Is Marcions Gospel First? - Dr. Markus Vinzent Vs. Dr. Dennis MacDonald

[Giuseppe]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6APhk33Z8uI

Interesting. I am curious about Vinzent's theory that Marcion, when he knew the reactions to his own gospel, merged some parts of them in his new draft. This may explain the judaizing tenor of some episodes, and why the Markan secrecy entered partially in the Evangelion.

I praise a lot the kindness of prof MacDonald and I hope that he can say in future something of more "marcionite" (by seeing Homeric influence in the same Mcn?).

What do those two scholars share in common, according to you?

[mlinssen]

A very important point, at 15 minutes in:

No birth story, no resurrection, no miracles in any of the Patristic writings before 140 CE

And Philip attests to the same - he criticises the virgin birth as well as the resurrection. I would have to dig into the miracles, but Thomas has none of the above of course, and it is highly likely that Marcion also doesn't have any of it

Just sayings, and nothing else, is what is attested to

[mlinssen]

And let's be honest: the reason that Q gets rejected highly likely lies in the fact that, precisely as Vinzent states, the gospels allegedly are divinely inspired and the question is whether Q was.
And naturally, if we look at Thomas as a possible Quelle, it is astonishingly evident that a true sayings gospel is extremely unlikely to be divinely inspired - or rather, that it is nigh impossible to demonstrate that the latter is the case

So a fun question might be, to those who reject Q: "do you believe that a sayings gospel could be demonstrated to be divinely inspired? And if yes, then how so?"

[mlinssen]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6APhk33Z8uI

Interesting. I am curious about Vinzent's theory that Marcion, when he knew the reactions to his own gospel, merged some parts of them in his new draft. This may explain the judaizing tenor of some episodes, and why the Markan secrecy entered partially in the Evangelion.

I praise a lot the kindness of prof MacDonald and I hope that he can say in future something of more "marcionite" (by seeing Homeric influence in the same Mcn?).

What do those two scholars share in common, according to you?

I am quite underwhelmed by MacDonald to be honest, who apparently gets tired of listening rather soon, given his "that analogy doesn't work for me" that is succeeded by nothing.
When you believe in Papias who so very anachronistically mentions only Mark and Matthew and no John or Luke, and when you have been wielding the Homeric hammer for so long, it is unavoidable that you reject anything but Markan Priority

I like his work, of which I have read a few books - but he doesn't hold a candle to Vinzent when it comes to arguing his case or reacting to what others bring up

[schillingklaus]

They share the naive belief that one of these gospels must have come first. Non-naive scholars like Jean Magne know that both of them are derived from lost pre-synoptic gospels.

[Leucius Charinus]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6APhk33Z8uI

The authors are a tiny tiny group who knew each other very well?

38:20
https://youtu.be/6APhk33Z8uI?t=2300

Vinzent coming from Patristics:

"It is so clear that we are dealing with a tiny tiny group"

"tiny group - they knew each other better than we - Jacob, Dennis and Markus - know each other. the world was tiny."

Highly reminiscent of Thomas Brodie's idea that the NT was produced by a "literary school"

[Irish1975]

Not sure what you mean by “these gospels,” schillingklaus.

Vinzent holds that Marcion published the first written gospel; not that the one reconstructed by scholars is identical with that original. Both he and Klinghardt postulate multiple redactions.

MacDonald clings to Q, the quintessential “lost pre-synoptic gospel.”

[Irish1975]

Vinzent—

In the absence of firm internal grounds, the evidence most often adduced for dating our [canonical] Gospels has been their early reception in other early Christian writings. Turning to this, does the history of reception favor a pre-Marcion dating, or rather a dating to the time of Marcion, by whom the Gospels are known?

The fact that the Gospels are not quoted or referred to in Paul or in other early Christian literature prior to Marcion speaks in favor of a dating of these texts to the time of Marcion. Yet, the evidence is clouded by the departmental boundaries between the disciplines of New Testament Studies and Patristics. The well-known reference work, Biblia Patristica, for example, covers texts ‘from the origins to Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian’ in its first volume, but excludes all writings that can be found in the New Testament. If these were included, it would become even more apparent that pp. 223–415 of the first volume, listing over 10,000 quotes (!) from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John for the period from Marcion onwards, do not provide a single one for the time before Marcion.

Walter Schmithals speaks of the ‘missing resonance that our Gospels had far into the 2nd century.’ The first arguable cases are those authors who are sometimes dated to the beginning of the 2nd century (Ignatius, Papias, Polycarp, Hegesippus), but who, however, may be dated as contemporary with or even later than Marcion.

Even if we date these authors and their writings prior to Marcion, we come to the same conclusion. Scholarship, here, gives us a good ground on which to stand. Only recently, in a centenary volume of 2005, Andrew F. Gregory and Christopher M. Tuckett picked up the often used, but rarely diligently read slender work of the Oxford Society of Historical Theology of 1905, entitled The New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers. Gregory and Tuckett brought together a group of specialists and reviewed the earlier findings of their Oxford colleagues. William L. Petersen gives a short summary of what had been achieved at Oxford over a hundred years ago:

The charge given to the committee was ‘to prepare a volume exhibiting those passages of early Christian writers which indicate, or have been thought to indicate, acquaintance with any of the books of the NT.’ The committee limited itself to the so-called Apostolic Fathers (AFs), examining eight authors (and/or texts) [Barn., Did., 1Clem., Ign., PolPhil., Herm., 2Clem.]. …The 1905 researchers ranked the likelihood that a specific Father demonstrated knowledge of a given book in the NT by assigning each possible intersection a letter grade from ‘A’ to ‘D’.

‘A’ designated ‘books about which there can be no reasonable doubt’ that the Father knew it;
‘B’ referred to books where there was a ‘high degree of probabililty’;
‘C’ referred to a ‘lower degree of probabilility;
‘D’ meant that the evidence was ‘too uncertain to allow any reliance to be placed upon it.’

A table on page 137 summarizes the results. Out of a total of 216 possible intersections between a Father and a specific book, conclusions were possible in only 85 of the intersections, 39 percent. Out of those 85 places where it was possible to assign a letter rank, we find 43 Ds and 22 Cs. There are 14 Bs (8 of them from a single source: Polycarp), and 6 A’s. …

The most remarkable aspect of the 1905 volume is the fact that now, a century later, the significance of the ‘formal’ results achieved by the committee … pale into insignificance when compared with the notes the researchers offered on the passages they examined. … [They] were well aware of the multiplicity of possible explanations for the evidence they found in the AFs; they were also acutely aware of their inability to reach definitive judgments on the basis of the evidence. All they could do was follow the via negativa: the source(s) used in about three-quarters of the passages in the AFs with a parallel in the NT … ‘affords no evidence for the use of either any of our Gospels in its present form’; that being the case, one has to consider … ‘the direct use of another [viz. non-canonical] source altogether, whether oral or written.

Petersen concludes his summary by pointing out that ‘their empirical, textual observations were devastating for the idea of a ‘standard’ or ‘established’ text of the New Testament in the first half of the 2nd century. And he specifies the results from his own reading of them:

First, it is clear that the vast majority of passages in the AFs for which one can find likely parallels in the NT have deviations from our present, critically reconstructed NT text. It must be emphasized that the vast majority of these deviations are not minor (e.g. differences in spelling or verb tense), but major (a completely new context, a substantial interpolation or omission, a conflation of two entirely separate ideas and/or passages.)

Second, harmonization is a surprisingly common phenomenon. Sometimes the harmonizations are (almost) entirely composed of material found in our modern editions of the NT; more often, however, they contain material which we today classify as extra-canonical.

Third, the AFs often reproduce, without remark, material that we, today, call extra-canonical. Sometimes this extra-canonical material is introduced with the quotation formula — such as, ‘the Lord says,’ or ‘the Gospel says.’ The obvious inference is that the Father considered this extra-canonical source as authoritative as any other. … Some might wonder if the disagreements would disappear if the basis for comparison were changed from our modern critically reconstructed text to the texts of the ‘great uncials’ of the mid-4th century (Cs. Sinaiticus, Vaticanus). They do not. Even if the basis for comparison is changed to the text of our oldest continuous-text manuscripts of the NT documents (P64, P67, P66), the differences remain. One simply must admit that the passages found in the AFs are different from the texts found in our oldest NT papyri… .

Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels (Peeters, 2014), pp. 224-26.)

[Leucius Charinus]

Petersen concludes his summary by pointing out that ‘their empirical, textual observations were devastating for the idea of a ‘standard’ or ‘established’ text of the New Testament in the first half of the 2nd century. And he specifies the results from his own reading of them:

First, it is clear that the vast majority of passages in the AFs for which one can find likely parallels in the NT have deviations from our present, critically reconstructed NT text. It must be emphasized that the vast majority of these deviations are not minor (e.g. differences in spelling or verb tense), but major (a completely new context, a substantial interpolation or omission, a conflation of two entirely separate ideas and/or passages.)

Second, harmonization is a surprisingly common phenomenon. Sometimes the harmonizations are (almost) entirely composed of material found in our modern editions of the NT; more often, however, they contain material which we today classify as extra-canonical.

Third, the AFs often reproduce, without remark, material that we, today, call extra-canonical. Sometimes this extra-canonical material is introduced with the quotation formula — such as, ‘the Lord says,’ or ‘the Gospel says.’ The obvious inference is that the Father considered this extra-canonical source as authoritative as any other. ….

Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels (Peeters, 2014), pp. 224-26.)

Does the "without remark" imply that the extra-canonical material was not specified? Or if not, was the extra-canonical material identified, and is it listed somewhere?

Thanks.

[schillingklaus]

Q lacks a narrative of the mass feeding(s), which is quintessential for Christianity as it institutes the eucharist.

Anyways, both Vincent and McDonald claim that Lk and Mt depend essentially on Mk instead of prior common sources of the narrative. If they bend Mk long enough to talk away the non-original stuff and the chismolatry, the result could no longer be called Mk but wouldbe an entirely different work altogether.