Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

RandyHelzerman wrote: ↑Mon Jun 10, 2024 6:25 pm We have no biographical information about Jesus at all which doesn't ultimately stem from Mark and revisions of Mark which were obviously written way later than Mark.

This is a statement of hypothesis, and it relies on multiple other hypotheses (or perhaps a particular definition of biographical).

A hypothesis that Romans 9:5, Galatians 3:16, and Galatians 4:4, which say that he was an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham who was born of a woman, was either not by Paul or doesn't mean what it seems to mean.

A hypothesis that Galatians 1:19, which identies a certain James in Jerusalem as being "the brother of the Lord," was either not by Paul or doesn't mean what it seems to mean.

A hypothesis that 1 Corinthians 11:23, which ostensibly talks about Jesus breaking bread with some associates on the night that he was handed over, was either not by Paul or doesn't mean what it seems to mean.

A hypothesis that 1 Thessalonians 2:15 didn't have Paul refer to the Judeans having responsibility for killing Jesus, for example, because it's not by Paul, which is not certain.

A hypothesis that 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, that says he died and was buried, was either not by Paul or doesn't mean what it seems to mean (which is compatible with the Secret James idea of a possibly non-tomb burial for what it's worth).

A hypothesis that Hebrews 13:12, which says that Jesus suffered outside the city gate, was either dependent on Mark or doesn't mean what it seems to mean.

A hypothesis that Revelation 11:8, which says that their Lord was crucified in "the great city," where the text claims some other bodies of the dead will be in the future, was either dependent on Mark or doesn't mean what it seems to mean (albeit, the particular city referenced, as the reader's existing knowledge, can be inferred only from other sources).

A hypothesis regarding 1 Clement 13:2, which has "remembering the words of the Lord Jesus which He spake, teaching forbearance and long-suffering: for thus He spake Have mercy, that ye may receive mercy: forgive, that it may be forgiven to you. As ye do, so shall it be done to you. As ye give, so shall it be given unto you. As ye judge, so shall ye be judged. As ye show kindness, so shall kindness be showed unto you. With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured withal to you." That this was dependent on Mark or doesn't mean what it seems to mean, or isn't up to snuff for a definition of biographical.

A hypothesis that 1 Peter 5:1 (not by Peter according to most scholars), which suggests that Peter was "a witness of Christ’s sufferings," leading to a death on a cross (1 Peter 2:24), was either dependent on Mark or doesn't mean what it seems to mean.

A hypothesis that 1 Timothy 6:13 (not by Paul), which says that Jesus was before Pontius Pilate, was either dependent on Mark or doesn't mean what it seems to mean.

A hypothesis that the report by Tacitus stems from Mark (not just Christians but specifically those whose words are stemming from Mark). There it's said that a certain Christus, a founder figure, was executed by Pilate.

This is just the surface of the many hypotheses implied here, which would extend to everything in every text everywhere.

It's pretty impressive that this bundle of hypotheses has now taken on the status of "proven fact" for some.

rgprice wrote: ↑Sun Jun 09, 2024 5:58 am Firstly I would say that recent scholarship related to Marcion's scriptures and the heretics in general has provided a quite compelling case that the works of the orthodox New Testament were produced/edited in response to Marcionism and other heretical ministries.

I don't disagree, but it's not clear what the full extent of it is. I think the pastorals write against something that, if not Marcionism directly, looks quite like it. We also find clear traces of this kind of reaction (not necessarily to Marcionism) in 2 Peter and Jude, those 'disputed' and clearly fake writings, as well as in 1 John, which even on a traditional dating straddles 100 CE or so. And I did not include Romans 1:3 as by Paul, on the hypothesis that the insertion of this David tradition (something I find absent, later, from Mark and John) at the head of the orthodox Romans-first canon was more evidently redactional. We're dealing with spin's famous tainted sandwich, and if we don't just walk away, it's difficult to try to determine the hypothetical full extent of what was interpolated, especially if we don't make the simplifying assumption that the Marcionite scissors were any less sharp than the orthodox quill was wet.

what would have to have occurred for the followers of a historical Jesus with their own writings to result in what we see now from our vantage point where his actual existence appears doubtful?
that process can be hypothesised too

Peter Kirby wrote: ↑Mon Jun 10, 2024 7:51 pm I.e. it looks very much like a proto-Marcionite setting.
because Marcionite and non-Marcionite Christians looked very much alike. I do like the idea of thinking about proto-Marcionites because there isn't necessarily that much original theologically about Marcion.

Yup. There is one detail in Pliny's letters which sounds Marcionite, and that is the high status that women--slave women even--had. When Pliny wanted to get an authoritative read on what this new sect was all about, naturally he would have rounded up some of their leaders....and the leaders he found were women, slaves, and yet had titled offices (deaconess).

It would be nice to think that all branches of christianity around 100ad really practiced what Paul preaches when he says that in Christ there is no Jew/Greek, Male/Female, Free/Slave. I'm *hoping* that it wasn't so very distinctive of Marcionite christianity, but I fear that it might be so

Peter Kirby wrote: ↑Mon Jun 10, 2024 9:41 pm This is just the surface of the many hypotheses implied here, which would extend to everything in every text everywhere.
It's pretty impressive that this bundle of hypotheses has now taken on the status of "proven fact" for some.

I don't really have a dog in this race here; as much as I think R G Price has nailed it in terms of how Mark was written and how fictional it is, I still find it more plausible that people would be "duped" by Mark if they had a pre-existing curiosity about Jesus's life. It's hard to prove a negative. Prove there are no aliens. Prove there's no life on Mars, even miles underground.

For that matter, Prove there is no God. I find it ironic that some of the same people who counter the (IMHO reasonable) demands for evidence in atheism by saying "you can't prove a negative" have set for themselves the lifelong goal of proving a negative.

So I have no interest whatsoever in proving that Jesus was or was not not a historical figure.

A hypothesis that Romans 9:5, Galatians 3:16, and Galatians 4:4, which say that he was an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham who was born of a woman, was either not by Paul or doesn't mean what it seems to mean.

It's a long list of hypotheticals, but if you dig into them, they aren't as formidable....e.g. in the above hypothesis: Jesus could only be a descendent of Abraham if there *was* an Abraham. If that is just a flowery way of saying that Jesus is Jewish, well, it still is not a very distinguishing biographical fact about him---it doesn't even mean he was born in Palestine or even lived in Palestine; Paul himself was a diaspora Jew.

It's describing who Jesus was by invoking a legendary figure--meant very much to say that the story of Jesus is part of *that* story, Abraham's story--a story which is a legend about a founding figure....which makes it all but an explicitly legendary statement about Jesus. Paul may very well be telling us something that he was told about Jesus, and this would be evidence that there *was* pre-Marcan, pre-Pauline Jesus tradition, but if so, Paul is passing along a legend he has heard, not a biographical tidbit that he's heard.

And one guy whose opinions I take very seriously indeed has pointed out here: viewtopic.php?p=37923#p37923 that these biographical facts which are sprinkled about in Paul are absent from Marcion's recension. Pro-Marcionite omissions, or anti Marcionite interpolations? Pick your poison, but at the very least the trend in recent scholarship is moving away from the Marcion the Mutilator hypothesis.

---//---

Even so, forgetting about Marcion for a second, if we brought all of these pre-gospel references together, how much biographical information is there anyways? Especially if you discount Hagiography like he was royalty--the son of David, and just-so stories about why we break bread and drink wine at the eucharist (cf the Didache, which gives a very different take on the eucharist), and other very generic details, like he had a mother and a brother.....really, how much is left?

Has there been anybody who a) is not a mythicist and b) has brought all of these pre-Marcan bits together to see what could be made of them? I've read Ehrman's book on why Jesus wasn't a myth, but really, I didn't find it very persuasive, because he mostly relies on texts which are downstream of Mark and Paul. I would like to see the very best case which could be made for a pre-paulilne Jesus tradition.

RandyHelzerman wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2024 6:20 am And one guy whose opinions I take very seriously indeed has argued here: viewtopic.php?p=37923#p37923 that these biographical facts which are sprinkled about in Paul are absent from Marcion's recension.

Not quite my opinion even then. There were still the 1 Corinthians 11 passage and the 1 Thessalonians passage that I was never able to persuade myself were absent from Marcion's recession. These passages gave me issues as a weakness of the hypothesis that I have had to dwell on since. I had to suppose they were an additional set of Marcionite or pre-Marcionite interpolations.

I have also since realized the weaknesses of some of my criteria, such as the criterion of the scholarly hypothesis of interpolation. By nature this creates a falsely-grounded attestation for an alleged absence being actually absent in Marcion's recension, transforming the hypothesis into a perceived non-hypothetical absence (since text critical ideas with no known sources are called hypothetical). This lacks validity in the respect that additional evidence in the form of actual attestation for the hypothesis was not actually found. This applies for example to the 1 Corinthians 15 passage.

After thinking about this, I was left to wonder what actually was attested as absent from Marcion's recension. And what I was left with wasn't confirmation that Marcion's text didn't have biographical style stuff, because it did have that. The parts that Marcion's version did not have were the parts that directly contradicted Marcion's idea that Jesus came down directly from heaven, such as the reference to being an Israelite in Romans 9:5. And even this doesn't appear to have been removed that artfully because the beginning of the passage's argument is retained, but the absence begins where it contradicted Marcion.

I was left not only recognizing that Marcion's version had biographical information, which I already was aware of, but that the particular locations where it was absent were precisely the kind of biography that Marcion took an issue with theologically.

Considering that I recognize and continue to recognize other, even anti-Marcionite changes to the text, such as Romans 1:3, at this point it felt hypocritical and almost hagiographic to continue to defend the innocence of Marcion from emendations of the text.

RandyHelzerman wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2024 5:31 am

Peter Kirby wrote: ↑Mon Jun 10, 2024 7:51 pm I.e. it looks very much like a proto-Marcionite setting.
because Marcionite and non-Marcionite Christians looked very much alike. I do like the idea of thinking about proto-Marcionites because there isn't necessarily that much original theologically about Marcion.

Yup. There is one detail in Pliny's letters which sounds Marcionite, and that is the high status that women--slave women even--had. When Pliny wanted to get an authoritative read on what this new sect was all about, naturally he would have rounded up some of their leaders....and the leaders he found were women, slaves, and yet had titled offices (deaconess).

It would be nice to think that all branches of christianity around 100ad really practiced what Paul preaches when he says that in Christ there is no Jew/Greek, Male/Female, Free/Slave. I'm *hoping* that it wasn't so very distinctive of Marcionite christianity, but I fear that it might be so

I do not think there is anything peculiarly Marcionite about the two ancillis (maidservants or slave women) who are called ministrae (ministers, or deaconesses) whom Pliny had tortured to extract the truth about what the Christians believed or did Letter 10.97:


Phoebe in Romans 16.1 is a deaconess of the church of Cenchreae (the harbor city on the eastern side of the Isthmus of Corinth, though she is probably not a slave. There are several other women mentioned in Romans 16 to whom Paul sends greetings, many of whom seem to be engaged in the work of the Lord (as Paul calls it).


Slaves certainly could be members of the church, as Paul addresses them in several places, and I cannot see why they could not have held lower offices. (I suspect they were not often chosen as bishops, unless freed first).

Best,

Ken

RandyHelzerman wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2024 5:31 amThere is one detail in Pliny's letters which sounds Marcionite, and that is the high status that women--slave women even--had. When Pliny wanted to get an authoritative read on what this new sect was all about, naturally he would have rounded up some of their leaders....and the leaders he found were women, slaves, and yet had titled offices (deaconess).

RandyHelzerman wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2024 6:20 am Paul may very well be telling us something that he was told about Jesus, and this would be evidence that there *was* pre-Marcan, pre-Pauline Jesus tradition, but if so, Paul is passing along a legend he has heard, not a biographical tidbit that he's heard.

It could be interesting to explore this further.

The thing is that I don't think I have yet convinced a single person on the forum of even this much. If I have, though, then let me know.

Peter Kirby wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2024 6:57 am After thinking about this, I was left to wonder what actually was attested as absent from Marcion's recession.

Not much And the reconstructions I've seen of the Apostolicon gets shorter and shorter....because what *is* attested as *not* being absent isn't that much either.

Which leads me to believe that the canonical and the Marcionite versions of Pauls letters probably were not that different from each other---especially, say, the versions available to Tertullian, which were written before the final round of redaction done when the canonical NT was compiled.

But even that must be tentative---here we are trying to prove a negative again--and this time, from a negative Tertullian *didn't* say X, therefore X was *not* in the Apostolicon..... building a case for a Mythical Jesus on such is building on sand.