Ken Olson wrote: ↑Sat May 20, 2023 8:53 am
Irish1975 wrote: ↑Sat May 20, 2023 7:55 am
Do people ignore Klinghardt because his 2 volumes are too expensive, or because his argumentation is too technical and dense (true enough), or because they think they understand him and judge that his case is weak, or has been refuted (by someone) already?
I don't ignore Klinghardt (Oldest Gospel, 2019), but I do find his arguments very difficult to follow as it isn't really clear which claims are his premises and which are his conclusions. I've occasionally discussed his work with other scholars and found my experience is not uncommon. As far as I'm aware, no one on this list has given a recap of his arguments in the form of a formal argument with premises and conclusions clearly stated, and if that's correct (you can correct me if I'm wrong) I don't think it's just the people who disagree with Klinghardt on Marcionite priority who are ignoring his arguments. If you do understand his technical and dense argumentation, perhaps you or someone else on the list could give maybe three examples of a Klinghardt argument for the absolute priority of Marcion that clearly outlines his thought process and how he arrives at the conclusion that the Evangelion is prior to the four canonical gospels.
I did pay close attention to Klinghardt's 2008 paper and found it self-contradictory. The premises he uses to reject the Farrer theory are then rejected when he comes to his own theory. I called this a 'methodological nightmare' on the list back in 2016:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2159&start=20
Klinghardt has changed his positions since then. In his paper 'Marcion's Gospel and the New Testament: Catalyst or Consequence' NTS 23 (2017) he makes the very interesting argument that the Evangelion is unlikely to be a cut down version of Luke because there would be no discernible theological agenda behind the excisions - all the ideas in Luke that might be considered objectionable to Marcion (e.g., God's fulfillment of the promises he made in the OT) do show up in the Evangelion somewhere, so it's hard to explain why Marcion would have made the changes he would have had to if he edited Luke. I think this is an interesting argument, though I'm not sure it's a valid one. But it seems to me that Markus Vinzent must reject it, as he thinks Marcion has a definite theological agena different from Luke (not just those who defend Markan priority).
So where are the people who are paying attention to Klinghardt's arguments and employ them in their own work? (Just to be clear, I do not mean people who appeal to the authority of Klonghardt or repeat claims he has made, I mean those who actually give the arguments they claim to be convinced by).
Best,
Ken
PS - Yes, I'm aware of the argument about the miracles done in in Capernaum in Luke, which does not have a precedent in Luke's text. That would be a problem if Luke and Marcion were all we had, but it's not a problem for Markan priority.
Ken,
You ask some fair questions. I think you are right that Klinghardt is hard to absorb, regardless of what one thinks of his thesis. It would be a challenge to outline his thought process. And yet it needs doing.
From what I recall of my reading of a few months ago, below are some of Klinghardt’s essential methodological/theoretical claims, as interpreted by me. I hope to have time soon to review his book again, and get down to specific textual questions.
1. The Tertullian/Harnack hypothesis that Marcion cut up Luke according to a definite theological agenda has always been hopelessly incoherent, if not absurd. Tertullian himself betrays this awareness in numerous places, where he indicts Marcion for doing such a terrible job of committing the very crime that Tertullian himself imputes to him, and which is the basis of Adversus Marcionem from start to finish. Tertullian never questions the indictment of Marcion that he inherits from Irenaeus, or his own monstrous portrait of an evil mus ponticus (the mouse from Pontus).
THERE ARE NO WRITINGS OF MARCION, of course. Nothing against which to test the validity of the most basic claims and allegations of Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian. The entire Christian tradition about Marcion is a Moscow show trial of a criminal defendant who was “disappeared” from the start, and made into a cartoon arch heretic (who evolves like Mickey Mouse). Klinghardt is not alone on this point (cf. Tyson, Lieu, BeDuhn, and others).
2. One can only work with the Gospel and Pauline textual traditions themselves. Just as there has to be a relationship of literary kinship between Matthew and Luke, so there has to be a literary kinship between *Ev and gLuke. They are too similar not to be versions of one another. But the question has never seriously been asked and investigated, which was the original, and which the plagiarism? Klinghardt aspires to go further than anyone before him in trying to open the heavy door of this question.
3. The thesis of *Ev-priority had been considered for a time in German scholarship prior to 1850, but was never rigorously tested. The debate was scuttled before it really got started. The 2-source theory (Marcan priority, Q) became entrenched, and has been so ever since (despite being unproven, unprovable, and generally unsatisfying even to proponents like McGrath; while Goodacre, its fiercest critic, likes it and wants it to stick around). The unwarranted self-certainty of NT Studies about Markan priority is the culprit.
4. Our evidence for the text of *Ev is generally terrible, and far worse than almost all the would be reconstructors say that it is (even Trobisch!). This evidence is just strong enough to convince a rational person that a Marcionite Gospel text had really existed in the early centuries, which was eerily similar to gLuke, but also significantly shorter and with a few crucial rearrangements of the material. But this evidence is not remotely strong enough to provide us with a text as stable as the Church’s Gospel tradition. We really only have two witnesses to something quasi-complete, Tertullian and Epiphanius, who often give conficting testimony, and are anything but trustworthy reporters on the Church’s most detested heretic.
5. There is a systematic bias in Marcion scholarship, most recently epitomized by Roth. They claim, and want to presuppose, that there is a neutral way to establish Marcion’s text, by simply going through the witnesses line by line. But this is tendentious. The assumption of Lukan priority is there all along, steering the investigation, and coloring the interpretation of every word. Thus Klinghardt brings something of a Kantian/Wittgensteinian/Kuhnian awareness of presuppositions, regulative hypotheses, or biases that distort a supposedly purely empirical process of reconstructing a lost text. We know well enough what kind of reconstructed Marcionite Gospels result from the all-pervasive bias towards Lukan priority. But the debate is not a real debate unless and until the opposite hypothesis, the anti-traditional hypothesis, is given a fair shake.
Hence Klinghardt’s most important methodological claim—
6. The only way to investigate thoroughly the possibility of Marcionite priority is TO ASSUME THAT IT IS TRUE. Sounds like a perfect fallacy, right? Begging the question, petitio principii, circular logic! No, because the assumption is a heuristic assumption—before or until it achieves acceptance as a ‘scientific’ conclusion (the Germans use ‘science’ in a broader sense than we do). The postulate of Marcionite priority has to be tested against a very inadequate and very complex body of textual ‘evidence.’ This is just the same unsatisfying and laborious type of methodology that Schweitzer declared would have to be employed in quests of the HJ. In this case, however, there are only 3 possibilities to be tested (parent/child, child/parent, sibling/sibling), rather than indefinitely many.
7. Following on 6, the textual tradition of gLuke, especially the Western, needs to be included as siftable evidence for the Marcionite text. This violates a conservative assumption—which even Harnack knew to be false—that no traces of (possibly, probably) Marcionite material are to be found in the textual tradition of the canonical NT. On the assumption that Klinghardt’s thesis is true, of course, there would be nothing surprising in the atavistic survival of Marcionite text in canonical versions. But again, the thesis is always and everywhere asssumed to be false. Because the Christian tradition is so sure that it already knows who Marcion was, what his theological agenda supposedly was, etc, it cannot entertain the question as a real question. It doesn’t even acknowledge that modern textual criticism tends to presuppose historical claims about Christian origins that cannot be justified rationally, but are simply theological. Most importantly, the assumption that what became our canonical 4-Gospel Book, and what textual critics aim to reconstruct as “the original text,” are one and the same.
