Markus Vinzent on Determining the Marcionite Gospel Text

[MrMacSon]

Now Vincent sees that *Ev is a composition of different texts

Yeah, I recall him saying something like that in a recent YouTube video

On the issues of 'sources' for early Christian writings, the predominant one would have been or in fact was the Hebrew Bible.

As for early Christian writings themselves, it has fairly recently been proposed - by Matthew Larsen in his 2018 book, Gospels before the Book, - that early Christian texts likely existed and circulated as notebooks, eg., as two-piece, wax-on-wood tablets.*

M David Litwa's very recent book, Late Revelations, proposes a wave and accretion model of Gospel development, with many authors contributing and adding tropes from events relevant to their time/s: from the time of or shortly after the First Jewish-Roman War onwards, through to and including references to the Bar Kokhba Revolt.

in his 2018 book, Pantheon, Jorg Ruepke somewhat tongue-in-cheek proposed that, following the authors of the Epistle of Barnabas and Shepherd of Hermas and their then, 2nd-century popularity, Marcion wrote his gospel from scratch as a novel.

*eta:

The Romans used precursors made of reusable wax-covered tablets of wood for taking notes and other informal writings ...

... At the turn of the 1st century AD, a kind of folded parchment notebook, called pugillares membranei in Latin, became commonly used for writing in the Roman Empire. Theodore Cressy Skeat theorized that this form of notebook was invented in Rome and then spread rapidly to the Near East. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex#History

And

... Julius Caesar may have been the first Roman to reduce scrolls to bound pages in the form of a note-book [Suetonius, Julius 56.6]

Also see viewtopic.php?p=173506#p173506 re a 'typical' four-leaf quire formed from a single sheet of papyrus or parchment. Apparently P46 is a single quire document.

[MrMacSon]

fwiw,
I haven't reproduced excerpts from Vinzent's article to support his then views about Marcion writing the Marcionite gospel [from scratch], I've reproduced them to show some of the history of Marcionite research and to show what passages from Tertullian +/- Epiphanius he uses to argue Marcionite priority over Luke, at least.

[MrMacSon]

More from
Markus Vinzent 'Marcion’s Gospel and the Beginnings of Early Christianity, ASE* 32/1(2015): pp.55-87

p.82-3:

... In his recently published PhD, Timothy P. Henderson gives us five synoptical lists of the following Gospels: Gospel of Peter (GP), Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, and he picks literally parallel verses, put into columns on the basis of GP, hence synopsis of the four canonicals plus GP.⁸⁶

... there are several verses, where all, or almost all these 'witnesses' converge and are either much closer than in all the other selected verses or [are, indeed,] even literally identical.

The list of these peculiar verses follows here:
[columns switched around here]

G.Peter	*Ev	G.Mark	G.Matthew	G.Luke	G.John
2:2,5	23:25b	15:15	27:26b		19:16
2:3	23:50-52	15:42-44	27:57-58	same	19:38
3:7	23:11	15:17a	27:28		19.2b
4.10	23:38	15:26	27:38	as	19:19
4:12	23:34b	15:24	27:35		19:23
5:15	23.44	15.33	27:45	*Ev	—
5:19	23:46b	15:37	27:50		19:30b
5:22	23:44	15:33	27:45		—
5:23	23:52,50,51	15:43,45,43a	27:58,57		19:38
5:24	23:53	15:46a	27:59-60a		19:40-1
9:35-6; 12:50	24:1-2	14:8; 16:2,5	28:1-2; 26:12		19:40; 20:1a,12
13:55	24:3	16:5	—		20:11
13:56-7	24:3-5	16:6,8	28:5-6,8		20:2,13a

As one can see, from the [Marcionite column] added here to Henderson’s columns, all (!) these verses correspond with verses that are attested for the Gospel of Marcion. Conversely, and this is as important as the positive evidence, without exception the literal parallelism between the five 'witnesses' stops where Marcion’s text is inexistent.

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https://www.academia.edu/31939279/Marci ... ristianity
.

Attestation seems to be best among G.Peter, *Ev and G.Mark, in that all have these similar verses present.

The verses are spread over more chapters of G.Peter than they are in *Ev, G.Mark, G.Matthew, G.Luke and G.John. In G.Peter they're in numerical order for both chapter and verses within a chapter. In the latter five they only range from the middle of a chapter to the beginning of the next chapter.

[JarekS]

fwiw,
I haven't reproduced excerpts from Vinzent's article to support his then views about Marcion writing the Marcionite gospel [from scratch], I've reproduced them to show some of the history of Marcionite research and to show what passages from Tertullian +/- Epiphanius he uses to argue Marcionite priority over Luke, at least.

Treating Marcion as a theologian, as a writer is a bad joke. Marcion was the leader of a large dispersed enterprise for which he needed standard content in the form of books. His missionaries were to read the same teachings, stories. He could commission books to be written, he could finance them, but not write them.