Stuart has a good exegesis of the equivalent passage in
Mcn:
The initial statement about a reed blowing in the wind is meant as a put down, giving an assessment of John as somebody unimportant. In the next line it is surprising to say the least to have Jesus to then ask if people went out to behold a finely dressed man and living among the king’s courtesans. This runs smack in the face of every preconceived notion we have about John as an impoverished outsider to the powerful. We like to think of these two lines as set up for the punch line to follows, as tongue in cheek, but there are no throwaway lines in the gospel all contain some theological significance. John is shown here to be aligned with the world’s wealth and powers, an alignment with those of the demiurge in Marcionite terms.
And when Jesus says that yes John is a prophet, we already know that it should be aligned with the same powers, the same God of creation and the Law. This is confirmed by saying John is not just any prophet, but the one written about in Malachi 3:1. The significance of this statement in Marcion’s text cannot be understated. This is not the scripture of Jesus’ God but of the Jewish God. Yet Jesus is confirming that John is the last prophet of the Creator before the end times (e.g., Malachi 4:5). But he does not accept him as belonging to him. When he says he is the greatest born of women, he is saying that although he ranks highest among the Jewish God’s elect, he is not in the Heaven of his God, and that even the lowliest follower of Jesus, who would be the least in God’s kingdom, is greater. And they are so because the least of his God is greater than the greatest of the demiurge.
http://sgwau2cbeginnings.blogspot.com/2 ... o.html?m=1
These words of Stuart put in mouth to Marcion sound (as words of Marcion) as a veritable apology:
But he does not accept him as belonging to him
This is similar to what I have argued before: the marcionite author is warning against the risk of giving welcome to John in the Christian pantheon. "
He is a good person but he is property of the demiurge. Please don't touch him".
Was this apology necessary because even some Gnostic was
someway accepting John as connected
someway with Jesus? Possibly because some hearsay said that the
Jewish John was possessed by the
marcionite Christ when the latter descended on
Capernaum, not coincidentially a place connected with a "source of
water"
per Josephus?