The Diatessaron Knows the Marcionite Gospel?

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Secret Alias
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Re: The Diatessaron Knows the Marcionite Gospel?

Post by Secret Alias »

[o]dd question. I think you are asking me to judge the canonical Pauline corpus plus Acts as a whole,
More Geworfenheit. The Marcionites understood Paul to have written the gospel AND the authentic letters. You see. It's either Paul writes everything - the entire New Testament corpus - viz. he's 'THE apostle' like Moses, the author of the new covenant/testament. Or the current 'working together' - i.e. Paul, the apostles, the apostolics all held together by the Holy Spirit like an ancient wireless network. The Samaritans not only influenced the Islamic creed "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger." لا إله إلا الله محمد رسول الله https://books.google.com/books?id=Ta08A ... 22&f=false but also the Marcionite understanding of Paul as THE apostle of God (i.e. that there is only one apostle or spokesman https://books.google.com/books?id=pzo6K ... 22&f=false). It's just Geworfenheit that a 'band of apostles' makes more sense. The Samaritans are older, more revered, more influential. The sense of Paul being the ONLY apostle is as old as our oldest Catholic writers. I don't know how to break the cultural biases that are so natural to you that you can't see the obviousness of what is older. Keep trying I guess.

The Samaritans are the oldest Israelite tradition. The Sadducees likely preserved many similar concepts as well as the Karaites. That's what so striking about the Marcionites. They are specifically anti-Jerusalemite (i.e. the temple is a house of demons - I see this evidenced by key replacements of 'Beth-saida' where 'Capernaum' is present in our gospel(s). Solomon says:
I got me sharim and sharoth, and the delights of the sons of men, shidah (שידה) and shidoth (וְשִׁדּוֹת) [Eccel 2.8]
The rabbis interpreted this 'shidah' as a reference to a demon. A sect root in Samaritan understandings of Moses as 'THE apostle' might be radicalized enough to turn tradition Samaritan hatred of the Jerusalem temple in to an accusation of demonically inspired sacrifices. All the individual pieces are attested in early Christianity. Just a matter of proving that they were gathered up into one tradition at the very beginning.

Another question - the understanding that Jesus said he came or 'is able' (Catholic reading) to destroy the temple is early in early Christianity, right? John 2:19 Mark 14:58, Gospel of Judas Thomas, Celsus, certainly the gospel of Marcion etc. How early? Which would you expect to find in the earliest gospel? The Catholic 'misunderstanding' version (i.e. that he didn't really want to destroy the temple only 'certain people' said he did) or the presumed Marcionite notion that he REALLY did want to destroy the temple? For me it is the latter. Jesus said it or it was understood in the earliest gospel that he said it.

But let's consider the alternative. Mark's (edited) version that only 'some' said he said it but it wasn't true. It starts to sound more like Acts report of Paul as the Egyptian in Acts. In other words, Mark or our Catholic texts still 'know' or are aware of a gospel where Jesus said 'I am going to destroy the [Jerusalem temple]" like Thomas 71.

Jesus said, "I will destroy [this] house, and no one will be able to build it [...]."

To me this notion of 'hearsay' lurking in background of the gospel implies knowledge of an earlier version of the gospel where Jesus is understood to expressed his desire to destroy the building. Be that as it may if you were to consider WHY they (the Gospel of Thomas, the gospel of Marcion) thought Jesus wanted the temple destroyed is it at least conceivable that this whole Solomon bottling demons and Jews sacrificing to demons might be part of the mix?


I think for instance Origen knows a gospel which understood Jesus wanted to destroy the temple despite the canonical gospels argument to the contrary (although he waters the narrative down with his use of 'providence'):
And that same providence which of old gave the law, and has now given the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not wishing the Jewish state to continue longer, has destroyed their city and their temple: it has abolished the worship which was offered to God in that temple by the sacrifice of victims, and other ceremonies which He had prescribed. And as it has destroyed these things, not wishing that they should longer continue, in like manner it has extended day by day the Christian religion, so that it is now preached everywhere with boldness, and that in spite of the numerous obstacles which oppose the spread of Christ's teaching in the world. But since it was the purpose of God that the nations should receive the benefits of Christ's teaching, all the devices of men against Christians have been brought to nought; for the more that kings, and rulers, and peoples have persecuted them everywhere, the more have they increased in number and grown in strength.
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mlinssen
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Re: The Diatessaron Knows the Marcionite Gospel?

Post by mlinssen »

MrMacSon wrote: Wed Dec 01, 2021 12:20 am Marcion didn't attack the Jews, he only attacked their scriptures. Ironically, in Judaising more after Marcion, Christians became more anti-Semetic.
I just happened to run into this

Bullseye Mac

Christian origins in a nutshell - all of it. Chrestianity and how it got turned into Christianity, there's really no more to it than this

Thomas: anti-Judean and anti-Judaic
John: anti-Judean
*Ev: anti-Judaic
Christianity: pro-Judaic in name only, yet adding all the fake and false prophecies for their brand new inheritance of the brand new IS turned the opposition to Judaism into contradictions with Judaism, with Christianity creating a pseudo-Messiah based on their own pseudo-Judaism

The end result: conceptually the same as each single text before aimed at, namely a schism
Stuart
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Re: The Diatessaron Knows the Marcionite Gospel?

Post by Stuart »

Secret Alias wrote: Tue Nov 30, 2021 5:45 pm Any gospel that blames the Jews is pushing the Marcionite needle. There are other considerations namely the Flying Jesus passages
The Marcionites were but one of many antinomon sects. The Marcionite gospel is far less anti-Jewish than say the first version of the gospel of John, and even the received version we have that is still very anti-Jewish; for heavens sake, Jesus says that the Jewish god is a liar and murderer, and those who follow him and Moses are doing the bidding of that monster. There is little doubt that the originating sect that wrote that was not Marcionite, as there are several dramatic divergences from their theology, from a pre-existent Jesus known to Abraham, to John the Baptist belonging to the same God as Christ, to very Cainite elements in the story of Judas fulfilling the big mission of handing him over that he could not entrust to other disciples. It is from this Johannine vein that antisemitism seems to have come into Christianity, not from the Marcionites against whom the church fathers vigorously defended the Jewish elements of Christianity.

Me thinks you overplay the importance of the Marcionites. I used to do that as well, because they provided a data point we don't get from other sects, an attested text of the NT in a different form than the Catholic form we inherited. But I have since come to recognize that because the split from the main church, taken a frozen in time earlier textual history, I gave them too much importance, and gave them too much credit as being more primary. Examination of their attested text indicates that it was not Marcionite, rather the same multi-sectarian composite as the Catholic text, simply missing the latter half of the evolving additions. The Marcionites turn out to be midpoint marker (structurally they seem to have been organized identically to the main church, suggesting the structured had been well established before they split), important more a splinter group for preserving comparative data point of material and ideology to help us place the mainstream movements, from Gnostic to proto-Orthodoxy. It is a mistake to equate that uniqueness of a recoverable (mostly) data point with originality or greater importance. We have the DSS also, but how important was that community really to the development of Judaism? Most think not much. Although the Marcionites appear to have had more of an impact, they too are a sideshow. And many of the apparent anti-Marcionite elements we find in the Catholic text could well have been targeted at somewhat similar sectarian opinions within the church which were not connected to the Marcionites.

The gospel of Peter is not in the least Marcionite. It didn't circulate in their circles, it shares hardly anything theologically with them. Being anti-Jewish had much wider appeal in the early church than just the Marcionites. Anti-Jewish sentiment in the early church came from many sects and many forms. It's not much different than today where you see antisemitism rising on both the political left and right.

It seems to me this is an overreach.
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Leucius Charinus
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Re: The Diatessaron Knows the Marcionite Gospel?

Post by Leucius Charinus »

Any gospel that blames the Jews is pushing the Marcionite needle. There are other considerations namely the Flying Jesus passages
Of course no Greek writers would have satirised the Jesus story in antiquity by blaming the Jews or making Jesus fly or him leaving no footprints in the sand or making the cross walk and talk or having his Roman father rape his mother
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Re: The Diatessaron Knows the Marcionite Gospel?

Post by Stuart »

Flying Jesus scene is paralleled by flying Simon Magus and Simon Peter in the pseudo Clement saga. Both seem to be from the same era (4th century, 3rd at the earliest) and probably both draw from some pagan satirical work or perhaps some anti-Mani work, long lost to history.
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Re: The Diatessaron Knows the Marcionite Gospel?

Post by MrMacSon »

Stuart wrote: Wed Apr 19, 2023 12:15 pm The Marcionites were but one of many antinomon sects
Perhaps, but when ?
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Re: The Diatessaron Knows the Marcionite Gospel?

Post by mlinssen »

Stuart wrote: Wed Apr 19, 2023 12:15 pm
Secret Alias wrote: Tue Nov 30, 2021 5:45 pm Any gospel that blames the Jews is pushing the Marcionite needle. There are other considerations namely the Flying Jesus passages
The Marcionites were but one of many antinomon sects.
Amongst all your assertions, you don't provide even one viable alternative to*Ev

Nor do you pay attention to the fact that *Ev demonstrably is a source text to Luke, and highly likely all the Synoptics
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Re: The Diatessaron Knows the Marcionite Gospel?

Post by Stuart »

mlinssen wrote: Wed Apr 19, 2023 11:45 pm
Stuart wrote: Wed Apr 19, 2023 12:15 pm
Secret Alias wrote: Tue Nov 30, 2021 5:45 pm Any gospel that blames the Jews is pushing the Marcionite needle. There are other considerations namely the Flying Jesus passages
The Marcionites were but one of many antinomon sects.
Amongst all your assertions, you don't provide even one viable alternative to*Ev

Nor do you pay attention to the fact that *Ev demonstrably is a source text to Luke, and highly likely all the Synoptics
As Dan Ackroyd would say to Jane Curtain's Joan Face character, "Jane you ignorant slut."
[youtube]https://youtu.be/c91XUyg9iWM?list=PLeY_ ... 9d0-r&t=54[/youtube]

The Marcionite gospel is the base document of Luke. But it's not the first gospel form. In my view, if you paid attention to what I've proposed for half a decade or more, you'd know that I think a prototype synoptic circulated, with some locale variances leading to slightly different content and form (miracle of time and distance between communities) which was the base document (in different forms) for the Synoptic gospels. Two main different forms, one with a doublet section common to Matthew and Mark; and one without that section common to Mark and Marcionite/Luke.

I am not in the camp of those who give priority to the Marcionites. Even the Paul in their collection is arguing against rival sects, plural. What I give credit to the Marcionites was the innovation of using what we call the gospel to evangelize. It was obviously successful enough that rival sects immediately went about the same strategy, with some writing their own gospel.

The contradictions in the Marcionite text indicate not primacy, rather a sect that had developed a hermeneutical to harmonize the contents, even developing a strategy of sometimes reading text literally and other times spiritually (see Megethius' statement on the matter in DA 1.7), in order to make it all conform. This strongly indicates the text was not from a single strain of teaching, but a hodgepodge that went into the writings.

Overall, the evidence, IMO, strongly points toward a significant incubation time for Christianity to develop, rather than springing from a single source here and a single splinter there. How else can one explain why there are so many sects (schools of teaching) the very first minute Christianity erupts? (Frankly that alone should rule out an Imperial conspiracy.)
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Re: The Diatessaron Knows the Marcionite Gospel?

Post by Stuart »

MrMacSon wrote: Wed Apr 19, 2023 9:06 pm
Stuart wrote: Wed Apr 19, 2023 12:15 pm The Marcionites were but one of many antinomon sects
Perhaps, but when ?
Based on the understanding in Galatians of how slavery is passed by the mother's status and not the father's, it has to be after Hadrian's ruling on the subject, which overturned Claudius' (Claudius made a number of poor rulings that later emperors overturned). Since slavery was empire wide, rules on slaves would have been well known and important to all the educated families (people who wrote or had their slaves write). This is also in opposition to Torah law (Exodus 21:4).

I would speculate that Hadrian adjusted the law later in his reign than early, when he was more secure (it took a number of years for his legitimacy to be relatively universal, given the controversy at how he gained the position and the executions he initially carried out to consolidate). And by the time the early version is written this ruling has become matter of fact, meaning it has been in place for some time and is universally accepted. I say this quite seriously, as Claudius basically kept the loophole that allowed parents to sell their own children as slaves by claiming the wife had conceived via a slave. (Wives often were slaves or barely much higher status). This was an ancient practice. So, it probably took some enforcement and time for Hadrian's reform to become accepted as the way it will be going forward. (It was a sensible rule, as with no DNA you could only know the mother for sure, but overturned cultural practice of the day.) This suggests a date in the reign of Antoninus Pius for the first layers of composition of Galatians.

The 140s AD would be the earliest IMO, to answer your question. Certainly, before the reign of Lucius and Marcus.
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Re: The Diatessaron Knows the Marcionite Gospel?

Post by davidmartin »

The Marcionite gospel is far less anti-Jewish than say the first version of the gospel of John
The God of Jesus in John appears to be a spirit that blows like the wind wherever it wants. Is that the earliest layer?
John 14:28 says "You heard how I told you "I go away and I come to you" (which looks like an earlier paradoxical teaching re-purposed for the context). The whole theology of the latter part of John fits the idea of an elusive, hidden divinity that needs seeking out

This isn't Judaism - yes and no. This looks like non-dualism to me - the Spirit God is in Judaism or any religion, as their ultimate source?
Jesus appears to be trying to unite and draw together differing religions to effect a peaceful state of existence. This is also a common view of Jesus among non-Christians, ironically.

In John the net appears to be closing around him and persecution on the verge of breaking out so he gives himself up to save the rest of his followers (commanding them to return to their villages, not desert him, that's his command). That's the story John seems to be telling anyway

So sure, this can be preached like it was authentic Judaism, from that perspective it is, hence the Odes
Obviously in this reading things became garbled fast and obscured. But could the anti-Judaic and anti-pagan layer hide a non-dualistic one?
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