Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

RandyHelzerman wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2024 7:17 am

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.

As I recall, we get positive attestation for the 1 Thessalonians reference that the Judeans killed the Lord Jesus actually being in Marcion. Sure we can still hypothesize its absence from Paul, but this is the one passage that not even Doherty or Carrier could bear. This implies that Marcion's version of Paul is incompatible with Doherty/Carrier style interpretation.

Leucius Charinus wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2024 7:09 am A serious quarrel among scholars concerning its genuineness arose between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th;

Its pretty amazing how non-original most NT scholarship is these days.....the dutch radicals already wrote about everything scholars have written in both the past 100 years and will write in the next 100 years

I take stylometric arguments very seriously; the techniques are getting better every day, and once they can fully exploit the large language models such as chatGPT uses, they will get amazingly better.

But just on the basis of the content of these letters, it's hard from to imagine they are interpolations. Try to imagine when and who the interpolators were? Tertullian paraphrases parts of them in his Apologeticum, book 2. His account in no way contradicts the text we have today. Tertullian's day job was a lawyer, and he was writing a legal opinion, and he would have been called out if he fraudulently cited a legal precedent. There's no way he made them up.

Pretty much the only thing which Tertullian doesn't mention is that Pliny rounded up women slaves, who were deaconesses. But who--if they were going to make up something--would make *that* up? How would it even occur to somebody's imagination that Pliny would take the word of slave women as in any way authoritative? Women couldn't even testify in a court of law. It has to be true, because its stranger than any fiction anybody would write.

--//--

But Trajan's letter back to Pliny argues even more persuasively for these letters authenticity. What story of martyrs has ever had the Emperor saying that it is "against the spirit of the age" to hunt down christians? Or that an Emperor would have said that christians can't be dragged into court because of anonymous accusations? Trajan's policies here are so enlightened, that Tertullian could use them to argue for religious tolerance -- remember, he was absolutely one of the best lawyers in history---every constitution written since 1700, even the most authoritarian, at least pay lip service to religious toleration--a concept which was invented by and agued for by Tertullian----using Pliny's letters to Trajan as precident.

What martyrology has ever portrayed the romans as being champions of religious tolerance??

RandyHelzerman wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2024 7:56 am I take stylometric arguments very seriously; the techniques are getting better every day, and once they can fully exploit the large language models such as chatGPT uses, they will get amazingly better.

Indeed.

Ken Olson wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2024 7:01 am 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:

All very good points about women and slaves having high status in pre-proto-orthodox versions of Christianity. But even by the time the pastorals were being written, that was no longer the party line.

When do you think the pastorals were written? Were they written before or after Pliny wrote his letters (c. 105ish AD)?

Peter Kirby wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2024 7:13 am 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.

A hallmark of a dogmatic, not a critical, stance.

RandyHelzerman wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2024 8:10 am

Ken Olson wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2024 7:01 am 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:

All very good points about women and slaves having high status in pre-proto-orthodox versions of Christianity. But even by the time the pastorals were being written, that was no longer the party line.

When do you think the pastorals were written? Were they written before or after Pliny wrote his letters (c. 105ish AD)?

1 Timothy is the only one of the Pastorals that I've engaged with seriously, but since that's the one in which the Pastor posing as Paul lays down the rule that women shall not teach or have authority over men but must remain silent (1 Tim. 2.12), it's the pertinent one here.

I have a high degree of confidence that the epistle is post-Pauline because the actual author employs the common pseudepigraphic device of having the supposed author explicitly address future issues that arose in the actual author's time rather than in his own (1 Tim 3.1 ff).

Is it later than Pliny's Letter 97 (which I currently would accept as authentic and date c. 110 CE)? I am less certain about that, but I think it is plausible that 1 Tim. 6.20 refers to Marcion's antitheses (c. 144 CE?):


Best,

Ken

RandyHelzerman wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2024 8:20 am

Peter Kirby wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2024 7:13 am 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.

A hallmark of a dogmatic, not a critical, stance.

Maybe it is! Easy rhetorical sparrings. But it's also just what I happened to tap into my phone while waking up. I was hoping for some kind of reply on whether there was any common ground achieved, even in the little just mentioned, i.e.:

RandyHelzerman wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2024 6:20 am a story which is a legend about a founding figure

Quite the unreliable hallmark, I'd say.

rgprice wrote: ↑Sun Jun 09, 2024 5:58 amWhat is clear is this: The Gospel of Mark is a work of allegorical fiction based primarily on two sources: The Pauline writings and the Jewish scriptures. The ministry of Jesus is based on the ministry of Paul and the "teachings" of Jesus are largely sourced from the Pauline letters. The first half of Markan story is based on the story of Elijah and Elisha from 1 & 2 Kings. The story of Elijah and Elisha sets the stage for the downfall of the Israelite kingdoms to the Assyrians and then to the Babylonians, which ultimately lead to the destruction of the "First temple" and the beginning of the Babylonian exile.

The Markan story is written from the perspective of one who is looking back on the events of the Jewish-Roman wars who by then knows that the Jews have repeated their history, who now already knows that the Jewish kingdom has fully fallen and that they are now off again into exile. This is why the writer uses the Elijah/Elisha motif. This perspective is only reached after the final events of the Third Jewish-Roman War.

And so, the first Gospel is a complete fiction.

Peter Kirby wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2024 7:21 am As I recall, we get positive attestation for the 1 Thessalonians reference that the Judeans killed the Lord Jesus actually being in Marcion

Yes. And dismissing these hard texts as being interpolations is just too facile. You can make a text say anything you want by just denying that it says what it says.

This implies that Marcion's version of Paul is incompatible with Doherty/Carrier style interpretation.

Aye.

*sigh* don't get me started The Jesus of the Evangelion may very well have been more like an angel than like a human, but the Jesus of the Evangelion is *explicitly* a historical figure. The very first sentence gives the date of his appearance, and the place where he appeared. The Jesus of the Evangelion is IN-YOUR-FACE in time and space. Which means that Paul's Jesus of the Apostolicon was too.

Marcionites didn't interpret their scriptures--or the septuagint--allegorically. At all. If they did, they could have just allegorized away all of the concerns mentioned in the Antithesis, and been happy little proto-orthodoxies. Like everybody else did at the time, and even many believers today do.

In complete contradistinction, Marcionites were BRUTALLY literal. Jesus had a mother and brothers. And God was his father. This was not a conceptual problem for them at all--both Genesis and Greek mythology have gods coming down for human women, and having demigod babies. Who can get killed. And then resurrected. These polytheistic/historical vs. transcendent/celestial hang-ups are *our* hang-ups, not theirs.

RandyHelzerman wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2024 1:42 pm In complete contradistinction, Marcionites were BRUTALLY literal.

Yes, indeed. This was their cudgel against the OT god, who was literally not a good god.