Klinghardt on ‘abolishing the Law & Prophets’

[mlinssen]

Could you please clarify the two sections that I highlighted? I'm confused

Ok but first of all, the second bit of highlighted text was NOT WRITTEN BY ME. I’ll get back to you about the rest.

Check, you are right. I can only blame my own fat fingers for that then, apologies - case closed on the confusion AFAIC, your question clearly and unequivocally is

What is the basis for asserting that Marcion was an “enemy of Judaism and the Law”?

[Irish1975]

Adamantius Dialogue 2:18 (830e)
[Marcus the Marcionite:] The Judaists wrote this, i.e. “I came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it.” However, Christ didn’t say that, but “I came not to fulfill the law but to abolish it.”

So is Klinghardt claiming that 'I came not to fulfill the law but to abolish it' is the original reading of the Evangelion and that it predates the canonical gospels (particularly Matt 5.17)?

No, IIUC, he does not propose inserting the Adamantius dogma into *Ev. He is cited in the OP stating his opinion that the authenticity of 23:2 (in the “oldest” Gospel) is actually proof [!] that Jesus was not guilty of abolishing the law and the prophets. I don’t know what this implies about his model of the historical Jesus or what have you, but at least he is holding to the primacy of 23:2 as a false accusation against the savior.

The late antique Marcionites of the Dialogue might be referring to Paul’s Christ, for all we know. I would have to look closer at that text. Recall that Gal 2:18 ascribes the abolition to the apostle, and this verse is witnessed by Tertullian.

Klinghardt seems to me a good empiricist who doesn’t go around making up stories. Whatever one thinks about the principles of his reconstruction or about his interpretations of this or that text, he does not put together a story based on some criminal sketch of ‘Marcion’ taken from the likes of Irenaeus. He has a model for including material from rejected readings in the ‘Western’ manuscripts, and qualifies his conclusions as to likelihood, etc.

[Stuart]

The Marcionite canon is kind of like gravity. Most people can see gravity at work when they drop something on the ground. But just because you can describe things falling to the ground it doesn't mean that you understand gravity. EXCEPT for religious scholars who like to pretend that WHATEVER WE DO KNOW ABOUT SOMETHING IS ALL THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT THAT SUBJECT. "Yes gravity is just things falling to the ground."

Straw man argument here. It only shows you don't like anything that contradicts your theories, and resort to logical fallacies. You can do better.

That said, while there is a Marcionite text, that is the Christian text frozen at some point in the mid to late 2nd century when the Marcionite sect broke off from the main church, there is no Marcionite text type. Many of the same textual errors can be found within some of the reproduced Marcionite texts by the Patristic heresy fighters, which merely proves Clabeaux's point that the Marcionite text came from the same milieu as the Catholic text, just that it represents an earlier state in the redaction process (not the original text).

[Secret Alias]

So why don't you tell me. Who saw the Marcionite canon? Who literally had it in front of them and went through it line by line without resorting to second or third hand accounts? Tertullian? No. Epiphanius? No. So who are these eyewitnesses to the Marcionite canon?

[Secret Alias]

Here's what's comical. Each scholar who attempts to "reconstruct" the Marcionite gospel and apostle does so with a different methodology than the guy before him. One says Tertullian is reliable. Another says Epiphanius is the most reliable. Some include Adamantius. Others deny. And so on. If it was so straightforward to put together the Marcionite canon how can every scholar disagree with the one who came before him about the right course of action? Imagine this in real scientific investigations. So at least some of the scholars view some of the sources as dubious which means all of the sources have some level of dubiousness or untrustworthiness when taken as a totality. So there are no unimpeachable sources. Imagine this if you were a trial attorney. You have lots of witnesses but all of them have mental illness because the crime happened at a mental hospital. So what do you? You don't go to trial. But this is the humanities so no one cares about reliability or "winning." It's all about publishing something in order to further your career. So we keep chopping down trees to produce garbage. Garbage, garbage. Spew, spew, spew. Onwards and upwards. Become part of the machine.

Why is this? What's the problem here? The Church Fathers, or at least the Fathers who report on Marcion and the heretics in a systematic way, are the worst sorts of people. For anyone who compiled these lists was basically taking hearsay as factual reporting. What smart reliable "scientific" person would spend years just compiling lists of nonsense?

[Secret Alias]

The idea is (a) publish something (b) try not to be embarrassed so (c) find a "delicate path" through the swamp of Patristic literature that (d) shows you are learned and (e) won't be easily disproved. It's all like going through a gymnastics routine. You don't want the audience to see you fall flat on your face. But there is no right or wrong, there is no "truth" in gymnastics or ice-skating or Marcionite studies. It's all up to the judges to determine better or worse.

[Irish1975]

Garbage, garbage. Spew, spew, spew. Onwards and upwards.

So all Marcion talk is garbage…

…but there’s also your pet theory—

as I would have it - that they (or Tertullian in particular) were/was working from a text of Against Marcion written by Irenaeus which argued from a Western text of Luke, Luke being "the true text of Marcion," that even "Marcion's gospel" (i.e. Luke) was compatible with the Law and prophets.

The reply—

Yet Tertullian and Epiphanius cite very minor textual differences, most being attributable to Western readings.

That's grossly inaccurate, as a quantitative analysis quickly reveals. Epiphanius and Tertullian together attest to over 4000 words of material in canonical Luke being missing from Marcion's Evangelion. More than 4000 words of additional content is unattested, some of which may align with canonical Luke, but most of which likely did not, even if merely by virtue of absence. That's around 8000 words of difference compared to a text that is about 19,500 words long.

The variations in the content indicated as present themselves likely number in the thousands of words, and most of these differences are not preserved in the western mss of canonical Luke. For hundreds of words, the wording attested for the Evangelion is much closer to canonical Mark than to canonical Luke, and the same is true, though far less often, regarding the Evangelion's alignments with canonical Matthew against canonical Luke.

The signal transmission tags in my open science book allow for these phenomena to be quantified and each tag to be evaluated and validated or invalidated.

While Marcion's Gospel can reasonably be called a version of Luke, and its text certainly has affinities with the western mss of canonical Luke, there is zero evidence for, and no compelling reason to postulate, an intermediary text by Irenaeus as the means by which Tertullian and/or Epiphanius and/or pseudo-Adamantius wrote their polemics (not to mention Ephrem, Jerome, Hippolytus, Eznik, et al). This presumes a scarcity of the text that does not align with the clear popularity of the Marcionite movement according even to its most staunch detractors from the late 2nd century to 4th century and beyond. Yes, the detractors are clearly prejudiced, but that prejudice comes out in their often line by line and word for word treatment of the Marcionite texts text, not in any supposed lack of access or any mediated access to the text.

*silence*

[Secret Alias]

Did the Marcionites think their text was merely a variant Luke text?

How much of Tertullian can't be explained as a variant Luke text?

Adversus Marcionem is nothing more than a commentary on Luke disguised as an anti-Marcionite treatise.

So the Marcionites have to be liars if we accept Adversus Marcionem's claims. Their gospel is just a gospel of Luke.

[Secret Alias]

So all Marcion talk is garbage…

The equivalent would be if the Nazis won the war and "Jewish studies" developed from Luther's the Jews and their Lies, Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Yes, you're "talking" and engaging in research about Jews. What's wrong with that? Isn't that good enough? Aren't we learning about Judaism? Surely you can't deny these are "sources" which offer "perspectives" on the Jews.

This is sub-retarded. What's wrong with you people? How aren't the Church Fathers like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Oh because Marcionite studies has people with PhDs beside their names they are now incapable of collective idiocy. Tell me which Chuch Fathers actually saw a Marcionite canon? I will tell you. None of them. Like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion it's all plagiarized rehashing of earlier stuff (which is now lost).

I wouldn't trust a shopping list from Epiphanius. Most heresiological works by Tertullian are just repurposed treatises of Irenaeus. Neither of them saw a Marcionite canon. Tertullian's account of the Valentinians. He's "against" them apparently. Did experience with Valentinians shape his anti-Valentinian treatise? No its just Irenaeus. No experience with Valentinians at all. None.

And what about Hermogenes? You really buy his story that Hermogenes moved from Antioch (where Theophilus wrote the original treatise) to Carthage just so Tettullian could embellish Theophilus's portrait? Is this for real? Never saw Hermogenes. Never met a Valentinian. Never saw a Marcionite canon. End of story. It's embarrassing I spent 30 years on this stuff.

[Secret Alias]

What does this sign say?

Nothing I have previously written against Marcion is any
longer my concern. I am embarking upon a new work to replace an old one. My first edition, too hurriedly produced, I afterwards withdrew, substituting a fuller treatment. This also, before enough copies had been made, was stolen from me by a person, at that time a Christian but afterwards an apostate, who chanced to have copied out some extracts very incorrectly, and shewed them to a group of people. Hence the need for correction. The opportunity provided by this revision has moved me to make some additions. Thus this written work, a third succeeding a second, and instead of third from now on the first, needs to begin by reporting the demise of the work it supersedes, so that no one may be perplexed if in one place or another he comes across varying forms of it

It says "Warning! Someone is about to copy out material from earlier writers about a heretical tradition he knows nothing about on the subject of a canon he's never seen."