Giuseppe wrote: ↑Fri Jul 06, 2018 9:05 am
DCHindley wrote: ↑Fri Jul 06, 2018 8:56 am
If the rabbinic sages (the more outstanding among their peers) differed in their interpretive opinions or even facts of the matter, can we not also expect that Christian elders might pass on unwritten traditions that differed in lore or facts. What else can one expect?
The problem with this view is that the marcionites didn't have something as a ''old tradition''. The God of Marcion was totally a new revelation and the only ''Elder'' allowed is only him,
SOLUS PAULUS. Even Celsus recognized this fact and despised the being too much suspiciously ''new'' of this religion. So the term ''tradition'' identifies without shadow of doubt only the Judaizers field.
And if I identify Papias as an anti-marcionite figure, then any his use of the term ''tradition'' is made not ''innocent'' (innocent in the sense meant by DCH) by the simple his being a tradition
eo ipso in opposition to Marcion.
I dunno Giuseppe. IMHO, introducing Marcion and his followers into a discussion always seems to muddy the waters, mainly because we really don't know all that much about them other than what was said about then by authors who followed the anti-heresy movement. I think that what had been relayed has suffered severe redaction to make him/them into straw men to be knocked down. In some ways they are relaying rumors as if facts, and I suspect they had never read anything by Marcion other than his
Antitheses.
The statements by early Christian writers (up to about the end of the 3rd century CE) just assumed, for the sake of polemic, that Marcion had, besides subjecting the received written gospel(s) and letters of Paul available in his age and area to analysis, distinguishing a core gospel preached by Jesus from the parts he believed had been added Judaic beliefs pertaining to an ignorant creator god, had also re-wrote the gospel(s) into a unified gospel, and his own compact version of the Pauline corpus, all reversed engineered to remove the Judaic parts.
The Heresiologists may have been right about him creating a revised Gospel text to publish what he believed to be a message from the true, real god, as preached by Jesus.
The high Christology of the Paulines may have been what attracted Marcion to Paul's writings in the first place, but the problem is that I think I have already made a
prima facie case that all Christological material in the Paulines was added to existing coherent texts.
If one wants to assume as many here have done that the Christology was central to them and somehow Marcionite in nature, then I have to say that this would be much harder to prove than most think. The christological statements are not by any means thematically presented and differ in details from the cosmology attributed to Marcion by the Herseiologists.
I think that what Marcion had liked about them was Paul's condemnation of the Judean Law as *the* means of reconciliation with God, offering instead that faith in God's promise of respite for all who believed that it would or could be accomplished was the *real* means of reconciliation to god. That resonated with his belief that the gospel truth had been contaminated with Judaistic thought. It didn't matter to Marcion that Paul's god was the Creator god, but what he had read had encouraged him to formally oppose the contamination that he believed had already occurred.
If the proto-orthodox somehow Judaized it because many of them were of Judean origin, then we have a shaky Christological core around which is this counterpoint of coherent hellenized Judean narrative that has nothing to do with Jesus or cosmology at all.
So, no, I do not think this adds anything to a discussion about what conditions may explain how traditions from these elders could vary from one another.
DCH