Giuseppe wrote: ↑Sat May 13, 2023 4:14 am
Curiously, Robert M. Price is arrived very close to the truth when he wrote that:
If Marcion was a Simonian, why does he speak about Jesus as much as he does? Why does he not talk about the salvation wrought by Simon?
(
Amazing Colossal Apostle, p. 224, my bold)
Think about the implications of that:
- Marcion was the first who collected the epistles;
- Bruno Bauer has proved, pace Bob Price, that the epistles betray knowledge of the Earliest Gospel;
- Marcion knew the Earliest Gospel;
- the Simonians would have willingly connected their Simon/"Jesus" with Pilate, since the latter had dealt cruelly with the Samaritans;
- Therefore: Marcion, or some Samaritan preceding him, would have introduced probably Pilate in the Passion story.
In short:
even if Marcion didn't write the Earliest Gospel, even if the Simonians didn't write the Earliest Gospel, what is very probable is that Marcion and/or the Simonians mentioned the first time Pilate in connection with Jesus.
ADDENDA: This explains why the insistence on the 15° year of Tiberius was an obsession entirely marcionite.
Further evidence that the idea itself of a "crucifixion of Jesus" was connected with Samaria is found in the Jewish post-Bar-Kokhba invention of a
samaritan Messiah Son of Joseph, as part and parcel of the anti-Christian polemic:
The notion of the Messias Ben Joseph or Ben Ephraim frequently mentioned by the Jewish writers, “makes so much for the Samaritans”, observed Lightfoot, “that one might believe it was first hatched among themselves; only that the story tells us that Messiah was at length slain; which the Samaritans would hardly ever have invented concerning Him. And the Jews perhaps might be the authors of it; that so they might the better evade those passages that speak of the death of the true Messiah”. If this notion is of post-Christian date, when the belief in a crucified Messias was in currency, it seems to imply the recognition that He who had suffered was the Samaritan Messias, or of the Ten Tribes. To suppose that the notion was invented to explain a text, Zech. 12. 10, seems to be insufficient reasoning. The remarkable thing is that a son of Joseph, whose bones were admitted by the Talmudic writers to be buried in Sychem,—a descendant of Ephraim, the Samaritan tribe,—should be admitted a Messias at all. We cannot but suppose that old Samaritan beliefs about the Messias were in some way blended with that current of Gnostic teaching of which the fountainhead was Simon, the Great One (perhaps originally only the Rabbi) of that land. Cerinthus, Cerdo, and Carpocrates taught that Jesus was son of Joseph and Mary.
(Edwin Johnson,
Antiqua Mater, p. 259, my bold)
So the more economical scenario is one where the Simonians, during the formation of the Gospel tradition (or at least when the early anti-demiurgists appeared in Samaria), introduced in it the connection of Jesus with the Samaria in the simplest possible way: by connecting Jesus with the notorious slaughterer of Samaritans:
Pilate.