A Basic Objection to BeDuhn’s “Semler Hypothesis”

[Irish1975]

A pertinent question is: Why would two anti-Marcionite writers use Marcion's Gospel as the basis for their Gospels?

Why would anyone other than Grant be buried in Grant's Tomb? It makes no sense.

[mlinssen]

I still see no objection to my LukeMatthew as a single editorial to Mark, yet looking at the quoting circus around and against "Marcion", it seems like it was a work in progress, which contradicts everything that we have found.
Naturally the FF don't t want to disclose *Ev unless it suits them, and perhaps they purposely mix Luke and Matthew when they want to make up Marcionite material - but then again they should quote either Luke or Matthew when they cite either of those two, and the odd thing is that they verbatim quote a mix of both, which is absolutely impossible

Did they have the Diatessaron instead? I mean either they quote from memory and couldn't possibly attain the verbatim level that they have, or they cite from a text that is neither Luke nor Matthew

It "seems impossible" only under the assumption--always taken for granted, never justified--that these were separate, "independent" texts, brought together only long after their separate composition.

Bringing texts together is something entirely different from combining, mixing, fusing them. We have separate texts, and Lawd knows that they made their way in collections of all kinds of sorts, a John with a Matthew and nothing else for instance - that evidence we do have for sure

I don't assume anything, we don't have mixed texts, never found anything the like. We don't have a Mark v0.6, a proto Luke, anything the like. That didn't preclude their existence, and we may yet run into a first of its kind at some point - but we don't have half products, mixed products, or anything the like

A Diatessaron is a very, very likely candidate for the Lukes and Matthews that Tertullian and chums quote

And nothing else

[John2]

[This thread is a comment on Jason BeDuhn’s The First New Testament: Marcion’s Scriptural Canon (2013), mainly the introduction to chapter 3.]

Following BeDuhn, it is commonly held that The Evangelion (attributed to Marcion) and Luke’s Gospel wer both redactions of a common, earlier proto-Gospel.

Hypothesis: someone wrote a Gospel text earlier than both The Evangelion and gLuke, which served as the basis for both latter texts.

This conjecture, which BeDuhn associates with Johann Semler, is positioned in today’s academic context as a mediating third way between (A) the discredited Patristic/Harnack thesis that Marcion shortened and mutilated the text of Luke, and (B) the radical thesis that Luke’s Gospel is nothing other than a supplemented plagiarism of The Evangelion published by Marcion.

But is this mediating theory, the “Semler Hypothesis,” a workable theory at all?

First of all, Klinghardt observes that, as with “Q,” there is no data or ancient witness for such a text. This is a serious objection, but there is not much to say about it.

My guess is that Marcion and Luke used the Ebionite Matthew, which I think was created using a translation of the Hebrew Matthew.

This would explain why Luke, Marcion's gospel and the Ebionite Matthew resemble each other and why Marcion's gospel has "Mattheanisms" and why Marcion was a celibate vegetarian who opposed sacrifice and Torah observance, because these were Ebionite ideas.

So for me the Ebionite Matthew is "proto-Luke" (derived ultimately from the Hebrew Matthew).

[mlinssen]

The OP will mostly only make sense for people who have read and absorbed BeDuhn's book, especially pp. 78-92.

The value of focusing on the work of the Marcion scholars is that (a) these people have a more erudite command of the ancient material than most of us do, and (b) we can hammer out our own ideas with each other more effectively if we are tracking an intelligent scholarly work. (Which is not at all to say that I agree with any contemporary scholar dogmatically, as the OP shows.)

It's just my suggestion for a more substantive conversation than the usual back-and-forth of homespun theorizing.

"Semler put forward the intriguing suggestion that the version of the gospel found in the Evangelion arose in the context of the Gentile mission, and that its relatively lesser Judaic material relative to Luke finds its explanation within the context of this intended audience

(common proto-Luke)

Schwegler and Ritschl argued that Luke is actually an edition produced af-ter Marcion, correcting the Evangelion in line with the orthodox view of Jesus of the mid-second century."(page 78)

(common proto-*Ev)

BeDuhn defines it as follows:

1. Marcion’s Evangelion derives from Luke by a process of reduction (The Patristic Hypothesis).
2. Luke derives from Marcion’s Evangelion by a process of expansion (The Schwegler Hypothesis).
3. Marcion’s Evangelion and Luke are both independent developments of a common proto-gospel (The Semler Hypothesis).

Then Irish poses the question:

"In particular, does the postulation of such a proto-Gospel in any way advance or clarify our understanding of the origins of either gLuke or The Evangelion, our two extant texts? Here is problem as I see it."

The answer to that naturally is "Yes", if we have a text that comes before other texts then we learn something about their origins

What Klinghardt says is irrelevant in this regard, as he manages to find 5 parallels with Thomas - whereas there are 57, going by his reconstruction. And he calls those "Thomas displaying proximity", so perhaps his mindset is at almost identical documents?

The answer is that Luke edited Marcion AND that both used Thomas as source, which does clarify our understanding of the origins.
Also, going by Irish' earlier exposition,

However, if (2) the long prologue to Jesus’ appearance in Luke’s 3rd chapter was not present in this conjectured original, then Luke would have done the very thing that Klinghardt and others propose that he did to The Evangelion published by Marcion: he (or his associates, of course) expanded it with a made up a prologue. And Luke’s claim to apostolic authenticity is still very much exposed as a fraud