture against the Valentinians rather than direct knowledge of Adversus Haereses Book One. The conclusion of the latter derives from the material used at the beginning of Adv. Valent. Adv Valent uses the same material from chapters 1 – 7 and 11 – 12 but does not know 8 – 10.
5. He credits Irenaeus with knowing all their doctrines (see above) but doesn’t inform his reader that he is copying whole sections of his work.
6. The use of large parts of De Carne Christi in Against Marcion III is yet another example of the complete transformation of original source material (i.e. cutting it up into pieces and scattering around the body of a new text).
7. S Moll, the Arch-Heretic Marcion p. 19

[Stephan Huller]

p. 3

between the ‘old’ covenant, which begins with Jesus’s appearance to Abraham and culminates with the giving of the Law on Sinai and the new covenant developed from the gospel.

To this end, we should see that Irenaeus isn’t really challenging the Marcionite separation of two collections of canonical writings – i.e. the Old and New Testaments. Instead the controversy comes down to whether the Marcionites were right in thinking that the covenant of Jesus was separate and distinct from the covenant established between Abraham, Moses and the ancient Israelites.[8] During the course of our investigation it will become self-evident that the elder fragment of 4.26.1 – 4.32.2 doesn’t quite fit this theme and is only superficially adapted to its present literary context. The first couple of chapters in this section really don’t have anything to do with Marcion whatsoever.

Indeed when Irenaeus in chapter 27 draws the reader’s attention to ‘what the elder said’ about the falling away of elders (veteribus) into lusts and sinfulness, it has the effect of startling the reader. From talking about Abraham and the covenants in chapter 25, the subject suddenly changes in chapter 26 to incorporate Book Three’s discussion of apostolic succession and apostolic doctrine. As Irenaeus continues to cite from what appears to be a written testimony of this elder, his source eventually mentions figures from the Old Testament and demands that they be re-interpreted as ‘types.’ It is then that integration with the original anti-Marcionite polemic which started at the beginning of the book takes place. But the process seems rather forced, confusing and ultimately contrived.

It shall be our purpose here to demonstrate that while this reincorporation effort tells us a great deal about the Marcionites, this information does not come from the elder but Irenaeus himself – or perhaps the third century editor of this section. The elder cannot be demonstrated to have directed any hostility against the Marcionites in these fragments or anywhere else for that matter. The Marcionites were something of an afterthought for Irenaeus. Most of his efforts seem to have been directed against the Valentinians and Florinus in particular. While there are hostile references to Marcion in Adversus

8. Cf. Adversus Haereses 4.15.2 “And not only so, but the Lord also showed that certain precepts were enacted for them by Moses, on account of their hardness, and because of their unwillingness to be obedient, when, on their saying to Him, "Why then did Moses command to give a writing of divorcement, and to send away a wife?" He said to them, "Because of the hardness of your hearts he permitted these things to you; but from the beginning it was not so;" thus exculpating Moses as a faithful servant, but acknowledging one God, who from the beginning made male and female, and reproving them as hard-hearted and disobedient. And therefore it was that they received from Moses this law of divorcement, adapted to their hard nature. But why say I these things concerning the old covenant (veteri testamento)? For in the New also are the apostles found doing this very thing, on the ground which has been mentioned, Paul plainly declaring, But these things I say, not the Lord." And again: "But this I speak by permission, not by commandment." And again: "Now, as concerning virgins, I have no commandment from the Lord; yet I give my judgment, as one that hath obtained mercy of the Lord to be faithful." But further, in another place he says: "That Satan tempt you not for your incontinence." If, therefore, even in the new covenant (novo testamento), the apostles are found granting certain precepts in consideration of human infirmity, because of the incontinence of some, lest such persons, having grown obdurate, and despairing altogether of their salvation, should become apostates from God,--it ought not to be wondered at, if also in the old covenant the same God permitted similar indulgences for the benefit of His people, drawing them on by means of the ordinances already mentioned, so that they might obtain the gift of salvation through them, while they obeyed the Decalogue, and being restrained by Him, should not revert to idolatry, nor apostatize from God, but learn to love Him with the whole heart.” Clearly as Knox has already noted in reference to the preservation of the Marcionite debates the Latin terminology obscured the original sense of the Greek records. Moll’s claim (p 19) that the Marcionites only directed their criticism at the god of the Jews not Moses and the Hebrews is plainly false (cf. Adv Marc 2.27). We should also consider Apelles the Marcionites’s identification of ‘the fiery angel’ as Jesus. The Marcionite position was clearly the same as the sectarian Jewish position recorded in rabbinic texts (cf. A. Heschel, Theology of Ancient Judaism, 2.353-56, especially 354 citing R. Shimon ben Laqish's interpretation of "And I [God] will give you the tablets of stone, and the law and the commandments I have written Ex 24:12, as cited by Heschel, 354: God did not write the Torah [except for the Ten Commandments]. According G. Vcrmes, "The Decalogue and the Minim," B£A W 103 (1968) 232-40). The problem is only that the monarchian emphasis of Irenaeus refracts the actual implications of Marcionism in predictable ways.

[Stephan Huller]

p. 4

Haereses there are also acknowledgements that the beliefs of the sect are more ‘tolerable’ (3.12.8) than other sects. If Tertullian’s Adversus Marcionem Books Four and Five are in fact developed from the work Irenaeus promises to develop against Marcion one can make the case that his consistent effort to appeal his interpretation of the gospel to that group implies there necessarily had to be more commonality between the traditions than often supposed.[9]

Hill, however, would have us believe that the section in Book Four which contain the ‘collection of elder fragments’ (hereafter CEF) in 4.26.1 – 4.32.2 derive their origin from Polycarp of Smyrna.[10] Polycarp is not only cited as the great opponent of Marcion but is usually assumed to be “a disciple of apostles, who heard and saw apostles and their disciples.” (4.27.1) But was he really? Did Irenaeus really believe that Polycarp’s teacher ‘John’ was an apostle or the elder of this name? There is no real consensus on this question. Culpepper confirms that Irenaeus was responsible for the confusion between the two Johns.[11] But even here the question isn’t as straightforward as Culpepper and others describe. They typically ignore that the term ‘the disciple of the Lord’ is already used by Papias to describe John the elder.[12] Did Irenaeus’s merely take over a terminology which had different implications than we might expect from a plain reading of the text. Moreover as we shall demonstrate throughout this work, the entire question of how faithfully the writings of Irenaeus’s were preserved also becomes a significant problem.[13]

With our proposed ‘rediscovery’ of the original literary context for the CEF everything will sudden make sense. It should be evident that Irenaeus has Papias in mind throughout the whole section leading up to his explicit citation of the words of the elder which cement his identification with John the elder. Indeed our proposed ‘original literary context’ was in fact first intimated by Hill and later echoed by Behr and at least a few others. Hill makes reference to it in his treatment of the anti-Marcionite commentary in Adversus Haereses 4.30 and while he ultimately settles on Irenaeus’s lost treatise De Monarchia as the original source for much of the information, Moll drawing from the opinion of Brox and Loofs demonstrates the implausibility of Hill’s suggestion.[14]

9. This phenomenon goes beyond Adversus Haereses Book Four and Tertullian’s Adversus Haereses. Mackenzie (Iain M. MacKenzie, Irenaeus's Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching:A Theological Commentary and Translation Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002) calls attention to the name of the addressee in this work i.e. Marcianos noting that this appellation “could have been employed as a personalized representation for the purpose of addressing the work to a particular body of persons - the Marcianoi, the appellation used by Justin Martyr for the followers of the heretic Marcion. That the argument of this work could be directed towards persuading perhaps hesitant followers of Marcionism may be supported (though there is no direct attack on that heresy in the Demonstration) by several emphases of Irenaeus implying a criticism of that heretical scheme.” (p.37) Many of the arguments he identifies there are very similar to those we will encounter in the aforementioned texts. All of which, when couples with the repeated identification of the ‘Jewishness’ of Marcion (cf. Vinzent 'Marcion the Jew', Judaisme Ancien 1 2013, 159-201) might argue for historical Marcionism to more closely resemble the beliefs associated with Apelles rather than the ‘straw man’ caricature of ‘Marcionism’ that emerged in third century tomes.
10. C E Hill,. From the Lost Teaching of Polycarp. Identifying Irenaeus' Apostolic Presbyter and the Author of "Ad Diognetum" Mohr Siebeck 2006
11. R A Culpepper John the Son of Zebedee p. 299
12. Eusebius Hist. Eccl. 3.39.15-16
13. This extends beyond the immediate question of the role of the editors of Adversus Haereses but also to the scribes who transcribed and translated that original text into other languages as the original Greek is for the most part lost. The Latin and Armenian translations disagree at the critical juncture where Irenaeus introduces ‘the elder’ to his audience making it impossible to be certain about anything said about the elder in what follows. Hill makes it seem as if there universal agreement with respect to the Armenian reading. However Moll (p. 20) demonstrates that while the Sources Chretiennes (1965) have adapted to the Armenian translation of the passage, whereas the Fontes Christiani (1995) stick to the Latin version.
14. Moll p. 20. Norbert Brox, Offenbarung, Gnosis und gnostischer Mythos bei Irenaus von Lyon, Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 1966, p. 146-148; Loofs, Theophilus, p. 310. Moll notes that Brox is strikingly missing from Hill's index of authors. Let us begin by noting that Irenaeus’s opponents are not specifically named in 4.28 – 30. Nevertheless there can be little doubt that they were Marcionites. How then could this section have derived its origin from De Monarchia when that letter was directed against Florinus and the Valentinians not the Marcionites? Hill’s efforts to make sense of the elder fragment sees him continually ‘move the posts’ of the discussion to suit the separate components of the existing discussion within the section making reference to the fragment. Here he wants us to consider De Monarchia but at another point in his discussion he appeals for us to ignore 4.26 and see that as somehow ‘separate’ from the main body of material. The only way to make sense of the constantly ‘shifting’ application of a series of fragments which betray remarkable consistency to each other is to suggest that the addition of the material was something of an afterthought or was done haphazardly.