The temple word.

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: The temple word.

Post by Ben C. Smith »

The various sayings I highlighted appear to be related to each other. Even if Thomas means something else by "house" than the temple in Jerusalem (which I agree is probable), the Thomasine saying still appears to be related to the others. If you are suggesting that it is not, or that the other sayings are not related to one another in some way, then I would have to query why.

Granted, then, that there is some interconnection, what is your preferred trajectory? Which saying (if any of the selections) came first, and why did it change meaning as it went along?
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Re: The temple word.

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Kunigunde Kreuzerin wrote: Sun Apr 08, 2018 1:18 pmI have no problem at all with it being your personal opinion, Ben.
I actually am not sure yet what my own opinion is on this. The OP presents a possible trajectory, one which makes sense to be, but which is probably not the only available one which explains all of the evidence, nor necessarily the best of those. I am looking for equal or better trajectories.
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Re: The temple word.

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Kunigunde Kreuzerin wrote: Sun Apr 08, 2018 1:18 pmImho it is one thing to doubt some claims of the Evangelists with a historical-critical approach. We do that every day. But I think it is another thing to claim something about Jesus what the Evangelists explicitly denied. In the former case there is a source, but you doubt the content of its statement. In the latter case you only claim something for which no source exists and the only source explicitly denies your assertion. Imho this has nothing to do with science anymore.
I have been doing some thinking about this statement, and I pretty much disagree on a fundamental level. I am reminded of a Sarah Silverman bit a friend introduced me to once:

"Don't tell girls they can be anything they want when they grow up. Because it would have never occurred to them that they couldn't. It's like saying, 'Hey, when you get in the shower, I'm not gonna read your diary.' 'Wait — are you gonna read my diary?' 'No! I said I'm not gonna read your diary. Go take a shower!'"

What on the surface seems like it should be a reassurance (the promise not to read your diary while you are in the shower) is actually disturbing precisely because it was brought up at all. It is not illogical for the person on her way to the shower to now wonder what is going on with her roommate and her diary, right?

I know the analogy is not at all perfect, but one way to read Matthew and Mark putting the temple word on the lips of false witnesses is to accept one part of the claim and reject another part. To wit:
  1. Matthew and Mark are claiming that people attributed the temple word to Jesus, whether those people were actual persons at his trial or stand-ins for persons known to the author(s), as happens elsewhere in the gospels. Let us accept this claim.
  2. Matthew and Mark are claiming that the people claiming this are being false witnesses. Let us reject this claim.
Obviously, there are going to be other possible explanations for that first claim: maybe Mark simply made up the entire line of inquiry about the temple. That is possible (and trajectories involving such alternative explanations for these points are exactly what the OP is asking for). But there is no question that it is also possible that Mark is really responding to a claim being made about Jesus, that he said something like that. And, as long as that possibility exists, it ought to be explored.

I think we find a similar situation in the case of Marcion. Every source we have tells us that Marcion truncated Luke. We learn only from Tertullian that apparently the Marcionites claimed that Luke interpolated Marcion. But, even without that bit of information, and even before we analyze a single line of Lucan or Marcionite text, I think it is perfectly valid to deconstruct the claims of Lucan priority and wonder whether the opposite, Marcionite priority, might not be true. But to apply the principle you gave:

IMHO, it is one thing to doubt some claims of the church fathers with an historical-critical approach. We do that every day. But I think it is another thing to claim something about Marcion that the church fathers explicitly denied.

And that does not work for me at all. That would be the death of critical inquiry.

We ought to wonder whether Marcion was first, among other reasons, precisely because the church fathers denied it. We ought to wonder whether our roommates have been reading our diary precisely because they denied it. Likewise, we ought to wonder whether Jesus uttered the temple word (or it was attributed to him early enough for later tradents to respond to) precisely because Matthew and Mark deny it.
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Re: The temple word.

Post by Kunigunde Kreuzerin »

Ben C. Smith wrote: Mon Apr 09, 2018 6:14 am And that does not work for me at all. That would be the death of critical inquiry.

We ought to wonder whether Marcion was first, among other reasons, precisely because the church fathers denied it. We ought to wonder whether our roommates have been reading our diary precisely because they denied it. Likewise, we ought to wonder whether Jesus uttered the temple word (or it was attributed to him early enough for later tradents to respond to) precisely because Matthew and Mark deny it.
From now on I have to fear that you count me among the opponents of critical inquiry ;) But I think that your analogy is not correct. The predominant view about the temple word is not, that there are „reasons to doubt“, that we should consider the opposite of Mark's claim „as a possibility“ or that we „ought to wonder“. The majority opinion is the positive claim that the historical Jesus in fact uttered the temple word as it stands in Mark 14:58.

Imho the correct analogy is if the predominant view of scholars would be Marcionite priority over Luke, developed not from text comparisons and studies, but against the claims of the church fathers.

1) My interest in this discussion is not that I believe to have a better solution to the source problem, but the question of whether the majority opinion of German scholars meets scientific standards. I find it interesting that there is a direct contradiction between a opinion of modern scholars and the Gospel of Mark, and that the majority of German scholars claim, without a sufficient source, a little fact about the historical Jesus that the Gospel of Mark explicitly denies.

So far I know the scholarly opinion was mainly developed by D.F. Strauß with additions of Wellhausen, Lietzmann and Bultmann (all great ones). They argued that the Jewish trial and especially the charge of blasphemy against Jesus is historically not plausible and therefore secondary. From this point of view scholars tried to detect the „true historical facts“. Already Strauß and Wellhausen believed that the historical Jewish charge was in fact what Mark presented as a false testimony. Since then many scholars claimed that Mark couldn‘t hold it back because "the facts were well known", but he turned it into a false testimony because it was "so embarrassing for him". :mrgreen:

It may be interesting in what context this scholarly view arised. In the OP you presented it as an interesting case for source criticism. But the theory was developed in Historical Jesus studies. It was seen as a problem in Historical Jesus studies, they developed a solution with regard to the historical Jesus and they never really tried it another way. They started with the presupposition that it is a "Jesus-temple of Jerusalem-thing" and – Io and behold - they came to the conclusion that it is a "Jesus-temple of Jerusalem-thing". Note that the theory was developed by Strauß even before the text of GPeter was discovered in 1886 and the text of GThomas in 1945.

2) My impression is that you could agree that the weakest point of the trajectory in the OP is that the assumed earliest stratum is preserved in a presumably later source (GThomas) and that the presumably earliest source shows an assumed later stratum (2 Corinthians 5.1 – offshoot of Reinterpretation 2).

imho therefore a good rival theory would be a case which could show the following dependence of the big four in this game
Paul -> Mark –> John / Thomas

The working hypothesis would be that it's not a "Jesus-temple of Jerusalem-thing", but a
body-temple-thing

2.1) We would start with 2 Corinthians 5:1 and 1 Corinthians 6:19
For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?

Let's first note that John agreed with Paul: it's a body-temple-thing, because the body of Jesus is the temple.
John 2:19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” 21 But he was speaking about the temple of his body.

Is there a possibility that Thomas agreed?
Thomas 71: Jesus said, "I shall destroy [this] house, and no one will be able to rebuild it ..."

Some scholars seems to think that. Christopher W. Skinner wrote in “John and Thomas - Gospels in Conflict?”, page 11
Image

What's with Mark?
14:57 And some stood up and bore false witness against him, saying, 58 “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands.’” 59 Yet even about this their testimony did not agree.

It seems difficult. Therefore let's go back to 1 Corinthians 6:19
Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?

Paul's line of thought seems to be: In the body of Christians is the holy spirit likewise the spirit of God was in the temple of Jerusalem. Therefore the bodys of Christians are technically a holy temple of God.

We know that according to Mark Jesus' body is filled with the holy spirit since his baptism. Paul would say that the body of Jesus in GMark is a holy temple. In Mark's pericope of the Jewish trial is the claim of false witnesses that Jesus said “I will destroy this temple ...”. But the Markan ironic truth seems to be the reversal, namely that they are going to destroy the true temple, the body of Jesus. Therefore the saying reappeared during the crucifixion when they in fact destroy the body of Jesus.
Mark 15:27 And with him they crucified two robbers, one on his right and one on his left. 29 And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, 30 save yourself, and come down from the cross!”

2.2) That's might be the way John understood both Paul and Mark and connected Mark's temple saying with the body-logy of Paul. Therefore John made Mark's ironic truth explicit. Not Jesus, but they are the destroyers of the true temple. And he added a Johannine twist (“ I will raise it up”)
John 2:19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” 21 But he was speaking about the temple of his body.

That's the moment when Thomas disagrees. According to Thomas Jesus will completely destroy his body, so that the soul is set free and can ascend to heaven.
Thomas 71: Jesus said, "I shall destroy [this] house, and no one will be able to rebuild it ..."

Look how easy it was to start with a different presupposition and to get a different conclusion (by putting all problems away as I learned it from German scholarship) :cheers:
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Re: The temple word.

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Kunigunde Kreuzerin wrote: Mon Apr 09, 2018 2:09 pm
Ben C. Smith wrote: Mon Apr 09, 2018 6:14 am And that does not work for me at all. That would be the death of critical inquiry.

We ought to wonder whether Marcion was first, among other reasons, precisely because the church fathers denied it. We ought to wonder whether our roommates have been reading our diary precisely because they denied it. Likewise, we ought to wonder whether Jesus uttered the temple word (or it was attributed to him early enough for later tradents to respond to) precisely because Matthew and Mark deny it.
From now on I have to fear that you count me among the opponents of critical inquiry ;)
Not at all. Just apparently confusing me with a few German scholars. :)
But I think that your analogy is not correct. The predominant view about the temple word is not, that there are „reasons to doubt“, that we should consider the opposite of Mark's claim „as a possibility“ or that we „ought to wonder“. The majority opinion is the positive claim that the historical Jesus in fact uttered the temple word as it stands in Mark 14:58.
You say that my analogy is not correct, but then you immediately turn around to discuss a view (what you are calling the predominant view) that neither the OP nor my follow-up posts even touched upon. I gave that analogy for my own judgment, not as vindication for some cadre of German scholars whose work I did not even have in mind. From my perspective, one not conditioned upon the findings of such scholars, yes, we really ought to wonder why Matthew and Mark put this saying upon the lips of false witnesses, thereby denying its currency.
Imho the correct analogy is if the predominant view of scholars would be Marcionite priority over Luke, developed not from text comparisons and studies, but against the claims of the church fathers.
Unless I am missing a trick here, this precisely was my analogy, which is why I specifically removed textual comparison from the equation (along with that one single line from Tertullian about Marcionite counterclaims):
Ben C. Smith wrote: Mon Apr 09, 2018 6:14 amI think we find a similar situation in the case of Marcion. Every source we have tells us that Marcion truncated Luke. We learn only from Tertullian that apparently the Marcionites claimed that Luke interpolated Marcion. But, even without that bit of information, and even before we analyze a single line of Lucan or Marcionite text, I think it is perfectly valid to deconstruct the claims of Lucan priority and wonder whether the opposite, Marcionite priority, might not be true.
The point both of this and of the Sarah Silverman snippet is that somebody introducing something just in order to contradict it is in and of itself grounds for suspicion and further investigation. The matter could have remained unspoken, and the decision to say something about it may well mean something.
My interest in this discussion is not that I believe to have a better solution to the source problem, but the question of whether the majority opinion of German scholars meets scientific standards.
This is, I think, where some of the confusion between us is coming in. I have zero interest in those opinions, nor were they on my mind when I composed the OP.

It may be interesting in what context this scholarly view arose. In the OP you presented it as an interesting case for source criticism.

Actually, the OP was about tradition criticism, not source criticism.
They started with the presupposition that it is a "Jesus-temple of Jerusalem-thing" and – Io and behold - they came to the conclusion that it is a "Jesus-temple of Jerusalem-thing".
This is the kind of incest I am trying to avoid: by asking for other, simpler (or at least as simple) trajectories. I want to consider as many viable ones as I can.
My impression is that you could agree that the weakest point of the trajectory in the OP is that the assumed earliest stratum is preserved in a presumably later source (GThomas) and that the presumably earliest source shows an assumed later stratum (2 Corinthians 5.1 – offshoot of Reinterpretation 2).
The first half of this (the relatively late Thomas preserving the actual saying) is a potential weakness, sure. On the other hand, when I have mapped out working trajectories for various ideas before, Thomas' statements always seem to come last in line; I always try to give this gospel (and that of Peter) as much benefit of the doubt as I give any of the other gospels, so far as potential priority is concerned, but alas, Thomas always comes off as late and derivative. So it was kind of fun this time to see it coming off as the early bird, at least so far as the original formulation itself is concerned.

The second half is not a weakness at all, since Paul's statements are a tangent to the actual trajectory outlined the in the OP. His statements (or statements like them) informed later tradents' formulation of the saying away from the temple connection. As such, the trajectory of the statement about the temple neither begins nor ends with Paul. (Paul is not an offshoot in this case. He is a tributary, not a distributary.)
imho therefore a good rival theory would be a case which could show the following dependence of the big four in this game
Paul -> Mark –> John / Thomas

The working hypothesis would be that it's not a "Jesus-temple of Jerusalem-thing", but a
body-temple-thing

....

Look how easy it was to start with a different presupposition and to get a different conclusion (by putting all problems away as I learned it from German scholarship) :cheers:
Okay, I have read your proposed countertrajectory and agree that it is viable. The natural next question is whether it is better or worse than the trajectory in the OP. Does it explain more data with fewer steps? What are its advantages or disadvantages? If it is roughly of the same quality, then are we stuck with whatever our presuppositions give us (that is, with whether it is originally about the temple or originally about the body)?
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Re: The temple word.

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Kunigunde Kreuzerin wrote: Mon Apr 09, 2018 2:09 pmWhat's with Mark?
14:57 And some stood up and bore false witness against him, saying, 58 “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands.’” 59 Yet even about this their testimony did not agree.

It seems difficult. Therefore let's go back to 1 Corinthians 6:19
Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?

Paul's line of thought seems to be: In the body of Christians is the holy spirit likewise the spirit of God was in the temple of Jerusalem. Therefore the bodys of Christians are technically a holy temple of God.

We know that according to Mark Jesus' body is filled with the holy spirit since his baptism. Paul would say that the body of Jesus in GMark is a holy temple.
As I follow this trajectory, the first thing that strikes me is how very necessary Paul is, not only to Mark's understanding (which I comprehend fully), but also to his readers' understanding. Mark, in other words, not only has to know and use Paul but must also assume that his readers are virtually as conversant with Paul as he is. Without Paul, on your reading, nobody reading Mark at this point will have any idea of what is going on.

That Mark expected his readers to know Paul pretty closely may not pose a problem, but it is an assumption which ought to be both made explicit and probably defended in other respects (rather than merely as a necessary corollary for this particular interpretation).
In Mark's pericope of the Jewish trial is the claim of false witnesses that Jesus said “I will destroy this temple ...”. But the Markan ironic truth seems to be the reversal, namely that they are going to destroy the true temple, the body of Jesus. Therefore the saying reappeared during the crucifixion when they in fact destroy the body of Jesus.
This reversal is rather elegant: "I will destroy this temple building" to "you will destroy this body of mine." What about the rest of the saying, however? "I will build another one in three days." To reverse this one does not work; rather, the trick is that the witnesses take the temple to be the literal building, whereas if Jesus had really said anything to this effect it would have been about his body. One could imagine Mark 13.1-2 being misinterpreted as "I will destroy this temple," but it is much harder to imagine the threefold passion prediction as reported by Mark being misinterpreted as having anything to do with the temple.

The overall effect is that the content of the accusation by these witnesses, however false they may be, comes as something of a surprise. If one wishes to make narrative sense of it, one has to know Paul, to go back and picture eavesdroppers in Mark 13.1-2, and to do the same for Mark 8.31; 9.31; 10.33 (either that or imagine Judas filling the priests in on these sayings) while simultaneously acknowledging the high degree of garbling such eavesdroppers would have engaged in. This kind of filling in details behind the scenes strikes me as very similar, in fact, to those other presumptions of reader knowledge that I have identified in the gospel of Mark. The author seems to expect that the reader will know who Simon (Peter) is, will know who Pilate is, and will know that Judas betrayed Jesus, for example. I have to admit, at the time I almost included the "temple word" as one of those things which Mark presumed his readers would know, but I decided that the argument for it was more oblique in this case; on the one hand, I still feel that way; on the other, if there is any merit to my observations on that other thread, then it is pretty easy to see how Mark very well could be presuming that his readers had heard this alleged dominical saying before. And, if they had indeed heard that saying before, then Mark's treatment of it is more straightforward than all the connections (listed above) that have to be made from scratch just to make sense of the accusation.

That such a saying was in circulation would explain the slightly disjointed presentation at the trial, as well:

Mark 14.57-58: 57 Some stood up and began to give false testimony against Him, saying, 58 "We heard Him say, 'I will destroy this temple made with hands, and in three days I will build another made without hands.'" 59 Not even in this respect was their testimony consistent.

Mark says that the witnesses' testimony was not consistent with each other, yet he presents only one example of the testimony. We as readers cannot actually see the inconsistency! This is readily explicable if Mark was working with a previously known saying: he gave the version of the saying which he knew, but he also had to have some reason why it was not effective at the trial (since it is going to be Jesus himself who gives them the needed ammunition in verse 62-64), so he introduced the idea that the testimony was not consistent. If, on the other hand, Mark was creating this saying out of a peripheral Pauline motif and his own imagination, what was stopping him from introducing two inconsistent statements as justification for verse 59? In my view, he had only one saying to defuse for the sake of his readers, and introducing unknown sayings might be confusing rather than elucidating for them. But, on a view that there was no already circulating saying to defuse, creating only one such saying seems a bit inadequate if in your next breath you are going to imply at least two, unless there is some concrete reason for it that I have not thought of.

It is interesting to look at all of the relevant sources together, as well, to get an idea of which versions of this saying elicited what kinds of reactions:

You Jews will destroy my body (Mark [reversing the statement], Matthew [following Mark], John). Fine.
I will destroy my body (Thomas). Fine.
The temple will be destroyed (Mark, Matthew). Fine.
I will destroy the temple (Mark, Matthew, Acts). Whoa! Those were false witnesses; their testimony did not agree; it was false testimony!

I do not think it is at all silly to at least suspect that the saying which three of our authors were most anxious to declare false might be the very saying which preceded the rest and accounts for their collective obfuscation.
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Re: The temple word.

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Ben C. Smith wrote: Mon Apr 09, 2018 6:14 am

IMHO, it is one thing to doubt some claims of the church fathers with an historical-critical approach. We do that every day. But I think it is another thing to claim something about Marcion that the church fathers explicitly denied.

And that does not work for me at all. That would be the death of critical inquiry.

We ought to wonder whether Marcion was first, among other reasons, precisely because the church fathers denied it. We ought to wonder whether our roommates have been reading our diary precisely because they denied it. Likewise, we ought to wonder whether Jesus uttered the temple word (or it was attributed to him early enough for later tradents to respond to) precisely because Matthew and Mark deny it.
The problem here is that all (or almost all) that we know about Marcion comes from his opponents among the church fathers,

General skepticism is possibly justified but brings our enquiries to a full stop.
Selective skepticism, e.g. accepting the church fathers as evidence for the detailed contents of Marcion's gospel while rejecting their account of the origin of Marcion's gospel does seem problematic.

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Re: The temple word.

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andrewcriddle wrote: Tue Apr 10, 2018 10:59 amSelective skepticism, e.g. accepting the church fathers as evidence for the detailed contents of Marcion's gospel while rejecting their account of the origin of Marcion's gospel does seem problematic.
I am not sure why this should be the case. For the former the fathers could well have had the Marcionite text in hand. For the latter, however, they were almost certainly not present at the original composition of that text.

As an analogy, I myself am a primary witness to the text of the NASB. But I cannot in any way testify to the origins of the NASB.
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Re: The temple word.

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Ben C. Smith wrote: Tue Apr 10, 2018 11:04 am
andrewcriddle wrote: Tue Apr 10, 2018 10:59 amSelective skepticism, e.g. accepting the church fathers as evidence for the detailed contents of Marcion's gospel while rejecting their account of the origin of Marcion's gospel does seem problematic.
I am not sure why this should be the case. For the former the fathers could well have had the Marcionite text in hand. For the latter, however, they were almost certainly not present at the original composition of that text.

As an analogy, I myself am a primary witness to the text of the NASB. But I cannot in any way testify to the origins of the NASB.
Maybe you are right, However (assuming that I can't directly check your claims) it would feel odd to accept the accuracy of your claims about the NASB text while being very sceptical of your claims about the chronological relation of the NASB to other modern translations such as the RSV.

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Re: The temple word.

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andrewcriddle wrote: Tue Apr 10, 2018 11:14 am
Ben C. Smith wrote: Tue Apr 10, 2018 11:04 am
andrewcriddle wrote: Tue Apr 10, 2018 10:59 amSelective skepticism, e.g. accepting the church fathers as evidence for the detailed contents of Marcion's gospel while rejecting their account of the origin of Marcion's gospel does seem problematic.
I am not sure why this should be the case. For the former the fathers could well have had the Marcionite text in hand. For the latter, however, they were almost certainly not present at the original composition of that text.

As an analogy, I myself am a primary witness to the text of the NASB. But I cannot in any way testify to the origins of the NASB.
Maybe you are right, However (assuming that I can't directly check your claims) it would feel odd to accept the accuracy of your claims about the NASB text while being very sceptical of your claims about the chronological relation of the NASB to other modern translations such as the RSV.
If you were able to perceive some benefit to me or my positions from my account of the origins of the NASB, then I think it would be perfectly reasonable to suspect my account of its origins, since they predate me. Suppose, for example, you knew that I was of the opinion that the "good" translations of Isaiah 7.14 (the ones with "virgin") came first, before the "bad" translations (the ones with "young woman" or the like), signalling a general decline in Christian piety. In such a case, you would do well to be skeptical of my (purely hypothetical) claim that the RSV took the NASB and perverted its wording deliberately.

We know that in the early church there was a marked tendency to regard the apostles and their noble followers as more original than the heretics, so a patristic claim to the effect that Marcion came later and perverted the text of Luke ought to at least be suspicious on those grounds. I am not saying it is the final argument; we should still run the parallels. But I think the notion ought to raise our eyebrows.

Same goes, IMHO, for the temple word. The emphatic way in which Mark calls "I will destroy this temple" false (twice) and contradictory (twice, even though there is no real contradiction pointed out), fit only for the lips of abusive mockers (once), should make us wonder, at the very least, especially when other Christian authors also have their own ways of making clear that Jesus did not say this. It is not the final argument (hence my desire to compare trajectories), but it ought to raise our eyebrows.
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