Vatican confirms Letters of Paul written by Marcion!! Is this legit?

[MrMacSon]

<fify>
So the prologues might encapsulate perception of ‘capturing’ the empire province by province...

[RandyHelzerman]

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So the prologues might encacpsulate perception of ‘capturing’ the empire province by province...

All 7 of them?

[MrMacSon]

<fixed it for me>
So the prologues might encapsulate perception of starting to ‘capture’ the empire province by province...

(and I didn't mean 'encac...' [wrt what the Latin, cacarem means])

[ebion]

This conforms to what (we think) we know of Marcionism, but is hardly uniquely specific to it.

Likewise, the 'similiter' of the prologue to 1 Corinthians implies that Galatians had priority in the order of Paul's letters, which from other sources we (think we) know to be the case with Marcion's Apostolikon; but that order was not unique to Marcion.

In short, the prologues, at best, only confirm what we (think we) know. They provide no new data.

What do you think of proxy baptism for the dead being unique to Marcion in 1Cor.?

I feel that there's no way that could be Early, and must be Marcionic (or something heretical just as bad).

[Secret Alias]

Look at Eusebius's statement in Book 2 (I think) of Church History regarding the taking on of names of dead saints by Christians (like "John"). Something there too. Look at what Origen says to Celsus (posthumously) about names embodying the thing named. When you die and were reborn in the waters you became someone new whose name was typically "borrowed" from a dead saint. Figure it out. What did Tertullian say again? We are seed.

[RandyHelzerman]

What do you think of proxy baptism for the dead being unique to Marcion in 1Cor.?

I feel that there's no way that could be Early, and must be Marcionic (or something heretical just as bad).

Dunno as it any weirder than, say, Jesus being perfectly able to forgive sins by verbal fiat, before he was ostensibly crucified to make that at all acceptable to God. or a virgin birth, or any of half a dozen other things we find in the NT.

We don't have a lot of visibility into what exactly the Marcionites believed, but that passage is in my favorite reconstructions of the Apostolicon, and scholars have argued that the Marcionites did baptize for the dead.

As far as it being heretical, well, that passage is in every version of I Cor we have any visibility into. Tertullian is our earliest witness to the text, and--while he did use it as a talking point against Marcion (why does Paul plump for baptism of the dead, if Paul didn't believe in a bodily resurrection?), Tertullian doesn't seem to have any problem with the practice himself. Its equally valid to wonder whether the proto-orthodox are heretical for *not* baptizing for the dead.

As far as "equally bad" goes, I try not to make value judgements. *everybody* who was writing at the time was in continual danger of being hauled in on trumped-up charges, facing the choice of making a token sacrifice to the Emperor, or being put to death. I've been put at some inconvenience for my beliefs before, but i've never faced anything like that, and I can't help but admire those who have. What possible motivation would they have besides genuine, sincere belief?

I have to proceed under the assumption that these writers were using their best and most sincere efforts to come to grips with Jesus.

Until the council of Nicaea, there wasn't even really a party line, and even after that, Constantine himself confessed to an Arian priest, who he received the last rites from. Valentinus was never expelled because of heresy--there wasn't any such thing back then. Everybody was just as clueless as anybody else as to what Christianity would finally be, and, let's be honest, they never did figure it out to everybody's satisfaction.

It takes years of conditioning, and no small measure of doublethink, before you can sit down and read the NT without being troubled by it, or reading it as if there is some coherent theology there to get right. There's just not, indeed, how could there be? Jesus himself objected to being called "good", and the way I take that is that is that he's reminding us that we're reading about him in a book, written by a human, in human language, so don't just uncritically accept what you are reading. If you really take seriously the proposition that the divine has entered human history here, that is just way too infinite and way to transcendent to be coherently captured in the finite language of humans, designed for glorified ape brains, which boggle at quantum mechanics, let alone the divine. If I were a believer, I'd just accept the mystery, admit that I have no more chance of figuring it out than somebody with half my IQ, and live by faith, not sight, that God would accept me as I am, and understand that I'm really just doing my best here just like everybody else. And if that had been an option presented to me, I might still be one.