Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

The Pseudo-Clementines say that Simon Magus was successor of Dositheus, who was in turn a disciple of John the Baptist.

Is this an attempt to depoil the Magus of a presumed temporal primate?

• The same pattern, in the case of Jesus (i.e. John the Baptist who is made precursor of Jesus), serves to combat Marcion, by working under the sign of the continuity between the Baptist (= the last of the Prophets) and Jesus.

• The same pattern, in the case of Magus (by having him preceded by the Baptist) works instead under the sign of the discontinuity between what the Baptist represents (i.e. a Judaizing icon) and what the Magus has to represent (the incipient anti-demiurgist "heresy").

So, as the propagandistic operation goes, placing the Baptist before both the good and evil side of Christianity secures the readers beyond any doubt who is on the good side and who is on the evil side of the Origins.

Now, if Paul==Simon Magus, at least for the anti-demiurgist readers of Paul, the operation would be a curious attempt to place Paul in a obvious Gospel-derived context, where the singular "coincidence" is that the distance between Simon/Paul and Jesus is preserved, the same distance that in the epistles is translated as absolute ignorance of an earthly Jesus.

Was the propagandist in this specific case more historian and less apologist?