The Antitheses and the origin of Luke

[Peter Kirby]

Thanks for your reply. It seems like you and Ken both agree on this, so it must seem plausible to some.

Let me take a moment to consider setting aside the Evangelion-priority stuff and adopting this viewpoint.

I should add that it now seems plausible to me also.

Andrew, what things led you to this position?

Ken, same question for you?

I would appreciate any insight you could offer.

It was intended as a simple and sincere question, looking for information that could better resolve this in my mind.

[Ken Olson]

Andrew has already offered a reasonable answer to this question, but I would like to add that I find the question itself seems to suggest that this is an odd or perhaps counterintuitive view in need of a special defense, which I don't think it is.

No, not in those words. How about just a defense of a not-odd, not-counterintuitive view?

It seems to me that (4) is the most straightforward interpretation of what Tertullian said about Marcion. We would need an argument for why we should not trust Tertullian in this case

Seems pretty straightforward:

(1) It's polemical.
(2) It's at best unclear whether Tertullian was in a position to know which came first.

So, yes, I don't find this enough to feel that I have a good answer on this basis.

Here's the passage from Tertullian's Against Marcion 4.4 again:

For if the Gospel, said to be Luke's which is current among us (we shall see whether it be also current with Marcion), is the very one which, as Marcion argues in his Antitheses, was interpolated by the defenders of Judaism, for the purpose of such a conglomeration with it of the law and the prophets as should enable them out of it to fashion their Christ, surely he could not have so argued about it, unless he had found it (in such a form).

The part that I take Tertullian to be attributing to Marcions is in bold (the yellow is the part where Tertullian attributes it to Marcion).

1) Tertullian is claiming that Marcion said in his Antitheses that the gospel which is known as The Gospel According to Luke had been interpolated by Judaizers. This would be a polemical claim made by Marcion and upheld by later Marcionites. Tertullian's claim is not necessarily a polemical one. We know that Marcionites did think that (don't we?)

2) Tertullian is arguing that since Marcion wrote that The Gospel According to Luke had been interpolated by the defenders of Judaism, this must mean he knew the Gospel According to Luke in its allegedly interpolated form.

3) Tertullian does not say that Marcion himself claimed to have removed the Judaic interpolations from Luke to arrive at the text of the Evangelion he used, but Tertullian makes the inference that that is indeed the case. But all Tertullian claims Marcion said is that he knew The Gospel According to Luke (in its interpolated form). Marcion could theoretically also have known the pre-interpolated Evangelion. Tertullian doesn't cite him as saying otherwise (but Tertullian does not think that to be the case).

So, no, I don't see the claim that Marcion knew the text of The Gospel According to Luke as polemical or obviously mistaken.

Best,

Ken

[Peter Kirby]

Andrew has already offered a reasonable answer to this question, but I would like to add that I find the question itself seems to suggest that this is an odd or perhaps counterintuitive view in need of a special defense, which I don't think it is.

No, not in those words. How about just a defense of a not-odd, not-counterintuitive view?

It seems to me that (4) is the most straightforward interpretation of what Tertullian said about Marcion. We would need an argument for why we should not trust Tertullian in this case

Seems pretty straightforward:

(1) It's polemical.
(2) It's at best unclear whether Tertullian was in a position to know which came first.

So, yes, I don't find this enough to feel that I have a good answer on this basis.

Here's the passage from Tertullian's Against Marcion 4.4 again:

For if the Gospel, said to be Luke's which is current among us (we shall see whether it be also current with Marcion), is the very one which, as Marcion argues in his Antitheses, was interpolated by the defenders of Judaism, for the purpose of such a conglomeration with it of the law and the prophets as should enable them out of it to fashion their Christ, surely he could not have so argued about it, unless he had found it (in such a form).

The part that I take Tertullian to be attributing to Marcions is in bold (the yellow is the part where Tertullian attributes it to Marcion).

1) Tertullian is claiming that Marcion said in his Antitheses that the gospel which is known as The Gospel According to Luke had been interpolated by Judaizers. This would be a polemical claim made by Marcion and upheld by later Marcionites. Tertullian's claim is not necessarily a polemical one. We know that Marcionites did think that (don't we?)

2) Tertullian is arguing that since Marcion wrote that The Gospel According to Luke had been interpolated by the defenders of Judaism, this must mean he knew the Gospel According to Luke in its allegedly interpolated form.

3) Tertullian does not say that Marcion himself claimed to have removed the Judaic interpolations from Luke to arrive at the text of the Evangelion he used, but Tertullian makes the inference that that is indeed the case. But all Tertullian claims Marcion said is that he knew The Gospel According to Luke (in its interpolated form). Marcion could theoretically also have known the pre-interpolated Evangelion. Tertullian doesn't cite him as saying otherwise (but Tertullian does not think that to be the case).

So, no, I don't see the claim that Marcion knew the text of The Gospel According to Luke as polemical or obviously mistaken.

All of these hypotheses involve the idea that Marcion, at the time of the writing of Antitheses, knew about Luke:

(3) A statement about Luke's gospel does go back to the Antitheses, but both Luke and the Gospel used by Marcion were too old for Marcion to know anything about the composition of either.
(4) A statement about Luke's gospel does go back to the Antitheses, and Marcion's Gospel was his own.
(5) A statement about Luke's gospel does go back to the Antitheses, Luke's gospel was recent, and Marcion knew about its origin.

So, I guess I should ask... has there been some miscommunication here? I'm wondering about how I could be more confident that Luke preceded Evangelion. Do you have any additional insight into that, as I asked earlier?

I would appreciate any insight you could offer.

[Peter Kirby]

I subscribe to the widely held theory that the four gospels were originally anonymous and the attributions to Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were added later. The authors of Mark and Matthew do not tell us anything about themselves directly (I realize there are people who think they give hints), and the author of Luke seems to reveal only that he was not an eyewitness but knew the tradition thoroughly. If the author meant to claim he himself was a companion of Paul with the 'we passages' in Acts, it is an amazingly indirect claim and, as far as I'm aware, unparalleled in ancient history.

I haven't been entirely convinced by S. Gathercole's article here:

The Alleged Anonymity of the Canonical Gospels
https://academic.oup.com/jts/article-ab ... m=fulltext

But I do remain open to the idea that one or more of the canonical gospels weren't completely anonymous.

Regarding the gospel of Luke and regarding Acts, I have previously gravitated to two very different positions:

(1) Luke-Acts was actually written by someone who was a companion of Paul (i.e. maybe Luke).
(2) Luke-Acts was written by someone who claimed authorship by a companion of Paul (i.e. Luke).

Such an explicit ascription - whether authentic or pseudonymous - would not be without parallel, I think, as Gathercole shows, because it's not clear that Luke-Acts didn't have the author's name spelled out somewhere.

This is just to give some background on how I've been thinking, particularly about Luke-Acts, not to say that different views are therefore incorrect.

[Ken Olson]

Andrew has already offered a reasonable answer to this question, but I would like to add that I find the question itself seems to suggest that this is an odd or perhaps counterintuitive view in need of a special defense, which I don't think it is.

No, not in those words. How about just a defense of a not-odd, not-counterintuitive view?

It seems to me that (4) is the most straightforward interpretation of what Tertullian said about Marcion. We would need an argument for why we should not trust Tertullian in this case

Seems pretty straightforward:

(1) It's polemical.
(2) It's at best unclear whether Tertullian was in a position to know which came first.

So, yes, I don't find this enough to feel that I have a good answer on this basis.

Here's the passage from Tertullian's Against Marcion 4.4 again:

For if the Gospel, said to be Luke's which is current among us (we shall see whether it be also current with Marcion), is the very one which, as Marcion argues in his Antitheses, was interpolated by the defenders of Judaism, for the purpose of such a conglomeration with it of the law and the prophets as should enable them out of it to fashion their Christ, surely he could not have so argued about it, unless he had found it (in such a form).

The part that I take Tertullian to be attributing to Marcions is in bold (the yellow is the part where Tertullian attributes it to Marcion).

1) Tertullian is claiming that Marcion said in his Antitheses that the gospel which is known as The Gospel According to Luke had been interpolated by Judaizers. This would be a polemical claim made by Marcion and upheld by later Marcionites. Tertullian's claim is not necessarily a polemical one. We know that Marcionites did think that (don't we?)

2) Tertullian is arguing that since Marcion wrote that The Gospel According to Luke had been interpolated by the defenders of Judaism, this must mean he knew the Gospel According to Luke in its allegedly interpolated form.

3) Tertullian does not say that Marcion himself claimed to have removed the Judaic interpolations from Luke to arrive at the text of the Evangelion he used, but Tertullian makes the inference that that is indeed the case. But all Tertullian claims Marcion said is that he knew The Gospel According to Luke (in its interpolated form). Marcion could theoretically also have known the pre-interpolated Evangelion. Tertullian doesn't cite him as saying otherwise (but Tertullian does not think that to be the case).

So, no, I don't see the claim that Marcion knew the text of The Gospel According to Luke as polemical or obviously mistaken.

All of these hypotheses involve the idea that Marcion, at the time of the writing of Antitheses, knew about Luke:

(3) A statement about Luke's gospel does go back to the Antitheses, but both Luke and the Gospel used by Marcion were too old for Marcion to know anything about the composition of either.
(4) A statement about Luke's gospel does go back to the Antitheses, and Marcion's Gospel was his own.
(5) A statement about Luke's gospel does go back to the Antitheses, Luke's gospel was recent, and Marcion knew about its origin.

So, I guess I should ask... has there been some miscommunication here? I'm wondering about how I could be more confident that Luke preceded Evangelion. Do you have any additional insight into that, as I asked earlier?

I would appreciate any insight you could offer.

Ah! Yes, I think perhaps there has been some miscommunication.

When you wrote that (4) was not very plausible (in relation to the other options), I took you to be saying that 'Marcion's Gospel was his own' was not a likely state of affairs, and I think that judgment is arbitrary. If you mean that the citation of Marcion by Tertullian does not actually say that Marcion acknowledged that the Gospel was his own edition (as opposed to it being possible that it was his own edition), then I think I agree.

But I allow that (3) is also a possible state of affairs not excluded by what Tertullian says and the choice between (3) and (4) would have to be made on other grounds. (5) is also possible, but perhaps slightly less so, depending on the time we think passed between the publication of Luke (by 115 CE) and when Tertullian was active in Rome, which I take to be the late 130's and 140's (as do Klingardt and Vinzent). I could, of course, be wrong. Marcion may have known of either or both texts earlier than those dates. But I think my main objection was to saying (4) was less plausible than the other options.

Best,

Ken

[Peter Kirby]

Yes, sorry, I mean to concede the point of the OP:

Thanks for your reply. It seems like you and Ken both agree on this, so it must seem plausible to some.

Let me take a moment to consider setting aside the Evangelion-priority stuff and adopting this viewpoint.

I should add that it now seems plausible to me also.

And allow that (4) is plausible.

Then I meant to follow up and ask if one could persuadest me to become a Luke prioritist.

[RandyHelzerman]

This is an incredible thread. Got my head buzzing, and I have questions about many of the topics brought up here:

Did Marcion know about the claim that Luke was the author of Luke? Did he know the name "Luke"? Tertullian certainly did, and he certainly presupposes more or less that Marcion is making a critical edition of Luke. But isn't the names of the gospels, and even the concept of a normative edition of the gospel, anachronistic of Marcion's day?

Justin Martyer really puzzles me. He's the one contemporary of Marcion who wrote about him, and AFAIKT he's the only one who *doesn't'* accuse him of cutting down Luke. It's not even clear that the gospels even had names yet--or really, even existed yet. If nobody else would have written about Marcion, we might very well think that the gospels hadn't reached anything like their final form in 130 or even 150 ad. (maybe they didn't...)

Did Justin just not *know* that Marcion had his own gospel? Or did he just not care--perhaps because the gospels were so fluid back then, that everybody more or less had their own favorite collection of stories and sayings?

[Peter Kirby]

Unfortunately we don't have Justin's work dedicated to refuting Marcion (which there are some references to, but which also don't say much about its contents). We have only a couple incidental references from Justin's apologetic works. There is some overlap of interest in his extant works; e.g., parts of Dialogue with Trypho on the prophecies of the Messiah have a triple purpose in that they have apologetic value, relevance to controversies with Jews, and possibly relevance in controversies with Marcionites. But we just don't have a complete picture here of what Justin said and thought about Marcion, especially of what he "didn't" say.

[Ken Olson]

This is an incredible thread. Got my head buzzing, and I have questions about many of the topics brought up here:

Did Marcion know about the claim that Luke was the author of Luke? Did he know the name "Luke"? Tertullian certainly did, and he certainly presupposes more or less that Marcion is making a critical edition of Luke. But isn't the names of the gospels, and even the concept of a normative edition of the gospel, anachronistic of Marcion's day?

I think Tertullian's language would suggest that Marcion did not name the interpolated gospel as Luke in the Antitheses:

For if the Gospel, said to be Luke's which is current among us (we shall see whether it be also current with Marcion), is the very one which, as Marcion argues in his Antitheses, was interpolated by the defenders of Judaism,

I think equating the theory that Marcion produced his Gospel by removing what he supposed were Judaic interpolations into a gospel h had with the idea that Marcion produced a 'critical edition' may be overstating the case a bit. Ian Mills has a paper forthcoming on the differences between what Marcion is supposed to have done and what Alexandrian scholars producing editions of Homer did. They both thought they were restoring a text to a more original form, but the methods they employed were quite different.

Best,

Ken

[Peter Kirby]

AFAIKT he's the only one who *doesn't'* accuse him of cutting down Luke

You're forgetting Origen, who does say something and doesn't accuse him of cutting down Luke specifically:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=11986

What Origen says is to some extent contradictory to the mutilated-Luke narrative, since it refers to "gospels."

What Origen says is also part of the idea that Marcion wrote the text and that he used canonical gospels.

To a certain extent you're also forgetting the Philosophoumena, which also says something that is relevant here (referring to Paul and Mark together when discussing the Marcionites). I don't think there's a mutilated-Luke reference there.

viewtopic.php?p=168056#p168056

To a certain extent you may also be overlooking other references; that's just off the top of my head.

And like I said, what accusations Justin may have made aren't quite clear.