Did the Gospel-writers anthropomorphize Marcion's J-Christ?

[Ben C. Smith]

One on the problems that the Farrer hypothesis brought back from the dead in recent decades by Goulder and others is that a simple explanation for what are called "minor agreements" is the observed fact of scribal cross-pollination, ie scribes carry ideas from one gospel to another due to familiarity of the context and forgetting they are copying another gospel.

BeDuhn uses the notion of such scribal manifestations ably when dealing with the Two-Source hypothesis and produces what seems to me a coherent picture of both the place of Marcion's gospel and the development of the synoptic tradition:

The seriousness of the problem depends upon whether the ‘Minor Agreements’ are an element of composition that existed in the original autograph of Luke (for some reason, it is always Luke, not Matthew), or were introduced subsequently as a textual corruption. The evidence of Marcion’s Gospel aligns with the latter idea, that they were introduced in the process of transmission of the gospel text, since Marcion’s Gospel contains between a half and two thirds fewer ‘Minor Agreements’ with Matthew than the current critical text of Luke does (a critical text that, due to axioms of text criticism, gives an absolute minimum of ‘Minor Agreements’ in Luke). In other words, the phenomenon of ‘Minor Agreements’ is reduced in Marcion’s Gospel to such a small factor that one must doubt that it was a feature of the original text at all, and conclude that Luke has more of them due to the greater exposure to the text of Matthew in the process of its transmission – either from a longer period of exposure or from transmission in closer association with Matthew, or both. In the case of Marcion’s Gospel, of course, exposure to the text of Matthew must have occurred before the gospel text reached Marcion and was sequestered within the Marcionite community, at which time exposure to Matthew in its transmission would have ceased. Nonetheless, two centuries of critical scholarship had to contend with the ‘Minor Agreements’ as if they were compositional elements that needed to be solved in the construction of our models of gospel interrelationships. Only now with the evidence of Marcion’s Gospel can this whole problem be set aside. From BeDuhn's contribution to "Marcion’s Gospel and the New Testament: Catalyst or Consequence?" in New Test. Stud. (2017), 63, 325

I have elsewhere quoted an excerpt from David Parker to a similar effect, to wit, that the textual transmission of these materials probably did not entail any two texts making contact only once before going their separate scribal ways; rather, the gospels may have kept influencing one another in complex ways as they continued to be transmitted: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1832&p=41579#p41579.

[Peter Kirby]

Wow. That is not great.

This is another review: http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/v20/TC-20 ... -Himes.pdf (gives a wider view of the argument)

And a slightly different Roth take: https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2015 ... n-marcion/

Markus Vincent defends himself on his blog:

http://markusvinzent.blogspot.com/2015/ ... ng-of.html

[Secret Alias]

This is such a shitty field of research Marcionite studies. It exists along side "New Testament criticism" so on the one hand there is this recognition that this 'other' gospel existed and was influential - but what to do about it? Roth's solution is to treat the gospel of Marcion as a knowable commodity so that all due 'seriousness' is accorded it. But the gospel of Marcion is lost and pretending that every gospel reference in Tertullian and Epiphanius 'is' the fucking gospel of Marcion is so stupid that Vinzent becomes a welcomed breath of fresh air. It's nice that we have Mark and the two other forgeries now canonized. You can do interesting things examining how Mark was used to make Matthew and Luke. But Marcion's gospel can't be admitted to this little party because the gospel is lost. What are scholars going to do about it?

Roth's approach again seems respectable and 'serious' but it is fundamentally stupid. I don't know what other word to use for it. But because he follows a heap of other stupid misguided people he too is treated as a respectable and 'serious' scholar along with his work. But it is stupid, stupid, stupid. There was no gospel like Roth and other imagine existed simply by pulling out a Latin forger and a despicable liar like Epiphanius (who pretends he has the Marcionite gospel in front of him but clearly does not). What to do? I don't know but Vinzent is closer to the right answer. Float ideas and theories but don't take any of them too seriously. If you want stupid seriousness you can always go back to Roth and others.

[Ben C. Smith]

Wow. That is not great.

This is another review: http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/v20/TC-20 ... -Himes.pdf (gives a wider view of the argument)

And a slightly different Roth take: https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2015 ... n-marcion/

Markus Vincent defends himself on his blog:

http://markusvinzent.blogspot.com/2015/ ... ng-of.html

Both, his comment and judgement ('such troubling use of the statement of others'), however, only reveals that either I have not expressed myself clear enough, or it was only a cursory reading which led to it. As rightly quoted by Roth, I was NOT talking about Tertullian's views, but of his 'views of Marcion'. While I totally agree with Roth that Tertullian did not subscribe to Marcion's views here that with Christ a new literary genre was born, but that already the Psalm talks about parabola, similitudes in connection with dialogues - it should be clear that Tertullian, nevertheless, witnesses that Marcion made such claims (and this is the only thing that I stated and which is rather confirmed and not disputed by Roth). Hence, instead of myself quoting and interpreting inadequately or inaccurately, it seems a misreading of this passage in my book (and reading of Tertullian that does not go far enough to unravel Marcion's opinion behind it) which becomes apparent.

Well, this helps. One can still disagree, if one chooses, but at least Vincent does not seem to have simply overlooked that important nec.

[Secret Alias]

Another difficulty is that Tertullian's Book 4 and 5 were originally written by someone who used a gospel harmony (as Criddle acknowledges here) and so the Luke vs Marcion dynamic doesn't even matter. It's not even a question. So when someone came along and transformed a text originally written by Justin, Tatian or someone in their encratite (encratic?) circle into something about Luke (i.e. Irenaeus) it says all you need to know about Lukan priority. Luke is only mentioned by the time of Irenaeus and to help support its antiquity a text based on a comparison with a gospel harmony was falsified by Luke's first promoter.

When this same asshole comes along and says in effect - hey if you like the shitty job I did preserving 'one-of-the-earliest-best-gospels-in-the-world-from-a-companion-of-Paul' here's another shitty gospel, 'one-of-=the-earliest-best-gospels-in-the-world-from-a-companion-of-Peter' - i.e. the gospel according to Mark who the fuck can believe this asshole? Really. I mean this is stuff that my dad or your dad would see as a no brainer. But scholars are different and have 'difficulties' with an outright rejection of the canonical sources because of their association with an asshole slimeball. Why is that? They don't have a choice. Admitting that the canonical set is a fraud diminishes the value of their research and work.

It's like being in a bad marriage. You don't admit that your ugly, fat, stupid, bald, unemployed husband is a loser and you are a loser too by implication. You continually find reasons to hang in the relationship.

[MrMacSon]

I have elsewhere quoted an excerpt from David Parker to a similar effect, to wit, that the textual transmission of these materials probably did not entail any two texts making contact only once before going their separate scribal ways; rather, the gospels* may have kept influencing one another in complex ways as they continued to be transmitted:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1832&p=41579#p41579 -

This excerpt from pages 121-122 of The Living Text of the Gospels, by David C. Parker, seems relevant ... -

.
... But a documentary solution requires ...published editions, in which every last word, syllable and letter is known. It is this discernible, published precision which is lacking. The reason for the lack is not - as it might seem I was about to conclude — that we do not have the evidence to recover precisely what the evangelists wrote. It is that the comparison of published editions assumes, in its two-dimensional diagrams, that there is a single point of contact between two texts*, for example, the single contact when Matthew copied Mark, and there was an end of the matter. I am proposing a three-dimensional diagram, in which the third dimension represents a series of contacts between texts each of which may have changed since the previous contact. For example, Matthew copies bits out of Mark in reproducing a tradition; then a later copy of Mark is enriched by some of Matthew's alterations; and next a copy of Matthew (already different from the one we began with) is influenced by something from the also changed Mark. Add in Luke, and oral tradition, and any other sources* that might have been available, at any points in the development that you please, and you have a process a good deal less recoverable than any documentary hypothesis. It is not at all the orderly business we had hoped, and looks instead like molecules bouncing around and off each other in bewildering fashion.

......
.

* not just the NT gospels either, as Parker alludes to. Apocryphal, pseudepigrapha and other texts are likely to have been engaged at times, too.

I wonder if some of those passages or pericopes that we see alluded to in the modern reproduced writings of early Fathers ie. Justin Matryr, Irenaeus, etc (eg. 'blah blah blah', Romans x:y; 'to wit to woo', Mark a:bc) are pericopes or passages from texts other than those they are attributed to.
.

[spin]

I have elsewhere quoted an excerpt from David Parker to a similar effect, to wit, that the textual transmission of these materials probably did not entail any two texts making contact only once before going their separate scribal ways; rather, the gospels may have kept influencing one another in complex ways as they continued to be transmitted: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1832&p=41579#p41579.

Parker may be right. I don't know, just that the usual notions of gospel production and preservation seems rather too simplified. Maybe more than one gospel was used by a community, but going from Irenaeus on those groups considered "heretical" he imputes one gospel to each of them, Marcion with Luke, gnostics with John, Ebionites with Matt (3.11.7). I don't see that it would have been different in "orthodox" communities. My guess is that, later, gospels met in the heads of scribes more than anything else after the basic gospel was formed. Memories of what had been copied elsewhere carried over to the current gospel, giving Goulder et al their minor agreements. The formation or building up of individual gospel traditions, Mt, Mk, Mc, Lk, Jn, Ptr, etc., was a community effort, a magpie effort. Here is where Parker may be right. Perhaps a community kept another gospel or two up its sleeve it could refer to, while maintaining and using its own, though I must admit I still haven't wrapped my head around a cultural context that could provide a cradle in which a unique gospel could be born. The community needs to have sufficient resources to physically maintain shared cultic material and to have not only (partial) literacy, but people to maintain and update texts.