BeDuhn’s Greek Reconstruction of Marcion’s Gospel

[Peter Kirby]

Like Valentinus limited himself to John.

This is literally false, isn't it? Good point.

[Peter Kirby]

Bullshit. Another list of gospel reference from the early tradition of associating Marcion with Luke.

I mean, yeah, I also haven't found anything that I could look at and say 'yeah, those are the attestations'.

There is a little bit of non-Luke stuff going on in Klinghardt that might be interesting, hence possibly a point of departure.

(I also know we are not the same and have different perspectives here...)

[Secret Alias]

To answer both questions. It's like the Samaritan question with respect to the Pentateuch origins. Allegedly the Samaritan stole the Jewish Pentateuch and added the thing about Gerizim, except that literally the Pentateuch has the Patriarchs literally living near Shechem. In the case of the Marcionites Luke is enough like Mark and other versions of Mark were floating around antiquity that it is possible that a text like proto-Luke could have been floating around in antiquity. But let's start with the Marcionite association with Luke. The Church Fathers say that Marcion also rejected Acts. Now if they were willing to falsify Luke why did they only reject Act rather than falsify it. The very title of Acts of the Apostles is obviously stolen from the Acta Pilati. A Roman administrator would have been expected to be associated with a text of "acts" unlike an anonymous doctor from Egypt. The Marcionites can be connected with the Acta Pilati. So score one for the Marcionites here. Their "history" of early Christianity predated the so-called Acts of the Apostles. Now we move on to Irenaeus. Irenaeus's point is to demonstrate to a Roman audience that Mark isn't the only gospel. That "John" had gathered together a collection of four texts including his own which together formed one gospel. The history of this document assumes that an otherwise unknown figure of Luke "proves" his identity by writing Acts which we have already demonstrated or suggested was copied from the original history of the Christian community the Acta Pilati. Luke supposedly shows that he was working with Paul when Paul rejected "Mark" (the evangelist) in favor of Luke. This is why the Gospel of Luke is supposed to be "Paul's" gospel. But Paul clearly speaks of "my gospel" and makes references to things which were found in early versions of the Gospel of Mark which were not preserved in our canonical text of Mark. To this end, the likelihood is that the Marcionites preserved as the Philosophumena notes was a text of the Gospel of Mark with mystical bits that seem to be from Empedocles add to it. Why Empedocles? Because Empedocles believed that Love and Strife (I forget the exact Greek words governed the universe, which is very close to the Marcionite/Philonic doctrine of Mercy and Judgement. To get back to my original point. Irenaeus's tendency to speak of the four gospels of the four principal heresies (Mark's heresy isn't specifically referenced) has each gospel connected with one heresy. Luke's gospel is related to Marcion, John to Valentinus. John however seems to have been aware of the Valentinians and Marcionites. He "knew" that these types would arise. As editor of the canon it seems at least plausible that the canon was formed after the existence of Marcionites and Valentinians (and Ebionites for that matter). At the very least the lack of any Valentinian use of other gospels besides John parallels the artificiality of Luke knowing all the gospels and choosing only Luke.

[Secret Alias]

If Irenaeus actually wrote the work he was intending to write, a work which proved from the portions of Luke that Marcion maintained in his gospel, that the God of Marcion was still the Creator, and if Tertullian's Adversus Marcionem was like Adversus Valentinianos a copy of something written by Irenaeus, then all the volumes of "Marcionite studies" literature is a complete fucking waste of time. This would be obvious to my father and your father and everyone else's fathers. But apparently not these guys. There is a high probability that the methodology used to refute Marcion in the first place tainted the results of the inquiry. It's as simple as that. If I study the link between cigarette smoking with gonorrhea in a pool of smoking prostitutes from Brazil and extrapolate from that study that cigarettes cause gonorrhea. You get the rest of it. In case you don't. If someone else comes along and rewrites the original study of developed from smoking whores in Recife and makes it seem that it was a more general study. Now you get the point. There is a high probability that Irenaeus's original study was improperly manipulated by Tertullian. And with respect to Epiphanius. Epiphanius is a bad source of information. He claims to have had before him a Marcionite canon but strangely the original ordering of that information runs in an arrangement which disputes the ordering of the letters of Paul which he seems to have gotten from Irenaeus's original Greek edition of Against Marcion, the source for Tertullian. Someone likely compiled a list of things said about Marcion's canon and arranged them in a strange ordering which Eusebius had to recalibrate to match the ordering that he got from Irenaeus. Irenaeus's ordering of his own edition of the Pauline letters is preserved in a text associated with Anastasius of Sinai and it matches the Galatian first ordering of Adversus Marcionem. These Galatians first canons were apparently quite common among the orthodox in the East and Ephrem used one. There is documentary evidence that Palut (= the first orthodox missionary in the East and the name by which the orthodox were called i.e. Palutians) left Rome at the time of Irenaeus (=fact) and brought his preferred Galatians first canon to the East (= inference).