Re: Jörg Rüpke on early Christianity in 'Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion'
Posted: Mon Aug 13, 2018 11:04 pm
[Marcion] found a theoretical, easily memorizable justification for his anti-Jewish position by reversing a prevailing dualistic narrative: evil was not to be identified with any kind of demon, but with the creator god as depicted in the Pentateuch. The god of Jesus Christ, as described in the available texts by Paul, was the positive antagonist of that ancient figure.130
The most influential aspect of Marcionism, however, was neither the institutions it created nor any accompanying rituals, but its historiographical groundwork. In outlining a simple biographical schema, replete with current anecdotes and quotations —here I am following the increasingly mooted, even if still radical position of a second-century date for the canonical gospels and the Acts of the Apostles— Marcion’s portrayal of the life of an apocalyptic visionary and peripatetic preacher, from his first emergence to his rather unusual execution, could be seen as the model of a life turning away from Judaism. He thus orchestrated a rupture that he relocated a century into the past, carefully keeping his narrative free of contemporary references 131 ...
... Marcion invented something new. In the literary environment of the Roman Empire as described, nothing was more natural than to write a Greek-language “biography” as a founding document for a new religious network.
Marcion’s opponents reacted immediately with a weighty intellectual exchange of the sort that a metropolis like Rome made possible; and, as was usual in historiography, they reacted with competing versions.133 ... because Marcion’s competitors were in fact also active in Rome, and, moreover, adopted substantial parts of his model. The author of the text that most plagiarized Marcion was identified a little later, by Marcion himself, as Luke, in an edition that featured the gospel along with some of Paul’s letters. It concentrated on correcting Marcion’s fundamental break with Judaism. With their narratives of Jesus’s childhood, both Luke and Matthew demonstrate how familiar the biographical character of the template was, and also how scant the source background was as soon as one wanted to move beyond that template.
Marcion, for his part, criticized their compositions (and that of Mark) as lying close to his own text.
Writings competing with Marcion’s edition of the 140s AD, which was prefaced by his “Antitheses,” could now only continue to accumulate. AD 160 saw a counter-edition that established the core of the future New Testament. The late addition of Luke’s Acts of the Apostles rescued the philosophical core represented by Paul and took a direction that, while no longer avoiding the gray zones of Jewishness, also provided this orientation with a patron.134 Within the same movement, however, spokesmen such as Luke (in Acts of the Apostles) and Justin (in his Apology) —and perhaps earlier the writer of the Epistle of Barnabas— persisted with the genealogy of exclusion, insisting that the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 was a consequence of the crucifixion of the “anointed one.”135
Still others in this same period, such as the author of the Gospel of Peter, did not shrink from obvious anti-Judaism and fawning to the Roman authorities.136 ... such schismatic polemics would remain a critical source of friction over the coming centuries, providing a forum where agendas of inclusion and exclusion could be exchanged. The polemic propagated by many Christian positions against the “gnosticism” of clearly anti-Judaic stances demonstrates the complexity that was emerging at the margins of a developing tradition.
This now historiographically constructed collective, this genealogy of Christ’s apostles, had no basis in any historical reality of exclusive bonding ...
Professional philosophers who taught for pay may well, like Justin, have read history, but it seldom played any important role in their argumentation. Tatian, Theophilus, and Athenagoras, in their “defenses” of their positions in the late second century, may often have addressed the Augusti formally, but in fact their primary goal was to reassure their students, freshly pressed into the fray, or to carry on disputes with critical colleagues. Christ (let alone Jesus) had no role to play ...
... And the new gospels gave rise to no text-based communities. The only exception was Marcion’s group, founded by a typical, religious, small-scale entrepreneur: a well-traveled merchant, an organizer, an arriviste (at least by virtue of his move to Rome), and more successful with his money than with his writings. Beyond this group and the intellectual conversation circles (in which Marcion, at least since Justin’s attack on him, was fully involved at a literary level), “God’s people’s assembly” (ekklēsia) had no lasting institutional basis: no one precisely knew where Peter and Paul had died, to say nothing of where their graves might be ...
..Christianity had thus been invented historiographically [in the 2nd century] by means of the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles complemented by collections of letters. There was as yet no actual community.
Rüpke, Jörg. Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion (pp. 355-358). Princeton University Press.
130. On the central work of Harnack and his earlier position, see Harnack 1921, Steck and Harnack 2003, Kinzig 2004. The most important source is Tertullian (see Moreschini 2014).
131. cf. the observations in Becker 2011, 143, on Matthew and Mark (dating them much earlier).
132. Generally, Foley 1987, 1988.
133. See in general Ankersmit 2002, Ascough 2008.
134. Vinzent 2014a, 73. 272–76; for the same dating of the collection on a different basis, see Zwierlein 2010, 143; Zwierlein 2009, 299–301. Nicklas 2014, 218, characterizes Paul’s orientation as a new focus in a Jewish matrix.
135. Clements 2012. On the Acts of the Apostles as a tale of schism, see Cancik 2011, 328–33.