Secret Alias wrote: ↑Sun Apr 07, 2024 10:08 pm
Why do people believe what Church Fathers sake about Marcion?
R. Joseph Hoffman's 1982 thesis on Marcion apparently consisted of discrediting patristic testimony, dating Marcion earlier, and refusing to attempt to provide a reconstruction of the gospel text of Marcion.
He would go on to try to reconstruct Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian.
According to Wikipedia:
Bart D. Ehrman noted that Hoffmann's Marcion had "not been well received"
The post reiterates a criticism of other reconstructions:
"BeDuhn's Greek version, in my view, should now be considered the gold standard Greek edition of the Evangelion, far more reliable than Roth's minimalistic text or the overlong texts of Klinghardt and Nicolotti."
(By "overlong" he means speculative, not reliable for the Greek, not that he thinks *Ev itself was necessarily shorter.)
"Our normalized datasets render in normal font words corresponding to indications 1–3." (both bold and some level of non-bold)
"To normalize this text, we rendered content corresponding to indications 1–3 in normal font." (both bold and some level of non-bold)
These are editorial choices that had to be made, but they are not the only ones that could have been made here.
<omitted>
It would seem that Klinghardt and Nicolotti were both capable of producing editions with a lower Greek word count, and if different editorial decisions were made then more comparable principles of reconstruction would be invoked here.
(I assumed "capable of" meant they hadn't)
Last edited by MrMacSon on Mon Apr 08, 2024 2:10 am, edited 2 times in total.
Peter Kirby wrote: ↑Sun Apr 07, 2024 7:51 pm
According to BeDuhn himself, though, Klinghardt should be understood as offering both a "primary reconstruction" and additional speculation, as he writes in "New Studies of Marcion’s Evangelion" (2017).
Even more seriously, Klinghardt has not adopted the same strict standard found in Roth’s and my own study, of relying only on direct testimony to the presence or absence of text. Instead, the reader finds himself back in Harnack-era speculation of probably present or absent passages based on subjective judgments without evidentiary control. Fortunately, however, he distinguishes this more speculatively-derived part of the reconstruction from that based strictly on the testimony of sources, and it is the latter, printed in bold-type, that must be considered his primary reconstruction, which in fact very closely approximates the reconstructions of Roth and myself. Klinghardt’s extensive assessment of testimony to Evangelion is an important complement to that offered by Roth’s book and my own.
To recover the "primary reconstruction" of Klinghardt, it is necessary to refer directly to his book (i.e. not Bilby's version of it).
For those interested in Klinghardt's reconstruction, I'm working on an alternative to Bilby-BeDuhn that's based on Klinghardt.
I'm about halfway through marking the text, so that bold parts are clearly visible in the text from non-bold parts. After doing that, I will also share a text with the non-bold parts deleted (along with one with the non-bold parts marked).
I may also produce a "via media" (roughly according to Bilby's sense) at my discretion that is based on Klinghardt instead of BeDuhn.
Marcionites were the "Luke stealers" or "Luke corruptors." Sure. Jews are greedy. Blacks have natural rhythm. Chinese people are sneaky. It's one of those truths.
