John2 wrote: ↑Thu May 02, 2024 10:43 am
Here's a question for Randy. If Acts is anti-Marcion, why would it suggest (according to your reading) that Simon Magus (the guy that anti-Marcionites say was the root of Marcionism) was a good guy?
Brilliant!!!!! That's a great question. It puts real pressure on my position. Time to start waving my hands
Recall, whoever compiled the final recension of the NT was trying to bring as many of the variant christianitys into the same communion. And the author of Luke-Acts clearly was trying to reconcile Petrine and Pauline Christianity.
So, there is a tight balancing act---you want to critique the Marcionite position in order to convince them to embrace proto-orthodoxy. But, you can't criticize them too much, or they will be put off.
There is just as hard of a balancing act for the Petrine/proto-orthodox: If you make it toooooo appealing to the Marcionites, then the porto-orthodox are put off, because they don't want their doctrine watered down just to appeal to heretics.
See what I mean? So, how do you pull off BOTH balancing acts at once? Here's where the total genius of the Author of Acts comes in. You write the scene so that its kind of like a Rorschach test: When people read it, they will find what they are looking for, no matter who they are.
This particular case illustrates this perfectly. A Marcionite reading Acts's Simon Magus story will do what I did--immediatlly jump to the conclusion that Peter prayed for Simon Magus and he was redeemed. So I'm not put off by the story. It does kinda put Simon in a bad light--trying to buy spiritual power and all, so perhaps I'm not as big of a fan after I read that. I've been moved a bit towards porto-orthodoxy, and the seed of doubt has been planted. But still, it doesn't offend me.
When a Petrine christian read that story, he immediately jumps to the conclusion that Peter had just cursed Simon Magus, and that's why the Marcionites are so misguided. He likes this NT---because he feels like it has just scored some real points against those Marcionites.
See what I mean? The story is deliberately written to be ambiguous. Since both parties can read the book of Acts, without being offended or thinking it had been watered down to make it more appealing to those heretics--it can serve perfectly as a vehicle to bring those two branches of christianity into a single fold.
One English prof I had once said "Human languages are ambiguous
for a reason. Use it to your advantage every time you can
Once again man, that was a great question, it really made me think. Thanks for that.
P.S. This worked by living the ending off of the Siimun Magus story......I wonder if the author of Acts did the same thing by leaving off the ending of the Paul story. According to tradition, he was martyred, but some scholars have made cases that he wasn't. By strategically just not telling us the rest of Paul's story, we tend to jump to the conclusions we already believe there too.
Here's a blog post which examines the question:
https://www.davidknoppblog.com/paul-did ... martyrdom/