Milk and Honey in the Marcionite Sacraments

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Secret Alias
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Milk and Honey in the Marcionite Sacraments

Post by Secret Alias »

Instead of that bread, the presence-bread [cf. Exod 25: 30] of the new covenant,they offered honey or milk.Since all these things are natural, howeverThey could not found their error this way either.Honey is not brought as an offeringnor is milk used for sprinkling and libation.The presence-bread was offered symbolically,and blood and wine purified as types.The crucifiers and the teachers of errorHave been contradicted by the symbol of which Moses wrote.
(Ephrem Hymn. contra Haer. 47. 6)

Milk and Honey is explicitly Mosaic. It comes from the description of the Promised Land. Those who claim Marcion was anti-Jewish haven't read enough.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
perseusomega9
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Re: Milk and Honey in the Marcionite Sacraments

Post by perseusomega9 »

Milk and honey is still given to those baptized in the Orthodox Churches as well as warm water mixed with the wine before the consecration. I would guess both practices stem from the melding of various traditions as they made amends.

eta isn't milk and honey also mentioned by Hippolytus ( or was it Epiphanius) as occurring after baptism?
The metric to judge if one is a good exegete: the way he/she deals with Barabbas.

Who disagrees with me on this precise point is by definition an idiot.
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Clive
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Re: Milk and Honey in the Marcionite Sacraments

Post by Clive »

John Henry Newman St. Paul at Melita

http://www.bartleby.com/340/321.html
"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
Clive
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Re: Milk and Honey in the Marcionite Sacraments

Post by Clive »

"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
outhouse
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Re: Milk and Honey in the Marcionite Sacraments

Post by outhouse »

Secret Alias wrote: Those who claim Marcion was anti-Jewish haven't read enough.

Are you trying to make a case he was not a gnostic heretic?
Clive
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Re: Milk and Honey in the Marcionite Sacraments

Post by Clive »

"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
g_n_o_s_i_s
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Re: Milk and Honey in the Marcionite Sacraments

Post by g_n_o_s_i_s »

outhouse wrote: Are you trying to make a case he was not a gnostic heretic?
In what sense was he Gnostic?
Secret Alias
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Re: Milk and Honey in the Marcionite Sacraments

Post by Secret Alias »

I am saying he was Jewish. Von Harnack said he likely had Jewish parents (which is the same thing). Like look at this forum. All these people talking about Jewish things (early Christianity being a 'Jewish thing') but do they have Fingerspitzengefühl for the Jewish religion, what is possible, impossible? Not a chance.

I remember watching that movie American History X (or whatever it was called) with Edward Norton about a Jewish skinhead (a movie written by Jews). It's hard to explain to people what it is to be Jewish and Jewishness has changed because of the development of the state of Israel. Whenever I go to Israel I am confronted by the change in what Jewishness was for my mother's generation (pre-1948) and what it has become with the development of Israel as a world power.

But that not withstanding - taking Israelis as a wholly modern social paradigm - it wasn't too long ago that American Jews could identify with the civil rights struggle of black people. It is almost hard to imagine that today because they seem to have been lumped in America with typical affluent west or east coast wealthy liberal donor class. Being Jewish was an unwanted minority in the United States. I can remember hearing stories about Jews being barred from admittance in southern golf and country clubs including Florida in the 1980s.

The point is that Marcion's interest and sensitivity for 'Jewish issues' and 'Jewish concerns' are paralleled by many messianic movements in a later period. For instance the Donme in Turkey preserve a strangely antinomian Jewish messianic movement that swept across the world in the 17th century. The common themes include Torah observance as slavery and the messiah bring 'freedom from the law.'

It would seem that the Christian persecution of Jews from the end of the Roman Empire down through to the Renaissance essentially boxed Jews in to maintaining Jewish religious customs. The facts are that when Western civilization opened its doors to the Jews especially after the French Revolution it spurred the modern Reform movement in Judaism which interesting developed a result of antinomian traditions such as Frankism and Sabbateanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbateans

The idea that the Israelites chose to obey their Lord (rather than essentially being owned by him as a slave lord) is a thoroughly modern concept. I am quite sure that Marcion's negative portrayal of the god who took over the slaves of Pharaoh was not that far off the mark for many believers. Indeed I think the manner in which the Pentateuch ends where there is no entrance into the Promised Land is a powerful symbol. The Israelites remained as slaves essentially being 'redeemed' from one master to another. This understanding of 'redemption' is present again in Marcionism where Christ purchases the slaves of the Demiurge but ultimately frees them.

If anyone is interested in continuing to read my ramblings it should be obvious that I think the reason the Marcionites had milk and honey in their sacraments was because they viewed themselves as completing the quest for the Promised Land. I think that the challenge that we have a researchers is to try and incorporate 'what is possible with Judaism' with 'what it says about the Marcionites' and try to pursue theories which understand the sect as a first century messianic tradition which interpreted the destruction of the temple as the promised 'freedom' from the Law.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: Milk and Honey in the Marcionite Sacraments

Post by Secret Alias »

And now to take things even a step further (and drawing from my own family's experience during the Holocaust) I would like to know how many Jews became atheists or at least agnostic after surviving the Second World War. I would imagine that observant Jewish families often stayed observant but there was a huge pool of Jews who were fully or mostly integrated into European secular culture who were dragged into the camps because of their ancestry rather than their practicing the religion of Israel. I have no statistics and my family so moved away from Judaism that we had very few friends who were practicing Jews growing up. Nevertheless I think that many Jews viewed their god as cruel, vindictive, irrational etc owing to what 'he put them through' between 1940 - 1945. I am not suggest a mass apostasy but the scale of the brutality is and was difficult to reconcile with a caring loving God. Now if we rewind back to the previous holocaust at the end of the Jewish revolt of 66 - 70 CE should be imagine that the cultural landscape would be any different? Even Josephus seems to attribute the war to a bunch of hotheads and that the majority of the Jewish population were dragged into the conflict as innocent victims. Given the scale of the retribution against the population and scale of the death and the general brutality of the Romans I don't find it hard to believe that a religion like Marcionism could have arisen in that era especially if it was aimed principally (as Tertullian says) as a movement to attract recent proselytes to the religion.

If, as Philo and others suggest, that the high priest was a living personification of the Logos or angel of the presence (and thus the spokesman of the Jewish god) if the high priest was in anyway responsible for the revolt it would be that hard to question not only his judgement but the god he represented.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
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