Let's Have a Discussion About What is Authentic About Early Christianity OUTSIDE OF MARCION?

[Secret Alias]

Like when I pick up a Catholic or whatever "New Testament canon" I can't take the gospels seriously. They are corruptions of earlier text. Acts is a joke. The letters of Paul have been falsified. What else is there?

At least with a Marcionite canon you might get something that was preserved as it was originally i.e. in an authentic form. Maybe.

[MrMacSon]

Paul was likely associated with Marcion or other Marcionites ie. early 2nd century CE.

There’s likely to have been a range of competing theologies in the eastern Mediterranean the early 2nd century CE, some-to-many without any surviving texts eg. Roman Mithracism,* ‘Serapianism’,* Simonianism, and others

* for which there’s a reasonable amount of archaeological evidence (but very little if any ‘textual evidence’). Ironically, it’s the converse for early Christianity ie. lots of texts, but no clear, pure-Christian archaeology before God-knows-when

[Secret Alias]

Not sure there was a Simon Magus.

[MrMacSon]

At least with a Marcionite canon you might get something that was preserved as it was originally i.e. in an authentic form. Maybe.

rgprice’s proposition for the Marcionite Evangelion being a version of a proto-Luke -what he calls Original-Luke- would disagree with that statement

[MrMacSon]

Not sure there was a Simon Magus.

• I agree that it’s hard to know
  
  But the different, perhaps changing accounts of a Simon or Simons and [of] Simonianism, including the Simons and Simon-Peter accounts in the books in the NT, particularly Acts, suggests there was something big enough that needed to be ‘taken care of’ and sidelined

[MrMacSon]

Name me one thing outside of Marcion that isn't fake.

The anonymous book Hebrews.

• And the Book of Revelation ...

[MrMacSon]

MARCION IS FAKE because he selected only one gospel when multiple gospels were in circulation.

• I tend to agree with rgprice ie. that Mark —based on a few Pauline epistles +/- written in conjunction with each other +/- written in conjunction with a proto-Luke/proto-Marcion-gospeltext— would have been the only other orthodox gospel in circulation, though so-called apocryphal gospels such as the Gospel of Philip, a Gospel of the Hebrews, a Gospel of the Nazoreans, etc., or any combination thereof, may also haven been in circulation

[MrMacSon]

I will, perhaps in a week or two, make a new post-thread putting a proposition that, rather than early Christianity being a sort of Platonized Judaism, it was more or at least as likely to have involved Judaizing of a sort-of-Platonic Greco-Roman Christian-‘Gnosticism’

[rgprice]

I think the short answer is that prior to the writing of the Gospels in the 2nd century, any form of what came to be known as "Christianity" that existed looked almost nothing like post-Gospel Christianity.

This pre-Gospel "Christianity" may well have been a diverse and/or small loose collection of ideas about a heavenly Lord who would be sent by the Most High God according to prophecies in the Jewish scriptures and little else of note or commonality.

It is really the Gospels that precipitated Christianity as we know it, and these writings were all likely produced in the 2nd century. When they came on the scene their stories overran whatever existing "Christianity" that had previously existed.

[MrMacSon]

Yes, ‘according to prophecies in the Jewish scriptures’ was a big part of the foundation of early orthodox Christianity, as Paul and Justin Martyr clearly say.

And there was Good versus Bad/Evil at play: especially Platonic Good