Acts 17:16-34 as anti-marcionite episode

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Giuseppe
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Acts 17:16-34 as anti-marcionite episode

Post by Giuseppe »

In my view it is the more anti-marcionite episode in all Acts.


Acts 17:16-34
16 While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. 17 So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. 18 A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. 19 Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? 20 You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like to know what they mean.” 21 (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)
22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.
24 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
29 “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. 30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31 For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”
32 When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.” 33 At that, Paul left the Council. 34 Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.

Note the deliberate parallelisms:


MarcionPaul
he is a gentilehe is a Jew
he goes to a Jewish Christian community in Romehe goes to a Gentile community in Athens
he heard about a Jesus son of the god of the Jews he heard about an Unknown God
he claimed that Jesus was really the son of the Unknown Godhe claimed that the Unknown God was really the god of the Jews
he converted many Jewish Christians to gnosticism he converted many gentiles to the god of the Jews

April DeConick recognizes that the ''Unknown God'' of Acts 17:16-34 is a Gnostic term.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Acts 17:16-34 as anti-marcionite episode

Post by Giuseppe »


The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands.
All that emphasis on the link God/world is too anti-marcionite.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
lsayre
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Re: Acts 17:16-34 as anti-marcionite episode

Post by lsayre »

Giuseppe wrote: Fri Jan 19, 2018 1:44 am April DeConick recognizes that the ''Unknown God'' of Acts 17:16-34 is a Gnostic term.
Is there a web link you can provide for this?
Giuseppe
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Re: Acts 17:16-34 as anti-marcionite episode

Post by Giuseppe »

I will quote it from the book "the gnostic new age" tomorrow.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Acts 17:16-34 as anti-marcionite episode

Post by Giuseppe »

The New Testament preserves a story about Paul addressing an Athenian audience (Acts 17:22-31). Paul's speech is usually dismissed by church historians as a figment of Luke's imagination. But I question whether we should be so quick to throw away Paul's speech as a mere invention of the author of Acts. it does in fact encapsulate Paul's entire message about the universal One God.
He begins the speech by commending the Athenians on their religiosity. He notes that they have temples and shrines to every god imaginable, and to be on the safe side, even an altar devoted ''to an unknown god''. Paul announces that he has come to proclaim to them the unknown God whom they are worshipping. He tells them that the unknown God is the biblical Creator God YHWH, who is lord of hevaen and earth. This God is not a tribal god or an idol who lives in a shrine or requires the service of humans. Rather, this God gives life breath to all and needs nothing from us.
In the Athenian address, Paul claims that the unknown God made all nations from a single ancestor, with the hope that his international offspring would search for and find him. Yet, Paul notes, even though we “live and move have our being” in him, God's offspring remain ignorant of him, thinking that his deity could be captured in idols. The time of ignorance is over, Paul says. Now God has been revealed and commands all people everywhere to repent and prepare for the Judgment and the Resurrection.
We may never know whether this is a real speech of Paul's or Luke's invention. But it certainly reflects Paul's understanding of the unknown God and of that God's relationship to all of humanity.
(The Gnostic New Age, Paul and the Gnostic Dogma, p. 122-123)

Clearly April De'Conick, as all the ''consensus'' of theologians masked as scholars, thinks that Paul was a monotheist and not a dualist, or that the New Testament doesn't reveal the fingerprints (or the threat) of the dualist marcionites. Even so, she notes that this passage from Acts may be useful to realize the proto-gnosticism of Paul.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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Irish1975
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Re: Acts 17:16-34 as anti-marcionite episode

Post by Irish1975 »

This speech in Acts is truly weird, and fascinating.

There is a hardcore pantheism in 17:28a that has been muted by the traditional English rendering, reproduced above: "have our being." The literal Greek is shockingly un-Jewish: in [God] we live, move, are. To say that we exist "in God" is to deny creation, not in the direction of Marcion (the creator is not the good, heretofore unknown God), but in the direction of pantheism, which simply denies any creation at all. If the creator made us, he/it must be distinct from us, outside of us, beyond us. But if we exist in God, then God merely emanates or expresses his own being, rather than creating new beings.

The source of the quotation might be Epimenides, a semi-mythical poet/sage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides

It seems to me wildly off the mark to suggest that Luke's Paul is even similar to, let alone identical with, the real Paul. The speech contradicts Romans 1, where Paul decisively and definitively affirms the angry and jealous creator god of Genesis, and where he also gives exactly the opposite message about idolatry. Paul's creator god most definitely does not "overlook" the idolatry of older times, or forgive the ignorance of the pagans. Quite the contrary, he curses them with sexual depravity on account of it.
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