The Antitheses and the origin of Luke

[Peter Kirby]

Alright, then I still tend to think Basilides is best explained as knowing Luke.

3) There is a third text in which Basilides appears to be commenting on the text of Luke, which is found in (Pseudo) Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, given here with David Litwa’s translation:

ὁπότε οὖν ἔδει ἀρθῆναι τὸ κάλυμ<μ>α καὶ ὀφθῆναι ταῦτα τὰ μυστήρια,
γεγέν<ν>ηται ὁ Ἰησοῦς διὰ Μαρίας τῆς παρθένου, κατὰ τὸ εἰρημένον· «πνεῦμα
ἅγιον ἐπελεύσεται ἐπὶ σέ»—πνεῦμα ἔστιν ἡ Σοφία—, «καὶ δύναμις ὑψίστου
ἐπισκιάσει σοι»—ὕψιστος ἔστιν ὁ δημιουργός·—«διὸ τὸ γεννώμενον ἐκ σοῦ
ἅγιον κληθήσεται». 4. γεγέν<ν>ηται γὰρ οὐκ ἀπὸ ὑψίστου μόνου, ὥσπερ οἱ
κατὰ τὸν Ἀδὰμ κτισθέντες ἀπὸ μόνου ἐκτίσθησαν τοῦ ὑψίστου—τουτέστι
[τῆς Σοφίας καὶ] τοῦ δημιουργοῦ. ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς, «ὁ καινὸς ἄνθρωπος», [ὁ] ἀπὸ
Πνεύματος ἁγίου—τουτέστι τῆς Σοφίας καὶ τοῦ δημιουργοῦ—, ἵνα τὴν μὲν
πλάσιν καὶ κατασκευὴν τοῦ σώματος αὐτοῦ ὁ δημιουργὸς καταρτίσῃ, τὴν δὲ
οὐσίαν αὐτοῦ τὸ Πνεῦμα παράσχῃ τὸ ἅγιον, καὶ γένηται λόγος ἐπουράνιος ἀπὸ
τῆς Ὀγδοάδος, γεν<ν>ηθεὶς διὰ Μαρίας.

Now when it became necessary for the veil to be removed, and these mysteries to be seen, Jesus was born from Mary the virgin, according to what is said: “Holy Spirit will come upon you”—the Spirit being Wisdom—“and power of the Most High will overshadow you”—the “Most High” being the Artificer. “Consequently what is born from you will be called holy.”181 4. Jesus was born not from the Most High alone, like people created according to the model of Adam were created from the Most High or Artificer. Rather, Jesus, “the new human being,” was born from the Holy Spirit—that is, from Wisdom and the Artificer.182 Accordingly, the Artificer fit together the mold and structure of his body, while the Holy Spirit supplied his substance. Thus arose a heavenly Word from the Ogdoad,
born through Mary. [Hippolytus Refutation of All Heresies 6.35.3, ed. and trans. David Litwa,p. 431]

As Litwa notes in his footnotes, this text would appear to be an interpretation of Luke 1.35. There are three quotations of Luke, ‘Holy Spirit will come upon you’, ‘and power of the Most High will overshadow you’ and ‘consequently you will be called holy’, interspersed with Basilides’ comments.

And I'm still not clear on what renders proto-Luke more than just a possible hypothesis.

Thanks for quoting this, Peter.

I want to raise the question of how much time passed between the publication of Luke and the time Basilides quoted it in the Exgetica. Basilides is neither simply quoting Luke nor using it as raw material for his own retelling of stories from Luke. He is writing an exegetical commentary on the textof Luke here. He quotes a short section of Luke verbatim, then gives his interpretive comment on the quoted text, then quotes the next section of Luke verbatim, etc.

This type of commentary is usually written on texts that had attained a high degree of authority in a particular community, not texts that were just recently published. I don't really know how long it might have taken Luke to become an authoritative text, but it seems to me it would be more than just a year or three.

Hi Ken,

Perhaps a publication ca. 115 would do?

That is Tyson's preferred date: https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/opeds/actapo358006

[Peter Kirby]

Alright, then I still tend to think Basilides is best explained as knowing Luke.

And I'm still not clear on what renders proto-Luke more than just a possible hypothesis.

I addressed the issue of Basilides somewhere, but I can't find it. I think my point was that these comments about Basilides are come from a much later source. The implications are way too tenuous. Someone 100-200 years later said that Basilides said something, and we don't even really know for sure when Basilides lived, if what was begin quoted as having been said "by Basilides" was actually said "by Basilides, etc., etc. We don't know exactly what text whoever wrote this may have been using, how it relates to canonical Luke, etc., etc. This is just assumptions stacked on top of assumptions.

You say that. But when I examine myself, I'm always full of doubt on attempts to tease out hypothetical recensions and literary dependencies, for which there is no source and on which I can easily put my weight on the Ouija board of the hypothetical to push it wherever I want to go.

By comparison, this kind of "issue" is a delight and the lack of personal "assumption" a reprieve.

[Ken Olson]

Alright, then I still tend to think Basilides is best explained as knowing Luke.

3) There is a third text in which Basilides appears to be commenting on the text of Luke, which is found in (Pseudo) Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, given here with David Litwa’s translation:

ὁπότε οὖν ἔδει ἀρθῆναι τὸ κάλυμ<μ>α καὶ ὀφθῆναι ταῦτα τὰ μυστήρια,
γεγέν<ν>ηται ὁ Ἰησοῦς διὰ Μαρίας τῆς παρθένου, κατὰ τὸ εἰρημένον· «πνεῦμα
ἅγιον ἐπελεύσεται ἐπὶ σέ»—πνεῦμα ἔστιν ἡ Σοφία—, «καὶ δύναμις ὑψίστου
ἐπισκιάσει σοι»—ὕψιστος ἔστιν ὁ δημιουργός·—«διὸ τὸ γεννώμενον ἐκ σοῦ
ἅγιον κληθήσεται». 4. γεγέν<ν>ηται γὰρ οὐκ ἀπὸ ὑψίστου μόνου, ὥσπερ οἱ
κατὰ τὸν Ἀδὰμ κτισθέντες ἀπὸ μόνου ἐκτίσθησαν τοῦ ὑψίστου—τουτέστι
[τῆς Σοφίας καὶ] τοῦ δημιουργοῦ. ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς, «ὁ καινὸς ἄνθρωπος», [ὁ] ἀπὸ
Πνεύματος ἁγίου—τουτέστι τῆς Σοφίας καὶ τοῦ δημιουργοῦ—, ἵνα τὴν μὲν
πλάσιν καὶ κατασκευὴν τοῦ σώματος αὐτοῦ ὁ δημιουργὸς καταρτίσῃ, τὴν δὲ
οὐσίαν αὐτοῦ τὸ Πνεῦμα παράσχῃ τὸ ἅγιον, καὶ γένηται λόγος ἐπουράνιος ἀπὸ
τῆς Ὀγδοάδος, γεν<ν>ηθεὶς διὰ Μαρίας.

Now when it became necessary for the veil to be removed, and these mysteries to be seen, Jesus was born from Mary the virgin, according to what is said: “Holy Spirit will come upon you”—the Spirit being Wisdom—“and power of the Most High will overshadow you”—the “Most High” being the Artificer. “Consequently what is born from you will be called holy.”181 4. Jesus was born not from the Most High alone, like people created according to the model of Adam were created from the Most High or Artificer. Rather, Jesus, “the new human being,” was born from the Holy Spirit—that is, from Wisdom and the Artificer.182 Accordingly, the Artificer fit together the mold and structure of his body, while the Holy Spirit supplied his substance. Thus arose a heavenly Word from the Ogdoad,
born through Mary. [Hippolytus Refutation of All Heresies 6.35.3, ed. and trans. David Litwa,p. 431]

As Litwa notes in his footnotes, this text would appear to be an interpretation of Luke 1.35. There are three quotations of Luke, ‘Holy Spirit will come upon you’, ‘and power of the Most High will overshadow you’ and ‘consequently you will be called holy’, interspersed with Basilides’ comments.

And I'm still not clear on what renders proto-Luke more than just a possible hypothesis.

Thanks for quoting this, Peter.

I want to raise the question of how much time passed between the publication of Luke and the time Basilides quoted it in the Exgetica. Basilides is neither simply quoting Luke nor using it as raw material for his own retelling of stories from Luke. He is writing an exegetical commentary on the textof Luke here. He quotes a short section of Luke verbatim, then gives his interpretive comment on the quoted text, then quotes the next section of Luke verbatim, etc.

This type of commentary is usually written on texts that had attained a high degree of authority in a particular community, not texts that were just recently published. I don't really know how long it might have taken Luke to become an authoritative text, but it seems to me it would be more than just a year or three.

Hi Ken,

Perhaps a publication ca. 115 would do?

That is Tyson's preferred date: https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/opeds/actapo358006

Yes. Naturally, I don't know if that's the correct date, but it seems to me to be be in the plausible range.

Best,

Ken

[andrewcriddle]

It's one thing for Marcion to say 'this was the original, that was an interpolation' when he does not know.

It's another thing if Marcion originated the gospel text and wanted it to be accepted. In that case, transparency is unexpected.

IMHO Marcion explicitly presented his Gospel text as a critical edition seeking to remove interpolations. This would be similar to the attempts of Alexandrian scholars to produce a text of Homer without interpolations. I think a version of Luke without the Birth narrative already existed and the text of Luke 3-24 known to Marcion differed significantly from the later text of Canonical Luke but I think Marcion was quite open that his Gospel text involved a significant amount of what we would call conjectural emendarion.

Andrew Criddle

[Peter Kirby]

It's one thing for Marcion to say 'this was the original, that was an interpolation' when he does not know.

It's another thing if Marcion originated the gospel text and wanted it to be accepted. In that case, transparency is unexpected.

IMHO Marcion explicitly presented his Gospel text as a critical edition seeking to remove interpolations. This would be similar to the attempts of Alexandrian scholars to produce a text of Homer without interpolations. I think a version of Luke without the Birth narrative already existed and the text of Luke 3-24 known to Marcion differed significantly from the later text of Canonical Luke but I think Marcion was quite open that his Gospel text involved a significant amount of what we would call conjectural emendarion.

Andrew Criddle

Thanks for your reply. It seems like you and Ken both agree on this, so it must seem plausible to some.

Let me take a moment to consider setting aside the Evangelion-priority stuff and adopting this viewpoint.

On hypothesis (4), Marcion would come close to admitting that the Evangelion he used was derived from the known text of canonical Luke, with the passages he perceived to be later interpolations removed in order to restore what he thought to be the original text of the gospel.

But you contend that we can reject that hypothesis because it is not plausible to think that a second century writer would be that forthcoming about the origin of the gospel text he used or his own role in it?

I do not find hypothesis (4), or Marcion's relative honesty, nearly as hard to accept as you seem to.

Best,

Ken

Andrew, what things led you to this position?

Ken, same question for you?

I would appreciate any insight you could offer.

[andrewcriddle]

It's one thing for Marcion to say 'this was the original, that was an interpolation' when he does not know.

It's another thing if Marcion originated the gospel text and wanted it to be accepted. In that case, transparency is unexpected.

IMHO Marcion explicitly presented his Gospel text as a critical edition seeking to remove interpolations. This would be similar to the attempts of Alexandrian scholars to produce a text of Homer without interpolations. I think a version of Luke without the Birth narrative already existed and the text of Luke 3-24 known to Marcion differed significantly from the later text of Canonical Luke but I think Marcion was quite open that his Gospel text involved a significant amount of what we would call conjectural emendarion.

Andrew Criddle

Thanks for your reply. It seems like you and Ken both agree on this, so it must seem plausible to some.

Let me take a moment to consider setting aside the Evangelion-priority stuff and adopting this viewpoint.

On hypothesis (4), Marcion would come close to admitting that the Evangelion he used was derived from the known text of canonical Luke, with the passages he perceived to be later interpolations removed in order to restore what he thought to be the original text of the gospel.

But you contend that we can reject that hypothesis because it is not plausible to think that a second century writer would be that forthcoming about the origin of the gospel text he used or his own role in it?

I do not find hypothesis (4), or Marcion's relative honesty, nearly as hard to accept as you seem to.

Best,

Ken

Andrew, what things led you to this position?

Ken, same question for you?

I would appreciate any insight you could offer.

I think that the most plausible reason for the unusual emphasis that Marcion put on Paul is that Paul's writings taught of the threat of Judaizers corrupting the Gospel. This threat in Paul's time had plausibly become a pervading reality in Marcion's time which justified conjectural emendation to purify the Gospel.

I also think it likely that almost all the passages missing from Marcion's Gospel but present in both Mark and Canonical Luke were removed by Marcion as editor. Assuming Markan priority it seems unlikely IMHO that these passages were missing in any Gospel text prior to Marcion.

Andrew Criddle

[Peter Kirby]

Andrew, what things led you to this position?

Ken, same question for you?

I would appreciate any insight you could offer.

I think that the most plausible reason for the unusual emphasis that Marcion put on Paul is that Paul's writings taught of the threat of Judaizers corrupting the Gospel. This threat in Paul's time had plausibly become a pervading reality in Marcion's time which justified conjectural emendation to purify the Gospel.

I also think it likely that almost all the passages missing from Marcion's Gospel but present in both Mark and Canonical Luke were removed by Marcion as editor. Assuming Markan priority it seems unlikely IMHO that these passages were missing in any Gospel text prior to Marcion.

Andrew Criddle

Thanks, Andrew.

I had already started to find reason to think that there were revisions to the Pauline epistles that were deletions.

Please let me know if you have any other thoughts.

[JarekS]

I've already said it once, but I'll say it again because maybe I didn't know how to say it right. Marcion was the leader of the project, not an admirer of selected writings or any writer. A leader who has achieved success, and this is inaccessible to people focused on secondary matters. These comparisons at the level of texts or theology lead nowhere, as the work of many generations of biblical scholars has shown.
The search for the first gospel ends with the one we know, i.e. *Ev. Klinghardt claims that it was written by another new, unknown ghostwriter. Gramaglia claims that it was Luke and that *Ev contains passages written in the language of Matthew. Klinghardt is supported by Trobisch, Vinzent and a few friends. A whole host of biblical scholars are against it.
Mark's priority requires such interesting reconstructions that you don't know whether to laugh or cry.
For now, my version of "They wrote together" is working, which I remind you without boasting.

Antitheses are polemics against alleged interpretations of Scripture in the Jewish tradition. I write "allegedly" because in the Jewish tradition, creating the maximum number of interpretations is a popular sport. We know of at least 3,000 comments on a short story about Isaac.

For the Greeks of the times of the empire, the LXX was already their own 200-year-old tradition and in the face of great Greek-Jewish and Roman-Jewish conflicts, there was a split in universal Judaism. The letter of Barnabas, Melito's sermon, the Antitheses, the gospels, the apostolic letters are writings that stigmatize Jews to show that one is on the other side of the barricade.
How to go to the Greek peasants with the Jewish Yahweh at that time?
Truly, all anti-Marcion literature has the same value as the interrogation reports of the NKVD and KGB. Give me a man and there will be a paragraph, as a certain Pole, a Soviet prosecutor, said.

[Ken Olson]

It's one thing for Marcion to say 'this was the original, that was an interpolation' when he does not know.

It's another thing if Marcion originated the gospel text and wanted it to be accepted. In that case, transparency is unexpected.

IMHO Marcion explicitly presented his Gospel text as a critical edition seeking to remove interpolations. This would be similar to the attempts of Alexandrian scholars to produce a text of Homer without interpolations. I think a version of Luke without the Birth narrative already existed and the text of Luke 3-24 known to Marcion differed significantly from the later text of Canonical Luke but I think Marcion was quite open that his Gospel text involved a significant amount of what we would call conjectural emendarion.

Andrew Criddle

Thanks for your reply. It seems like you and Ken both agree on this, so it must seem plausible to some.

Let me take a moment to consider setting aside the Evangelion-priority stuff and adopting this viewpoint.

On hypothesis (4), Marcion would come close to admitting that the Evangelion he used was derived from the known text of canonical Luke, with the passages he perceived to be later interpolations removed in order to restore what he thought to be the original text of the gospel.

But you contend that we can reject that hypothesis because it is not plausible to think that a second century writer would be that forthcoming about the origin of the gospel text he used or his own role in it?

I do not find hypothesis (4), or Marcion's relative honesty, nearly as hard to accept as you seem to.

Best,

Ken

Andrew, what things led you to this position?

Ken, same question for you?

I would appreciate any insight you could offer.

Andrew has already offered a reasonable answer to this question, but I would like to add that I find the question itself seems to suggest that this is an odd or perhaps counterintuitive view in need of a special defense, which I don't think it is. From the OP:

Marcion is the author of the Antitheses, and Marcion was active in the first half of the second century.

Against Marcion drew on the Antitheses. In Against Marcion 4.4, it is written:

For if the Gospel, said to be Luke's which is current among us (we shall see whether it be also current with Marcion), is the very one which, as Marcion argues in his Antitheses, was interpolated by the defenders of Judaism, for the purpose of such a conglomeration with it of the law and the prophets as should enable them out of it to fashion their Christ, surely he could not have so argued about it, unless he had found it (in such a form).

There are a few possibilities:

(4) A statement about Luke's gospel does go back to the Antitheses, and Marcion's Gospel was his own.

(4) is possible, but it does not seem very plausible. If Marcion were the author of the Gospel, then on this possibility, by pointing out the so-called interpolations in the known gospels that were previously received, he would be in effect advertising the way that the created his new text by editing the existing ones for speculative restoration of the Gospel. Such a thing would be without parallel in the second century. It would run counter to the implicit goal of winning support for the antiquity of such a new Gospel, which is why most other second century gospels don't do this and simply claim authorship by an apostle.

It seems to me that (4) is the most straightforward interpretation of what Tertullian said about Marcion. We would need an argument for why we should not trust Tertullian in this case and why we should not believe Marcion had said or done as (4) posits. It's not obvious to me that Marcion would not have done as (4) posits. I seriously doubt that he would have conceived of what he was doing as creating a new Gospel, but rather that he had restored the original gospel by removing the Judean/Judaic interpolations.

It's true that in the (perhaps mid to late) second century there were people claiming authorship by apostles (or 'apostolic men' like Mark and Luke), but this was not a universal practice in the late first or early second centuries. I subscribe to the widely held theory that the four gospels were originally anonymous and the attributions to Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were added later. The authors of Mark and Matthew do not tell us anything about themselves directly (I realize there are people who think they give hints), and the author of Luke seems to reveal only that he was not an eyewitness but knew the tradition thoroughly. If the author meant to claim he himself was a companion of Paul with the 'we passages' in Acts, it is an amazingly indirect claim and, as far as I'm aware, unparalleled in ancient history. The author of John does seem to suggest that the Disciple Jesus Loved is the authority behind the text, but seems to fall short of actually claiming to be that disciple, who is anonymous and not clearly identifiable with any person named in the text.

Best,

Ken

[Peter Kirby]

Andrew has already offered a reasonable answer to this question, but I would like to add that I find the question itself seems to suggest that this is an odd or perhaps counterintuitive view in need of a special defense, which I don't think it is.

No, not in those words. How about just a defense of a not-odd, not-counterintuitive view?

It seems to me that (4) is the most straightforward interpretation of what Tertullian said about Marcion. We would need an argument for why we should not trust Tertullian in this case

Seems pretty straightforward:

(1) It's polemical.
(2) It's at best unclear whether Tertullian was in a position to know which came first.

So, yes, I don't find this enough to feel that I have a good answer on this basis.