Markus Vinzent's Blog

Irenaeus' Presbyter (Adv. haer. IV 27-30) about Marcion's ship trade

2012-02-26T10:36:00.001Z

In Irenaeus, Adversus haereses IV 27-30 we find an unknown Asian presbyter who’s work served Irenaeus as one of his sources about Marcion.[1] The presbyter does not only provide ‘an apology for the Old Testament with the intention to demonstrate that the two Testaments speak of one and the same God’, but also gives us a hidden insight into Marcion's business, perhaps he was even a former employee of Marcion, before he became a believer.

The Presbyter develops his subtle arguments with constant reference to the letters of the Apostle Paul as his main authority and to Lord’s sayings, taken mainly from Matthew, but also from Luke. The only time where he refers to a parable of the Lord (Matth. 25:14-30 // Luke 19:12-28), it is within the report about his interlocutors. The Gospel narratives, therefore, seem to him to be of lesser authority than the Lord’s oracles. Sebastian Moll is correct in his observation that in the opening part of the excerpt from the presbyter (Iren., Adv. haer. IV 27,4) not only anti-Marcionite arguments, but also those of ‘a Valentinian opponent’ are displayed.[2] And yet, Marcion is the major, and in Adv. haer. 28-30 the sole target. We even find a passage which may have been minted on Marcion:

For in some cases there follows us a small, and in others a large amount of property, which we have acquired from the mammon of unrighteousness. For from what source do we derive the houses in which we dwell, the garments in which we are clothed, the vessels which we use, and everything else ministering to our every-day life, unless it be from those things which, when we were Gentiles, we acquired by avarice, or received them from our heathen parents, relations, or friends who unrighteously obtained them?—not to mention that even now we acquire such things when we are in the faith. For who is there that sells, and does not wish to make a profit from him who buys? Or who purchases anything, and does not wish to obtain good value from the seller? Or who is there that carries on a trade, and does not do so that he may obtain a livelihood thereby? And as to those believing ones who are in the royal palace, do they not derive the utensils they employ from the property which belongs to Cæsar; and to those who have not, does not each one of these [Christians] give according to his ability? … And [these objectors] allege that [the Israelites] acted dishonestly, because, forsooth, they took away for the recompense of their labours, as I have observed, unstamped gold and silver in a few vessels; while they say that they themselves (for let truth be spoken, although to some it may seem ridiculous) do act honestly, when they carry away in their girdles from the labours of others, coined gold, and silver, and brass, with Cæsar’s inscription and image upon it. If, however, a comparison be instituted between us and them, [I would ask] which party shall seem to have received [their worldly goods] in the fairer manner? Will it be the [Jewish] people, [who took] from the Egyptians, who were at all points their debtors; or we, [who receive property] from the Romans and other nations, who are under no similar obligation to us? Yea, moreover, through their instrumentality the world is at peace, and we walk on the highways without fear, and sail where we will… For whatsoever we acquired from unrighteousness when we were heathen, we are proved righteous, when we have become believers, by applying it to the Lord’s advantage.[3]

It is probably an intrinsic criticism of Marcion’s wealth to call the ‘large amount of property’ being ‘acquired from the mammon of unrighteousness’, meaning a profit making business, ‘acquired by avacrice’, or inheritance ‘from our heathen parents, relations, or friends who unrighteously obtained them’. That he adds that ‘even now we acquire such things when we are in the faith’ may hint at Marcion who, then, would have carried on with his maritime trade and business: ‘For who is there that sells, and does not wish to make a profit from him who buys? Or who purchases anything, and does not wish to obtain good value from the seller?’ And he seems to have obtained his ‘livelihood thereby’, and perhaps, had also the support by the royal palace, as already Peter Lampe suspected with regards to the special payments he received from the palace for his trade. Moreover, the presbyter seems to have been well acquainted with Marcion’s trade, as he mentions that he has ‘observed, unstamped gold and silver in a few vessels’ being carried, and that he earned ‘coined gold, and silver, and brass, with Caesar’s inscription and image upon it’, hence made money ‘from the labours of others’, his employees, amongst which the presbyter – before he has become a believer – counts himself (‘we, [who receive property] from the Romans and other nations … through their instrumentality the world is at peace, and we walk on the highways without fear, and sail where we will’). Interestingly, at the end of the passage, the presbyter rectifies his earlier involvement in the business, while he criticises his opponent Marcion who still trades in it, when he states: ‘For whatsoever we acquired from unrighteousness when we were heathen, we are proved righteous, when we have become believers, by applying it to the Lord’s advantage’.

[1] See Iren., Adv. haer. IV 27-32, or if one follows S. Moll, The Arch-heretic (2010), 17-21, than at least Adv. haer. IV 28-30 is directed against Marcion.

[2] See S. Moll, The Arch-heretic (2010), 18f. who highlights the idea that the maker of the world ‘originated from degeneracy’ (‘in diminutione’) as being not by Marcion.

[3] Iren., Adv. haer. IV 30,2f.

Spring is coming - and a new design

2012-02-12T18:27:00.000Z

Dear readers of this blog,
When I started this blog - my first ever in my life - I did not know, how many people would enjoy it. Over 150,000 views in less than one year, almost 14,000 to 15,000 each month and many readers who write to me and to whom I am happy to answer individually. One of the suggestions was a revamp of the design as some browsers did not work with the colour scheme. Let me see whether the new one is any better. Thanks also to all those who recommended other blogger platforms, but I admit, it took me weeks until I knew where to click to get this site to run at least partly the way I would like to have it run. Then, I am not a techy. Really not. And I try to minimize the time input into technology (which I find much more difficult than reading Greek, Latin or anything from the past), to maximise the research time which is left in a full-time Professorship.
But it is more than fun in running this blog. It is sharing half-digested ideas with people around the world who take part in what is always a fascinating enterprise: research. Where you don't know what you can expect around the corner. Never in my life did I know what I am going to find. And when I look back at those few topics which occupy me most at this very moment - Eckhart's new Parisian Questions, the Dating of the canonical Gospels, Marcion's own Gospel - only a few months ago, I had not dreamt that I would work on such topics. That is what curious scholarship is about, looking for what we do not know.
The opposite, in my eyes, what I came across the last days when I continued looking into the dating of New Testament papyri. As I asked myself. How on earth can beliefs (be they evangelical or non-evangelical whatever this might be called) taint our spectacles so that suddenly papyri are dated to a particular century, even decade which other scholars from a different belief-set, or without such belief-set maintain that they cannot be dated or at least not nearer than to a window of about 200 years. Where is the difference between scholarly opinions and ideological dogma?
Is it worth writing scholarly against dogma, even if dogma is using (pseudo-)scholarship? All my life I had no inclination going into debate with hidden agendas. Yes, I can see the purpose of ambiguities - but having been brought up in a country where scholarship once has been misused for ideological racism, I resist ideologies, and trust that transparent arguments are more powerful movers of mountains than all kinds of beliefs.
Hope you like the spring around the corner, and the new design here.

Daniel B. Wallace on the discovery of the earliest Manuscript of the New Testament

2012-02-10T23:21:00.000Z

(P52)

When one approaches New Testament material and their interpretation from the perspective of a Patristic scholar, one is sheerly amazed to see the ideological gulfs that separate opinions and the battles that are fought about the most basic evidence. One of such grounds is the dating and reading of Papyri that are seen as witnesses of New Testament texts. On 1 February 2012, Daniel B. Wallace has debated Bart Ehrmann at UNC Chapel Hill ‘before a crowd ofmore than 1000 people’ and mentioned ‘that seven New Testament papyri had recently been discovered – six of them probably from the second century and one of them probably from the first’.[1] While ideological disagreements, based on denominations, confessions, even religious backgrounds are mostly remnants of the past and rarely present in Patristic studies, we learn from this debate that whether one is evangelical or critical of evangelicals has even a baring on the dating of papyri, something, the innocent scholar should think is a matter for impartial scholars to decide. And yet, because we are not dealing with bare evidence, but with witnesses of ‘canonical’ texts, ‘pure’ scholarship operates on a stage that is set by vested interests. How can one avoid to be located in any of the preset sceneries? I have chosen, to weigh arguments of either side, lay them open to the reader as thoroughly and broadly as possible, and let the reader follow why I believe what sounds more likely than not, and what has less likelihood as a historical conclusion. With regards to D.B. Wallace findings which are not published yet, one will need to see how a dating of a first century papyrus can be established as a) it would be the very first of this kind and b) papyrologists today – at least those of no confessional leanings – do no longer maintain, as we will see below, that we can date papyri anything near, if we have not internal or external evidence. Likewise with what Wallace calls ‘the second century’ papyri – this statement arouses scepticism when in the same report P⁵² is still dated ‘to the first half of the second century’, a dating that is no longer supported by recent scholarship.

Unfortunately, scholarship can not operate on ideological scenes. As soon as pre-determined camps make claims that ‘the world’s leading paleographers’ issue opinions that are taken to be ‘certain’, even the best willing scholar becomes sceptical. Not for scepticism’s sake, but to be true to his own judgement.
In his article on the misuse of papyrology in New Testament studies, B. Nongbri summarises what he calls ‘nothing surprising to papyrologists: palaeography is not the most effective method for dating texts, particularly those written in a literary hand … Any serious consideration of the window of possible dates for P⁵² must include dates in the later second and early third centuries. Thus, P⁵² cannot be used as evidence to silence other debates about the existence (or non-existence) of the Gospel of John in the first half of the second century. Only a papyrus containing an explicit date or one found in a clear archaeological stratigraphic context could do the work scholars want P⁵² to do. As it stands now, the papyrological evidence should take a second place to other forms of evidence in addressing debates about the dating of the Fourth Gospel’.[1]

[1] See http://www.dts.edu/read/wallace-new-testament-manscript-first-century/ (acc. 10.02.2012).

[1] B. Nongbri, ‘The Use and Abuse of P⁵²’ (2005), 46.

Marcion's authorship of his Gospel - an overlooked question

2012-02-03T11:29:00.001Z

The scholarship of the past was almost entirely clouded by those opponents of Marcion, beginning with Irenaeus, who claimed that Marcion had used an already existing Luke and made a truncated version of it. Even the few scholars of past and present, including the very learned ones like Ferdinand Christian Baur of the 19th century, who had mistrusted Irenaeus and his followers, have seen in this claim a heresiarchical accusation and therefore inverted the argument, so that Luke depended on Marcion, have maintained the position that Marcion had found a Gospel which he merely used.
As far as I can see, in all previous scholarship there are only two exceptions, both non-theologians: Heinrich Joseph Vogels, who at least ventured the possibility what has never been dared to think before him, that Marcion’s Gospel could have been produced and published by himself – and this, as we will see, albeit Marcion himself having probably made this claim. And there is the poet Paul-Louis Couchoud (1879-1959), professor of philosophy and scholar at the Ecole Normale, Paris who, very different from Vogels’ Germanic cautious suggestion, developed a full ‘outline of the beginnings of Christianity’ in his The Creation of Christ (excerpts, a good summary and comments can be found here), based on the idea of a Christ-myth which was turned into a historical Gospel-narrative by Marcion in the years 128-129. And also scholars may rightly reject most of the wild speculations of Couchoud, a critical reading of him is extremely rewarding. He knew his sources and he was prepared to unearth and make fresh and unorthodox connections which even today can inspire serious scholarship. Why has scholarship not picked up the question of Marcion’s authorship – irrespective of whether one agrees or disagrees on it? Our towering rhetoritians of the early centuries and their anti-heretical argument that heretics always come after orthodoxy and deviation presumes a straight route overshadowed almost 2,000 years of historical, textual and theological scholarship. Even when in the 20^th century Walter Bauer turned this genealogy upside down, he did not conclude that, if heretics were first, also their writings must have been produced prior to that of the orthodox reaction, but copied the traditional apologetics that Marcion ‘restored’ the Gospel ‘to its pristine splendour and the unadulterated Paul’, thus based his investigation by excluding a critical look at the canonical Gospels.

The Face of the Devil - a film by Menno Kuijper

2012-02-02T19:47:00.003Z

Last week I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Menno Kuijper towards his film, The Face of the Devil - a short 12m film that explores the dark side of our own self through the question of the links with the devil. It was an interesting challenge to detect that often our misconceptions start with the assumptions that the devil is as old as human beings are. Quite the contrary, as I state in my interview, he is a rather young discovery. None of the old Jewish writings know of him - on the contrary, good and evil are encompassed and part of the one first principle. Likewise, the same monistic principle we find in the oldest strata of the Zoroastrian and Indo-Babylonian mythology, reflected again in the Platonic tradition where evil is not bracketed out in something different from the creative power.
If you want to find out more, here the link to Menno's blog:

The Face Of The Devil

Reception and dating of the canonical Gospels

2012-01-20T11:55:00.002Z

Only recently, in a centenary review of 2005, Andrew F. Gregory and Christopher M. Tuckett have picked up the often used, but rarely diligently read slender work of the Oxford Society of Historical Theology of 1905, entitled The New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers, brought together a group of specialists and reviewed these earlier findings. William L. Petersen gives a short summary of what had been achieved at Oxford over a hundred years ago:

The charge given the committee [of the Oxford Society of Historical Theology] was ‘to prepare a volume exhibiting those passages of early Christian writers which indicate, or have been thought to indicate, acquaintance with any of the books of the New Testament’. The committee limited itself to the so-called Apostolic Fathers, examining eight authors (and/or texts) [i.a. Barn., Did., 1Clem., Ign., PolPhil., Herm., 2Clem.]. … The 1905 researchers ranked the likelihood that a specific Father demonstrated knowledge of a given book in the New Testament by assigning each possible intersection a letter grade from ‘A’ to ‘D’. ‘A’ designated ‘books about which there can be no reasonable doubt’ that the Father knew it; ‘B’ referred to books where there was a ‘a high degree of probability’. ‘C’ referred to a ‘lower degree of probability’. And ‘D’ meant that the evidence was ‘too uncertain to allow any reliance to be placed upon it’. A table on page 137 summarized the results. Out of a total of 216 possible intersections between a Father and a specific book, conclusions were possible in only eighty-five of the intersections, 39 per cent. Out of those eighty-five places where it was possible to assign a letter rank, we find forty-three Ds and twenty-two Cs. There are fourteen Bs (eight of them, however, come from a single source: Polycarp), and six As. … The most remarkable aspect of the 1905 volume is the fact that now, a century later, the significance of the ‘formal’ results achieved by the committee … pale into insignificance when compared with the notes the researchers offered on the passages they examined. … The 1905 researches … were well aware of the multiplicity of possible explanations for the evidence they found in the Apostolic Fathers; they were also acutely aware of their inability to reach definitive judgements on the basis of the evidence. All they could do was follow the via negative: the source(s) used in about three-quarters of the passages in the Apostolic Fathers with a parallel in the New Testament … ‘affords no evidence for the use of either of our Gospels in its present form’; that being the case, one had to consider … ‘the direct use of another [viz. non-canonical (W.L. Petersen)] source altogether, whether oral or written’.[1]

W.L. Petersen concludes his summary pointing out that ‘their empirical, textual observations were devastating for the idea of a ‘standard’ or ‘established’ text of the New Testament in the first half of the second century. And he specifies the results from his own reading of them:

First, it is clear that the vast majority of passages in the Apostolic Fathers for which one can find likely parallels in the New Testament have deviations from our present, critically reconstructed New Testament text. It must be emphasized that the vast majority of these deviations are not minor (e.g., differences in spelling or verb tense), but major (a completely new context, a substantial interpolation or omission, a conflation of two entirely separate ideas and/or passages).

Second, harmonization is a surprisingly common phenomenon. Sometimes the harmonizations are (almost) entirely composed of material found in our modern editions of the New Testament; more often,however, they contain material which we today classify as extra-canonical.

Third, the Apostolic Fathers often reproduce, without remark, material that we, today, call extracanonical. Sometimes this extra-canonical material is introduced with the quotation formula – such as, ‘the Lord says’, or ‘the Gospel says’. The obvious inference is that the Faher considered this extra-canonical source as authoritative as any other. … Some might wonder if the disagreements would disappear if the basis for comparison were changed from our modern critically reconstructed text to the texts of the ‘great uncials’ of the mid-fourth century (Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus). They do not. Even if the basis for comparison is changed to the text of our oldest continuous-text manuscripts of the New Testament documents (P⁶⁴⁺⁶⁷ + P⁶⁶[both of which date from ‘ca. 200’, W.L. Petersen]), the differences remain. One simply must admit that the passages found in the Apostolic Fathers are different from the texts found in our oldest New Testament papyri, from the texts of the ‘great uncials’, and from the text of our modern editions.[2]

How can we account for these findings, if the later canonical Gospels were written before 100, or around 70, or, as some opt, in the early 40^th and had become authoritative readings in the community? Petersen sees only two models of explanation, one which is ‘profoundly flawed’ and another one which seems the only way to make sense. The first, flawed model would assume that the ‘deviations’ from the established and fixed texts of the Gospels and Letters, dated to the first century, ‘would be – as suggested by many Victorian (and even contemporary) scholars – due to citation from memory or adapting the text to the purposes of the moment (e.g., preaching, evangelizing, teaching, disputing):[3]

In the first half of the second century – that is, in the age of the Apostolic Fathers – and even later, into the time of Tatian and Clement of Alexandria (near the end of the second century), there was neither a fixed canon nor a fixed text for any of the New Testament documents. Rather, ‘clusters’ of sayings/episodes/parts of (what later became our canonical) gospels and epistles circulated, initially (for the gospels, at least) probably without a title, and then, later, with a title. But the contents of the ‘cluster’ bearing the title ‘Mark’ or ‘Romans’ was still very much in flux and subject to change. Additions were still being made, as were deletions; the sequence of the text was still being modified. … Subscribing to this model has certain consequences. It means that scholars must be very circumspect about attributing anything to the first-century church. And what evidence we have from the second century – in the Apostolic Fathers, for example – hardly inspires confidence. The problems are not confined to the liberties taken with the texts …, but also extend to the matter of the boundary between what would later be called canonical and extra-canonical texts, and the citation of extra-canonical material as ‘gospel’ or logia Iesou during the age of the Apostolic Fathers. The issue, then, is not just one of the texts being unsettled, but also one of which documents (or, more properly, clusters of material) and which traditions were authoritative, and which were not.

W.L. Petersen is joined in his judgement by J. Keith Elliott: ‘As far as the Apostolic Fathers are concerned, we may well agree that they, like Justin and most other early writers, are unlikely to have had access to the “published” documents’.[4] As has been shown by Elliott, W.L. Petersen’s view is materially embedded in the critical apparatus of both the Nestle-Aland and the United Bible Societies’ Greek Testament hand editions which with the exception of Did. 8,2 (// Matth. 6:9) in Nestle-Aland ignore even the very few ‘A’-rated citations in their critical apparatus.[5]

That the Gospels are not quoted or referred to in our early Christian literature prior to Marcion[6] is clouded by the boundaries between the disciplines of New Testament Studies and Patristics. The well-known reference work, Biblia Patristica, for example, covers texts ‘from the origins to Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian’ in its first volume, but excludes all writings that can be found in the New Testament. If these were included, it would become even more apparent that pp. 223-415 of this volume listing over 10,000 quotes (!) from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John for the period from Marcion onwards, does not provide a single one (!) for the time before Marcion. The first arguable cases are those authors who are sometimes dated to the beginning of the second century (Ignatius, Papias, Polycarp, Hegesippus), which, however, many scholars rather date contemporary or later than Marcion. But even, if we date them early and include them into the comparison with the Gospel, we come to the same conclusion as shown by the findings of the 1905 Oxford researchers and the revisiting of these findings in 2005.

[1] W.L. Petersen, ‘Textual Traditions Examined’ (2005), 29-32.

[2] W.L. Petersen, ‘Textual Traditions Examined’ (2005), 33f.

[3] W.L. Petersen, ‘Textual Traditions Examined’ (2005),42-5 gives a fourfold account why he finds this model untenable.

[4] J.K. Elliott, ‘Absent Witnesses?’ (2005), 53.

[5] See J.K. Elliott, ‘Absent Witnesses?’ (2005), 48.

[6] A fact that is, for example, clouded by the boundaries between the disciplines of New Testament Studies and Patristics. The well-known reference work, Biblia Patristica, for example, covers texts ‘from the origins to Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian’ in its first volume, but excludes all writings that can be found in the New Testament. If these were included, it would become even more apparent that pp. 223-415 on quotes from Matth., Mark, Luke and John resulted in entries only that derive from the time of Marcion onwards.

Argumentum e silentio? Or the big hiatus in Gospel reception - Kurt Alands 'nightmare'

2012-01-18T11:08:00.002Z

Authors prior to Marcion do not refer to any Gospel ‘as a sequence of events or a “story”. Nowhere are fixed credal formulations called “Gospel”’.[1] What the famous New Testament scholar Helmut Koester summarized in rather dry words, kept Kurt Aland awake during the night.[2]

The fact is clouded by the boundaries between the disciplines of New Testament Studies and Patristics. The well-known reference work, Biblia Patristica, for example, covers texts ‘from the origins to Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian’ in its first volume, but excludes all writings that can be found in the New Testament. If these were included, it would become even more apparent that pp. 223-415 of this volume listing over 10,000 quotes (!) from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John for the period from Marcion onwards, does not provide a single one (!) for the time before Marcion, and would we add the canonical literature - the same would still be true, with one massive exception: The Synoptics copied each other partly literally. The first arguable cases of authors who begin to quote the Gospels are those who are sometimes dated to the beginning of the second century (Ignatius, Papias, Hegesippus), which, however, many scholars rather date contemporary or later than Marcion. How can we account for this discrepancy in the reception of the Gospels, if these later canonical Gospels were written before 100, or around 70, or, as some opt for, in the early 40^th?

I'd give a lot for somebody who can come up with a convincing answer.

[1] H. Koester, ‘Kerygma-Gospel’ (1986), 366, especially with regard to the deutero-Pauline Epistles and Acts, but also to Ignatius – something that we can broaden, as shown above.

[2] K. Aland, ‘Bemerkungen’ (1979), 29.

'New Covenant' and the newness of Christianity in and after Paul

2012-01-18T10:36:00.000Z

Writing on Early Christian Art and Literature of the first and the second century means an engagement with Jewish culture. Only slowly did a new Christian identity evolve which sets Christianity apart from both, Judaism and Paganism. This process was a complex one and can only be traced to a limited extent. Similar to artists, none of our early authors knew of themselves as being Christians. They were Jews, Greeks, Romans, sometimes all of this in one person like, for example, Paul. And yet, as Paul was a Jew nourished from multiple sources (Hellenistic Jewish backgrounds, Philo, Qumran, Stoicism), Christians were inspired from a wide range of traditions, some followed Jesus’ ethics and beliefs rather than himself, others related their thinking and writing to Jesus or to an apocalyptic cult-community without even mentioning the name of their savior (such as the so-called Shepherd of Hermas). As far as we can ascertain from the surviving evidence, however, for several decades, in writings and art production, Christians did not move beyond the Jewish threshold.
One of Paul’s classic passages can be found in Rom. 2:17-29.

Paul, himself a Jew, does condemn neither Jews nor Judaism,[1] but conveyes what he believes a Jew is and should be: not somebody who is Jewish by physicality, outward appearance or descendance – today we would probably say, a Jew by ethnic or cultural definition – but anybody who keeps the Law in a spiritual sense. And yet, Paul does not deny such physicality either, nor the written code, the Law. But because he sees being Jewish in relation to God, he maintains that a) those who have been physically circumcised have to live according to this ‘value’ by practicing ‘the law’; and b) the breaking of the law by those who are meant to observe the law is an issue, not the circumcision in itself which is unquestionable. In addition, he takes it that people who are not circumcised and would not need to practice the law,[2] but do, indeed, ‘obey the righteous requirements of the law’, can be ‘regarded’ as circumcised, and therefore as ‘Jews’. What would be unrighteous demands? Paul, the eager Jew (Gal. 1;13; 1Cor. 15:9; Phil. 3:6), knew that circumcision was not amongst the noachite requirements, hence would not apply to non-Jews. And he endorses that winning people over to his own theological and ethical positions and that of the followers of Jesus was to make those non-Jewish converts to ‘Jews’. He describes himself as having advanced in Judaism beyond many of his contemporaries in his nation, prior to embracing the community of deviating Jews who he persecuted: ‘I was extremely zealous for the traditions of my ancestors’ (Gal. 1:14), but even after having become an Apostle, as one can see in this passage from Romans, he still sees the goal in winning uncircumcised people for a refined Judaism where the circumcision ‘of the heart by the Spirit’ is more highly regarded than a non-observance of a physically circumcised.

Paul, therefore, sees himself entirely rooted and part of Jewish belief and praxis, enjoying all the freedom as any other teacher, writer, rabbi or philosopher of Hellenic Judaism displays, and we only need to think of names like Philo or Josephus.

Coming from the traditions of his ancestors, Hellenized Roman pharisaic traditions, he gives everything his own interpretation or rather he reads his traditions in the light of his master and role-model, Jesus Christ. Like himself, he also situates Jesus Christ firmly within the same Jewish tradition ‘born of a woman, born under the law’.[3] And yet, he sees Jesus Christ in a special relation to God, calls him his son, and likewise projects this intimate relation to himself and his audience: ‘Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his son into our hearts, who calls “Abba! Father!”’[4] Paul insists on this almost mystical relation between God, the son and the sons, made possible according to Paul not through the Law, but through this Son who was rich, but made himself poor,[5] who had a humble ‘attitude’ ‘though he existed in the form of God’. Despite his elevated relation, to this Jesus Christ

did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave,by looking like other men, and by sharing in human nature …, by becoming obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross,[6]

crucified by ignorant ‘rulers of this age’.[7]

In the light of this Lord, Paul re-reads his traditions of the ancients:

Our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea, 10:2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, 10:3 and all ate the same spiritual food, 10:4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they were all drinking from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.[8]

Christ becomes the focus and hermeneutical spectacles through which even the salvific exodus traditions are being read and understood, with baptism rather than circumcision being the symbol of the new foundation. The rock is Christ, no longer the Law, and yet, Paul refers to only three Jesus’ sayings[9] and only once he sees his own writings endorsed by the Lord.[10] Writing to a mixed community of circumcised and uncircumcised Jews, Paul wants to allow for this mixed community which he sees as those of being new ‘in Christ’, no longer old and rooted in the Law. As Paul has never met the historical Jesus, he sees being Jewish as having undergone a baptism into the death of Christ and gained a new life ‘in the likeness of Christ’s resurrection’:

6:3 Do you not know that as many as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 6:4 Therefore we have been buried with him through baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may live a new life.

6:5 For if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, we will certainly also be united in the likeness of his resurrection. 6:6 We know that our old man was crucified with him so that the body of sin would no longer dominate us, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. 6:7 (For someone who has died has been freed from sin.)

6:8 Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 6:9 We know that since Christ has been raised from the dead, he is never going to die again; death no longer has mastery over him. 6:10 For the death he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God. 6:11 So you too consider yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Baptism and new life lead in Paul to stressing ‘newness’ which has its groundings in the Jewish tradition. As shown by Wolfram Kinzig, ‘newness’ neither in the temporal sense nor the sense of something being unused, but in that of novelty and innovation has been regarded as a positive qualification, God’s qualitative change of the present live of Israel for the better.[11] The idea of novelty is missing in the older Jewish traditions, but appears in prophetic texts during – and only during – the Babylonian exile of the Israelites. The earliest and most important evidence can be found in Jeremiah 31:22.31:

31:22 How long will you vacillate,

you who were once like an unfaithful daughter?

For I, the Lord, promise to bring about something new on the earth,

something as unique as a woman protecting a man!’”

31:31 “Indeed, a time is coming,” says the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. 31:32 It will not be like the old covenant that I made with their ancestors when I delivered them from Egypt. For they violated that covenant, even though I was like a faithful husband to them,” says the Lord. 31:33 “But I will make a new covenant with the whole nation of Israel after I plant them back in the land,” says the Lord. “I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts and minds. I will be their God and they will be my people.

Few Jewish writers have picked up on this prophecy by Jeremiah – on those we will come back a little later –, but Paul seems to have found key elements of Christ’s messianic message in it. God’s promise to bring ‘something new on the earth’, a woman acting for a man, the establishing of ‘a new covenant’ not only with Judah in the south, but also Israel in the north, hence with all of Israel. A new covenant that is unlike the old which not only delivers from slavery, but which also brings the entire people ‘back in the land’ – and, as the last verse underlines, this plantation is not a physical one, but one where the Law is understood as a spiritual entity, put in and written ‘on hearts and minds’, a new covenant of the spirit.

Many of these ideas resonate with various statements of Paul, especially where he uses and refers to this quote above from Jeremiah (31:21.31). More importantly, this reference constitutes one of only three occasions where he quotes the Lord himself:

11:23 For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night in which he was betrayed took bread, 11:24 and after he had given thanks he broke it and said: ‘This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ 11:25 In the same way, he also took the cup after supper, saying: ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, every time you drink it, in remembrance of me.’

According to this quote from 1Corinthians Paul assumed that the ‘new covenant’ was a genuine idea of the Lord. Moreover, in Paul’s entire extant work, this is the only literal quotation of a Lord’s saying that the apostle gives, and amongst all Gospels, it is only Luke 22:20 where it is picked up again, not present in the parallel passages in Mark and Matthew. To remember the Lord and his testament – in the double sense of the word, his witness and his legacy – means to remember the message of the ‘new covenant’, the reinstatement of Jeremiah’s prophecy by Jesus. It is, therefore, little surprise that the idea of ‘novelty’ recurs in Paul, often with further references to Jer. 31:21.31:

2Cor. 5:17: So then, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation (see Jer. 31:21: ‘to bring about something new on the earth’); what is old has passed away (see Jer. 31:31: ‘not … like the old covenant’) – look, what is new has come (see Jer. 31:21 [‘something new’].31 [‘a time is coming’])!

Rom. 11:32: For God has consigned all people to disobedience so that he may show mercy to them all (see Jer. 31:31: ‘with the whole nation of Israel’).

Gal. 3:28-31: A person is declared righteous by faith apart from the works of the law. 3:29 Or is God the God of the Jews only? Is he not the God of the Gentiles too? Yes, of the Gentiles too! (see Jer. 31:31: ‘with the whole nation of Israel’) 3:30 Since God is one, he will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. 3:31 Do we then nullify the law through faith? Absolutely not! Instead we uphold the law (see Jer. 31:31: ‘I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts and minds’).

1Cor. 12,13: For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body. Whether Jews or Greeks or slaves or free, we were all made to drink of the one Spirit.

Gal. 5:5: And hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us (see Jer. 31:31: ‘I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts and minds’).

The many parallels in their variations show how deeply influenced Paul was and how central to him was what he perceived and transmitted as legacy of the Lord himself, the application of Jeremiah’s prophecy of ‘the new covenant’ to the Lord’s blood, and how he elaborated on this, developing the ‘new covenant’ from Jeremiah’s ‘something new on the earth’ into ‘a new creation’, set in opposition to the ‘old’ that ‘has passed away’, broadening Jeremiah’s ‘whole nation of Israel’ into ‘all’, ‘Jews’ and ‘Gentiles’, ‘Jews or Greeks or slaves or free’ by seeing Judaism being extended beyond physical and social boundaries. That Jeremiah spoke of the ‘law’ being put and written ‘on their hearts and minds’ is used spiritualize the law and to equate it with God’s love that has been ‘oured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit’, which reconnects with the spiritual act of baptism through which God made people ‘to be servants of a new covenant not based on the letter but on the Spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.’[12] How important it is to read the Jewish Scriptures, ‘the old covenant’, in clarity through the spectacles of Christ, Paul shows further in the same letter, 2Corinthians:

3:14 But their minds were closed. For to this very day, the same veil remains when they hear the old testament read. It has not been removed because only in Christ is it taken away. 3:15 But until this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds, 3:16 but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed (see Ex. 34:34).

Paul backs his own antithetical reading of the ‘old testament’ in the light of Christ where ‘the veil is removed’ by the same Law (Ex. 34:34). And, yet, he is suggesting not just a new form of preaching, but insists on a new covenant that renders the writings of the old one to becoming an ‘old testament’.

Even in the pseudo-pauline tradition, we encounter Paul’s Jesus-motive of ‘novelty’, albeit in different shades. To start with Colossians, where we read the Pauline theme of putting off the old man and the clothing with the new one, that there is ‘neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised …’:

3:9 Do not lie to one another since you have put off the old man with its practices 3:10 and have been clothed with the new man that is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of the one who created it. 3:11 Here there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and in all.

As in Paul, we discover religious, ethnic and social unity in Christ, but the view is narrowing to an individual seight, or, what Wolfram Kinzig has called, a restitution ad integrum, a renewal of man before his fall in paradise, a restitution that takes place in the baptism of the individual.[13] Parallel to this, we read in Ephesians:

Eph. 4:22-4: You were taught with reference to your former way of life to lay aside the old man who is being corrupted in accordance with deceitful desires, 4:23 to be renewed in the spirit of your mind, 4:24 and to put on the new man who has been created in God’s image – in righteousness and holiness that comes from truth.

Here in Ephesians, too, Paul’s idea of novelty is turned from a socially encompassing concept to a moral idea that relates to the individual (‘the old man … with deceitful desires’), and is rather a spiritual renewal than a new creation through the Spirit. Similar is Eph. 2:11-6:

2:11 Therefore remember that formerly you, the Gentiles in the flesh – who are called ‘uncircumcision’ by the so-called ‘circumcision’ that is performed on the body by human hands – 2:12 that you were at that time without the Messiah, alienated from the citizenship of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. 2:13 But now in Christ Jesus you who used to be far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 2:14 For he is our peace, the one who made both groups into one and who destroyed the middle wall of partition, the hostility, 2:15 when he nullified in his flesh the law of commandments in decrees. He did this to create in himself one new man out of two, thus making peace, 2:16 and to reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by which the hostility has been killed.

Whereas in Paul we encounter a new creation, Ephesians’ re-creation is underlined by reconciliation which now presupposes the existence of two ‘groups’, the ones of the ‘uncircumcision’ and the others of the ‘so-called circumcision’. And while in Paul the new covenant of ‘the blood of Christ’ made the uncircumcised spiritually circumcised and asked the circumcised to follow the Jewish law, being put into the hearts and minds of all, in Ephesians ‘the law of commandments in decrees’ is explicitly ‘nullified in his [Christ’s] flesh’. Although there is still a concept of peace and unity between two groups without hostility, ‘the middle wall of partition’, the ways between these groups seem to have departed and need the distruction of divisive partitionings. Wolfram Kinzig rightly states: ‘The terminology in Eph. 4:22-4 and Col. 3:9f. sounds similar [to that of Paul], but the mindset is different from that of 2Cor. 5:17’.[14]

Whether or not we can count the canonical letter of Hebrews to the Pseudo-Pauline tradition, is debated, but it is one of the very few other writings in the New Testament where the idea of ‘novelty’ reoccurs. Christ’s covenant is seen in comparison and competition to a previous one, where the prophetic promise of Jeremiah is extensively quoted:

Now Jesus has obtained a superior ministry, since the covenant that he mediates is also better and is enacted on better promises. 8:7 For if that first covenant had been faultless, no one would have looked for a second one. 8:8 But showing its fault, God says to them: ‘Look, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will complete a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. 8:9 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their fathers, on the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they did not continue in my covenant and I had no regard for them, says the Lord. 8:10 For this is the covenant that I will establish with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds and I will inscribe them on their hearts. And I will be their God and they will be my people. 8:11 And there will be no need at all for each one to teach his countryman or each one to teach his brother saying, ‘Know the Lord’, since they will all know me, from the least to the greatest. 8:12 For I will be merciful toward their evil deeds, and their sins I will remember no longer.’ 8:13 When he speaks of a new covenant, he makes the first obsolete. Now what is growing obsolete and aging is about to disappear.[15]

9:15 And so he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the eternal inheritance he has promised, since he died to set them free from the violations committed under the first covenant.[16]

10:16 ‘This is the covenant that I will establish with them after those days, says the Lord. I will put my laws on their hearts and I will inscribe them on their minds,’ 10:17 then he says, ‘Their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no longer’ (Jer. 31:33f.) 10:18 Now where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin.

As in Paul, Hebrews interprets Jeremiah as the prophecy of the creation of a new covenant, but it is ‘no longer a new definition of God’s relation to his people …, nor is it about a coming back to the original status that had been lost …, instead the second covenant is materially different from the first one, replaces it and revokes its existence. Contentwise, this new covenant (against Jer. 31[38]:33 and the Jewish tradition that is based on this verse) is qualified by the annihilation of the Torah, as the Torah was incapable to reunite men and God (Hebr. 10). From now on, there are two epochs in the history of humanity: The time before and that after the coming of Christ.’[17] In Hebrews Jesus surpasses Mose as mediator of this new covenant, but he also goes beyond the prophecy itself, as he ‘enacted on better promises’. The reason for the superiority lies in the fault of the ‘first covenant’, thus, God had to announce an entirely new one, not a remake or an amended version of the first, because the Israelites themselves had discontinued it. And yet, the end of the prophecy in Jeremiah seems to negate such interpretation, when the prophet points to God’s mercy and the promise that he ‘will remember no longer’ their sins. To contradict the idea of a possible revival and renewal of the covenant, Hebrews adds: ‘When he [God] speaks of a new covenant, he makes the first obsolete’, and more pronounced, the author refers this rejection of the old covenant to those Jews who are not partaking in the new covenant of Christ, setting the old Jewish covenant against a new one: ‘Now what is growing obsolete and aging is about to disappear’. And, yet, we are still not in the realm of a non-Jewish Jesus-movement, as Hebrews still states that ‘those who are called’ do not receive anything else, but what has been promised before, as announced by the Jeremiah, ‘the eternal inheritance’, a heritage which does not set them free from the commandments, but only ‘from the violations committed under the first covenant’. The Law and the laws remain, but they are no longer existing in the physical realm, based on the Temple and the sacrifices there,but exist in hearts and minds.

According to Annie Jaubert, outside Paul and the Pauline tradition ‘nowhere in Judaism, the concept of the “new covenant” which was that of Jeremiah, is attested with the one exception of Qumran, especially in the Damascus Document’.[18] Here we read:

None of the men who enter the New Covenant in the land of Damascus, and who again betray it and depart from the fountain of living waters, shall be reckoned with the Council of the people or inscribed in its Book from the day of the gathering in of the Teacher of the Community until the coming of the Mesiah out of Aaron and Israel … And thus shall it be for all among the first and the last who reject (the precepts), who set idols upon their hearts and walk in the stubbornness of their hearts; they shall have no share in the house of the Law. They shall be judged in the same manner as their companions were judged who deserted to the Scoffer. For they have spoken wrongly against the precepts of righteousness, and have despised the Covenant and the Pact – the New Covenant – which they made in the land of Damascus. Neither they nor their kin shall have any part in the house of the Law.[19]

The Damascus Document speaks about the creation of the ‘new covenant’ in the ‘land of Damascus’ and a fierce opposition against this ‘house of the Law’. Like Paul, the text points to the right commandments, the ‘precepts of righteousness’. However, it is unclear, how this ‘new covenant’ is related to the eternal covenant of which there is mention elsewhere in this document.[20] Most scholars assume that the ‘new covenant’ is a ‘renewed’ one, as highlighted by 1Q34bis, probably a liturgical prayer, and perhaps ‘part of a homiletic exposition of the famous prophecy in Jer. 31.31-33’:[21]

… But in the time of Thy goodwill Thou didst choose for Thyself a people. Thou didst remember Thy Covenant and [granted] that they should be set apart for Thyself from among all the peoples as a holy thing. And Thou didst renew for them Thy Covenant (founded) on a glorious vision and the words of Thy Holy [Spirit], on the works of Thy hands and the writing of Thy Right Hand, that they might know the foundations of glory and the steps towards eternity …. [Thou didst raise up] for them a faithful shepherd …[22]

Although we can discover some related terms and ideas, different to Paul and the Pauline tradition of unity in Christ is the concept of separation or setting aside of the ‘holy thing’. Their apocalypticism ‘left no room for a dynamic concept of history’, as we found it in Paul.[23] And yet, despite such differences, similarities cannot be overlooked and may point to contact and influence.

It appears that Paul, who’s letters were rarely read and who’s theology was barely accepted by most of the early Christian authors except the Pseudo-Pauline and Pauline tradition (Ignatius, Polycarp, 1Clement), initially convinced only very few Christians with the Lord’s saying about the ‘new covenant’ and the novelty of his message. This only changed when around 140 AD the rich shipowner, scholar and teacher Marcion of Sinope arrived in Rome and rediscovered Paul’s letters. In his reading of Paul, the concepts of the ‘new covenant’ and ‘newness’ became core. How can it be that this idea of the ‘new covenant’ of the Lord’s saying in the last supper report re-appears only in Luke’s Gospel which according to Irenaeus and Tertullian Marcion had used only to truncate it? How can this be a genuinely Lukan tradition or a borrowing from Paul, if the same author wrote the canonical Acts of the Apostles where Paul figures prominently, but none of his letters are either mentioned or quoted? It occurs that this is further supporting evidence for the case that has been previously made that not Marcion circumcised Luke, but that Luke is the Judaized, broadened version of Marcion’s own Gospel.[24] It is, therefore, no surprise that in Marcion’s Gospel, for example, we read the famous saying that has been widely discussed in the anti-Marcionite authors:

1:39 He [Jesus] also told <them> a parable: ‘No one tears a patch from a new garment and sews it on an old garment. If he does, he will have torn the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. 1:40 And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the old skins and will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. 1:41 Instead one pours new wine into new wineskins <and both will be preserved.>’[25]

While Marcion’s Jesus sets a clear antithesis between old and new, the old garment and the new one, the old wineskins and the new wine and highlights that the new message cannot be put onto the old foundations and cannot be contained in old frames and containers, in Luke we read an abbreviation of the last verse and an additional verse which not only corrects and contrasts what has been said before, but also shows a startling breakdown in the logic of his text:

5:36 He [Jesus] also told them a parable: “No one tears a patch from a new garment and sews it on an old garment. If he does, he will have torn the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. 5:37 And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. 5:38 Instead new wine must be poured into new wineskins. 5:39 No one after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, ‘The old is good enough.’”

Even the best willing conservative exegetes had struggled with Luke 5:39 and its relation to the verses before, but it is only one example of many others which show that Luke is based on Marcion’s Gospel, not the other way around. While Luke usually follows slavishely the wording of Marcion’s Gospel and tries to alter typically Marcionite radicalisms and antithetical statements where Marcion sets Judaism and Christianity apart by cutting down in text, or adding Jewish Scriptural references or narratives, the author of the Gospel of Mark, reacts differently. Here, Marcion’s wording and content is often changed, while the basic shape of Marcion’s Gospel is preserved (no birth stories, no youth, the Lord comes as an adult, the narrative is called a ‘Gospel’, a short ending). And again, Matthew reads like a mixture between the way Mark and Luke are dealing with Marcion’s Gospel. Matthew, like Luke adds many narratives (birth and resurrection stories), but like Mark he also alters the wording of Marcion. Without going into the precise relationship between these Gospels, let us just add that consistent to this outline, Mark is the one that also preserves some of Marcion’s concept of ‘newness’, while Matthew and John relativise it.

[1] Hence, a misleading headline that the Netbible has given to this passage (‘The Condemnation of the Jew’).

[2] Still the recognized opinion in the synagogues today.

[3] Gal. 4:4f.: ‘4:4 But when the appropriate time had come, God sent out his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 4:5 to redeem those who were under the law, so that we may be adopted as sons with full rights.’

[4] Gal. 4:6.

[5] See 2Cor. 8:9: ‘For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that although he was rich, he became poor for your sakes, so that you by his poverty could become rich.’

[6] Phil. 2:7f.

[7] 1Cor. 2:8.

[8] 1Cor. 10:1-4.

[9] 1Cor. 7:10f.: ‘7:10 To the married I give this command – not I, but the Lord– a wife should not divorce a husband 7:11 (but if she does, let her remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband), and a husband should not divorce his wife’; 1Cor. 9:14: ‘the Lord commanded those who proclaim the gospel to receive their living by the gospel’; 1Cor. 11:23-5: ‘11:23 For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night in which he was betrayed took bread, 11:24 and after he had given thanks he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” 11:25 In the same way, he also took the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, every time you drink it, in remembrance of me.”’

[10] 1Thess. 4:15: ‘For we tell you this by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will surely not go ahead of those who have fallen asleep’.

[11] W. Kinzig, Novitas Christiana (1994), 92f.

[12] 2Cor. 3:6.

[13] W. Kinzig, Novitas Christiana (1994), 107.

[14] W. Kinzig, Novitas Christiana (1994), 106 (own trans.).

[15] Hebr. 8:6.

[16] Hebr. 9:15.

[17] W. Kinzig, Novitas Christiana (1994), 115 (own trans.).

[18] A. Jaubert, La notion (1963), 447 (own trans.).

[19] CD VIII, trans. G. Vermes (2004), 136f.

[20] See W. Kinzig, Novitas Christiana (1994), 100.

[21] Th.H. Gaster, The Dead Sea Scriptures (³1976), 391.

[22] Trans. G. Vermes (2004), 381.

[23] W. Kinzig, Novitas Christiana (1994), 101.

[24] See more on this M. Vinzent, Christ’s Resurrection in Early Christianity and the Making of the New Testament (2011); see also id. In the forthcoming volumes of the commentary on Marcion’s Gospel.

[25] The verses are counted according to the new edition, translation and commentary of Marcion’s Gospel in M. Vinzent, Marcion’s Gospel (2012/3).

Arator in his 'Historia apostolica' on baptism

2012-01-12T08:29:00.000Z

In a forthcoming article ('Arator and Baptism in Sixth-Century Rome': Studia Patristica 53, 2012), Richard Hillier shows 'clearly that, for him [sc. Arator], the critical moment of baptism comes in the descent into the depths and the plundering of the devil’s domain, be it the ocean or the underworld. For Arator the subsequent "resurrection" is little more than the return to the surface'. In his footnote, he adds: 'Arator’s emphasis is in curious accord with the contention that the celebration of Easter (and thus baptism) was more a memorial of Christ’s passion and death than his resurrection... Such a view is supported by the fact that baptismal candidates (as, for example, in the Gelasian Sacramentary) were asked to affirm their belief in Christ’s incarnation and passion rather than his resurrection' (thus Wolfram Kinzig, ‘"… natum et passum etc.", Zur Geschichte der Tauffragen in der lateinischen Kirche bis zu Luther’, in: Tauffragen und Bekenntnis: Studien zur sogenannten ‘Traditio Apostolica’ zu den ‘Interrogationes de fide’ und zum ‘Römischen Glaubensbekenntnis’, Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 74 [Berlin/New York, 1999], 75-183).
So, still in 6th century Rome did the early Christian tradition of linking baptism and Christ's suffering and death prevail in some authors.

"Pan-Marcionism" - not a bad idea! Lionel Wickham's 'Times Literary Supplement' Review of Markus Vinzent, Christ's Resurrection in Early Christianity

2012-01-11T10:39:00.001Z

Lionel Wickham in the below review, published on 6 January 2012 in the Times Literary Supplement summarizes my findings as "Pan-Marcionism". And yet, it is like reading Tertullian Against Marcion - most of the rhetoric's catchy polemics are quite revealing of what Marcion intended, even if he himself not always expressed it in the sharp and distinct way as his extremely skilled critic did.
Having reflected about Wickham's "Pan-Marcionism" label - I agree that only since Marcion came to Rome, Christianity developed to what it became, a religion distinct from Judaism and another cult amongst the Roman religions with its own writings, liturgy and communities. If, as further work on Marcion's Gospel only confirms, he started off the writing of Gospels, it was with this literary genre and content that Marcion impacted and shaped all of what we know today as being 'Christian' - hence, the label "Pan-Marcionism" for "Christianity" is not bad at all and admissable, although only with one big reserve: Christianity, as it developed post Marcion, was based on his foundations, but his colleages did not embrace all of his ideas - on the contrary, most (but not all - so no 'Pan') who accepted his basic writings and ideas, also quickly corrected and developed these further. But I maintain that the readings of the texts in the book reviewed below are not amassing absurdities or building on silence or conjectures, but gathers evidence and tries to interpret them as best as I can.
That all authors up to the end of the 2nd century call Christian Easter the celebration of Christ's death is not an argument e silentio, not a conjecture or absurdity, but a simple fact which has been criticized in the 3rd c. by Origen who blames his colleagues as bad linguists, because not knowing Hebrew they derived 'Pascha' from 'paschein' = suffering (although Origen does not mention that already the Jew Philo was of the same opinion as Origen's Christian colleagues).
Again that the baptismal question read: 'Do you believe in Jesus Christ who was born and suffered' is not conjecture, but shows that Christ's birth and suffering was core to baptism, according to Rom. 6. Why we find 'passum', but not death in the Apostle's Creed and in the Nicene Creed, I leave this question to the reader of earlier studies (Die Entstehung des römischen Glaubensbekenntnisses, in: Kinzig, Wolfram/ Markschies, Christoph/Vinzent, Markus, Tauffragen und Bekenntnis. Studien zur sogenannten Traditio Apostolica, zu den Interrogationes de fide und zum Römischen Glaubensbekenntnis, AzK, 74 [Berlin: de Gruyter 1999], 185-410; Der Ursprung des Apostolikums im Urteil der kritischen Forschung, FKDG 89 [Goettingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht 2006]). But the resurrection, indeed, only comes into the creed at a later stage.
I am glad that this time (see JEH 58 [2007]), the reviewer did not believe that what he read was 'repetitive', 'of no importance' and 'worth only a footnote', but 'stimulating'.

The two recensions and editions of Marcion's Gospel

2011-12-20T04:54:00.000Z

Tertullian reports in his polemic against Marcion's Gospel how Marcion himself complaint about those who must have nicked his text, plagiarised and published it, even before he himself could do so:

How absurd it would be that when we have proved ours the older, and that Marcion's has emerged later, ours should be taken to have been false before it had from the truth material, and Marcion's be believed to have suffered plagiarism through ours [Luke, or Matthew] before it [= Marcion’s] was even published:[1]

This most important information of Tertullian has so far, if I am not mistaken, never been picked up by any scholar: Tertullian reports that Marcion – apparently still in his Antitheses – did explain that Luke (or is Tertullian referring this to Matthew?) was ‘plagiarism’ (aemulatio) of his own Gospel, and, even more importantly, that this plagiarism occurred even before Marcion had edited and published (editum) his own Gospel – which he seems to have done in conjunction with the Antitheses in which he drew attention to the unauthorised publication of the appropriated, interpolated and judaized version of his own Gospel.

From this information we have to draw that we are dealing not with only one version of Marcion’s Gospel, but with two different editions and possibly recensions!

The first was the unauthorised version of the Gospel which ‘suffered plagiarism’, must have gone out of the circle in which Marcion had distributed it, it was copied and altered. The text of this edition/recension which was obviously only intended for internal use, a so-called 'memorandum' or 'apomnemoneuma' can no longer be retrieved.

The second recension, the edition of which was undertaken by Marcion himself. In this Marcion responded already critically to the plagiarised version of his first edition, hence took notice of and potentially may have also revised his previous recension. Calling the altered version a ‘copy’, Marcion certainly acknowledged that the plagiarised product was based on his own, older text. The reason for himself to formally publish his own version, was of course the challenge by the plagiarised version. And in order to defend his own product, he added first the Antitheses and combined the Gospel with the ten Pauline letters, certainly not, as we can learn from this process, because he wanted to evangelize the world – and he certainly had never dreamt that his initial work would be further copied and eventually lead to the fourfold New Testament (and to harmonizations of it). Instead, his publication was a direct reaction against the case of plagiarism in self-defense. When Geoffrey M. Hahneman in his book on the Canon Muratori states that ‘Marcion’s basic intent appears to have been to recover a lost tradition’, we can certainly agree, but the quoted text of Tertullian goes against his further view that ‘there is no direct evidence that Marcion knew or excluded other gospels. So far as is known, Marcion never polemized against the other gospel traditions.’[2] Although we are not aware that Marcion knew of more than the one plagiarism, we do not know whether he is talking about Luke (it could also be Matthew, as Tertullian calles the latter often ‘our’ Gospel) or another version. Having said that Marcion, according to the above quote, was highly critical of the copy made of his Gospel, to the extent that he wrote his Antitheses and published his New Testament, the question still needs to be answered whether Marcion intentionally excluded other writings, as Tertullian claims (disallowing Rev., 1-2Tim., Tit.[3]), and thought of his New Testament as a ‘closed’ collection. If, what would need further research, later Marcionites altered and broadened Marcion’s text, we may have to do with a collection that was meant to be ‘specific’ but not ‘fixed’.[4]

As Tertullian begins his own commentary of Marcion’s Gospel with reference to Marcion’s Antitheses which Marcion has added to the second recension, his publication of the Gospel, he had only knowledge of this second recension.

[1] Tert., Adv. Marc. IV 4,2: ‘Alioquin quam absurdum, ut, si nostrum antiquius probaverimus, Marcionis vero posterius, et nostrum ante videatur falsum quam habuerit de veritate materiam, et Marcionis ante credatur aemulationem a nostro expertum quam et editum.’

[2] G.M. Hahneman, The Muratorian Fragment (1992), 91.

[3] See Tert., Adv. Marc. IV 5,2; V 21.

[4] This differentiation in G.M. Hahneman, The Muratorian Fragment (1992), 91f. (ibid. more about later Marcionites).

Forgiveness of sins in Baptism - irrespective of repentance

2011-12-09T20:08:00.004Z

Marcion’s theology of the ‘Church’, the foundation for his understanding of baptism, can be found in his readings of Eph. 5:22-32 and Gal. 4:26; he saw the antithesis between the Creator’s Synagogue and the God of Love’s ‘holy Church’. Tertullian reports about Marcion’s interpretation of Galatians:

Two revelations, as I see they have translated it – the one from Mount Sinai referring to the synagogue of the Jews, which according to the law gendereth to bondage: the
other gendering above all principality, power, and domination, and every name that is named not only in this world but also in that which is to come: for she is our mother, that holy church, in whom we have expressed our faith: and consequently he adds, So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free.[1]

There is a strict antithesis between bondage and freedom, between the old revelation from the Mount Sinai referring to the synagogue, and the new one which stands ‘above all principality, power, and domination’ and is delivered to the ‘holy Church’. The Church is ‘our mother’, also the bride and therefore the replacement of matrimony and family which, according to Marcion, were the old ‘type and figure of the mystery’, but now set forth ‘by him to whom also the mystery belonged’, namely the unknown God. This God of Love did away with any bondage when he revealed himself in Christ to his free and holy Church.[2] Tertullian’s quote teaches us that Marcion also knew of an ‘expression of faith’ into this ‘holy Church’, and in a further note, Tertullian points out that, also he is not sure about the details, baptism is connected with a ‘confession of the Name’.[3]

According to Marcion’s theology, confirmed by this quote by Tertullian in which he tries to drive Marcion’s thinking ad absurdum, the remission of sins happens as a free gift from the loving God, not bound to repentance, but expressed by an engagement into a new life. Tertullian mentions that Marcion has read his message in Colossians 1:13f.: ‘He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins’.[4] Hence, for Marcion, remission of sins is connected with baptism, as otherwise Tertullian could not use it in his counter-argument, but baptism is unrelated to repentance and, in consequence, to judgement. The loosing of the bonds of death is a separation from a life’s submission to the Creator and his law. Baptism is a new, a spiritual birth, in contrast to the corporeal birth, in which the soul receives the Holy Spirit. How Marcion envisaged this remission of sin to take place, is illustrated in the story of ‘Jesus Healing a Withered Hand’ (par. Luke 6:1-11), the same that we already introduced above on fasting.

Here, however, with regards to the forgiveness of sin we approach the core of this story, as can be seen in the version that is attested for Marcion’s Gospel:[5]

1:23 Just then some men <carried> a paralyzed man <on a stretcher. They were trying to bring him in and place him before Jesus. 1:24 When Jesus saw their faith he said:

‘Friend,> your sins are forgiven.’

1:25 <Then the experts in the Law and the Pharisees began to say to themselves:>

‘Who is this man <who is uttering blasphemies?>

Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

1:26 <When Jesus perceived their hostile thoughts, he said to them:

‘Why are you raising objections within yourselves? 1:27 Which is easier, to say,> ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or <to say,> ‘Stand up and take the mat’? 1:28 <‘But so that> you may know <that> the Son of Man has authority <on earth> to forgive sins’, <he said to the paralyzed man:

‘I tell you,> stand up, take your mat, <and go’,

and he went home’, glorifying God. 1:29 Then astonishment seized them all, and they were filled with> fear, <saying:

‘We have seen> incredible things <today.’

The pericope starts with Jesus teaching and people gathering for seeing him to be healed. Pharisees and teachers of Law are around too who are also teaching. A paralyzed man is being brought who is not only going to be healed by Jesus, but also taken as an example to state another case: that the ‘Son of Man’ is forgiving sins. The scene ends almost stereotypically or at least, as one would expected: The healed glorifies God, the rest freezes in astonishment, fear and the unbeliefer’s statement: ‘We have seen incredible things today’.

The ‘Son of Man’ who can forgive sins, is the hot topic of this story, and, as the counter argument reveals, it remained Marcion’s view that this title worked against its Old Testament figure of Daniel and human insights. It should not be taken allegorically, and, therefore, was not it in harmony with any of the Jewish or non-Pauline writings. Interestingly, the entire question of ‘forgiveness of sins’ and whether or not it involves judgement and repentance (so Tertullian’s view), or unconditional love (so Marcion’s), is a debate which, as Tim Carter has recently shown in his King’s Patristic Seminar, takes place around the mid second century, starting with Marcion. The Epistula Apostolorum, an anti-Marcionite half-Marcionite text, as I have elsewhere shown,[6] has preserved us a summary of beliefs which is shorter and misses out elements which this work elsewhere endorses, but in the given form represents a strongly Marcionite character:

They are a picture of our faith concerning the great Christianity and that is

1) In the Father, the ruler of the entire world, and

2) In Jesus Christ our Saviour, and

3) In the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, and

4) In the holy Church, and

5) In the forgiveness of sins.

While we have seen that the belief in the ‘holy Church’ was part of Marcion’s creedal statement, EpAp 5 makes it likely that it also encompassed the belief ‘in the forgiveness of sins’. And what the Ethiopian version of EpAp 42 reports could have been written by Marcion himself: ‘Truly, truly I say to you, you will be called fathers, for you, full of love and compassion, have revealed to them what [is] heaven [… for] by my hand they will receive the baptism of life and forgiveness of sin … and they shall have forgiveness of sins and eternal life and a share of the kingdom.’ Although Hermas knows of the link between baptism and forgiveness of sins, he struggles with the question of people who sin again after they had received the forgiveness of sins in baptism.[7] But contrary to Marcion, Hermas maintains that forgiveness of sins is based on repentance. Astonishingly, Luke only knows of this link between forgiveness of sins and repentance in those sections which have no parallel in Marcion’s Gospel (Luke 1:76-7; 3:3; 24:47; see also Acts 2:38: ‘Repent and by baptized’; 5:31-2), but it is missing in such core places as the account of the last supper where Matth. 26:28 states: ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins’, but Luke 22:20 and Marcion’s Gospel have the Pauline formula (1Cor. 11:25: ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood’): ‘This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood’. If, as most NT scholars assume (following Irenaeus and Tertullian), Luke has been written prior to Marcion’s Gospel, than it is very difficult to explain why the link between repentance and forgiveness of sins has such a central place in those sections which have no parallel in Marcion (i.e., the beginning and end of Luke) but not in the passages which are also present in the latter’s Gospel. But if one inverts the chronological order, it becomes perfectly clear. While Luke preserved most of Marcion’s Gospeltext, the non-Marcionite link between baptism and repentance only appear in those sections which were added to Marcion’s Gospel. Be this, as one may judge, it seems a reasonable hypothesis to assume that Marcion’s baptismal statement included both, the ‘holy Church’ (Gal. 4:26) and the ‘forgiveness of sins’ (Col. 1:13f.).

Marcion’s baptism left significant traces in Church history. It entailed a radical forgiveness of sins (without any form of repentance), but also asked for strict ascetic demands (sexual renouncement, virginity) and was apparently often delayed to late in life. Not all elements were retained by the Roman Church and especially his ascetic emphasis reduced, but we learn from a quote by bishop Stephen of Rome (cited by Cyprian) that even in mid third century Rome the sacramental bonds between the different communities (that of Stephens and those of Marcionites and others) were not broken, ‘since those who are specially heretics do not baptize those who come to them from one another, but only receive them to communion.’[8] As Cyprian’s Epistle 74 further details, the reception must have been a mutual one and Stephen must especially have thought of Marcionite communities in his city. The bond of sacramental unity that is unimaginable for Cyprian was obviously still reality at Rome, a sacramental and liturgical acceptance because of much common grounds and despite some significant differences in theologies and rites.

[1] Tert., Adv. Marc. V 4.

[2] See Tert., Adv. Marc. V 18; see also Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott (Leipzig, 1923. ²1924 = Darmstadt, 1960), 143.

[3] Tert., Adv. Marc. I 24.

[4] See Tert., Adv. Marc. V 19.

[5] The vers numberings are taken from my forthcoming edition and commentary of Marcion’s Gospel. Brackets indicate where text is unattested for, but probably part of this Gospel, underlined if these parts are at least hinted at in Tertullian or other sources. The re-construction of this text is to a large extent hypothetical and looks like some re-stored fragments of one or more papyri. In a certain sense, the re-construction work was even more difficult in this case than working on a papyri, as the papyri sometimes give the scholar at least a defined framework, fixed lines, or a text with known lacunae, the number of missing characters asf. Unfortunately, all of this is not given in the present case. And still, we had not working entirely in the dark. Tertullian, although being a fierce opponent of Marcion and his Gospel, is so engaged and entangled with the text that in his opening paragraphs of Book IV, chapter 10 he summarizes our pericope of Marcion’s Gospel, so that we know that the story of the paralyzed followed the healing of the leper, and he also gives a few quotes of Marcion’s text. Mostly, however, we have to deduce further fragments from Tertullian’s broader counter-arguments. This makes the task extraordinarily difficult. Any conclusions which we draw below is, therefore, either restricted to the few verbal quotes that he gives, or, as we will indicate, are subject to the uncertainty of what we tried to reconstruct. One help was the seeming variants that are preserved in Codex Bezae (D), as these not only strenghthen the narrative, but also underline the theological message. The guiding elements for the reconstruction, was, of course, Tertullian’s witness, aided by the overall necessity for a coherent narrative. Verses, which Tertullian does not attest, are included, if they are necessary for the story line.

[6] M. Vinzent, Christ’s Resurrection (2011), 128-35.

[7] Hermas, Mand. IV 3,1-3.

[8] Stephen in Cyprian, Ep. 73,4.

Review of Mark Edwards on my book on 'Christ's Resurrection in Early Christianity'

2011-12-08T17:56:00.001Z

The publishers kindly sent me through a review that was published in 'Church Times' on 2 December 2011:

Mark Edward picks up the question of the 'argumentum e silencio', on which I entirely agree. And he is absolutely right, silence can mean both that people believed or did not believe in the Resurrection. To assume, therefore, as a principle that they did believe in the Resurrection right from the start, as hundreds of years of scholarship and schoolbooks let us know, is therefore not the only true option. The other has not been seen yet, and therefore, is being tried out here in this book.
Now, if we have two potential options - it comes down to, how to way the arguments. As I admit in the book, sheer silence (especially in homiletic literature) could mean both, but the interesting element which is not highlighted in the review is that all the many texts that are dealt with in this book do talk about salvation, talk about incarnation, talk about death and sacrifice and that these are the salvific acts of Christ. Moreover, as I show in chapter 3 - Easter, Baptism and Sunday have been centered around Christ's death, so that, for example, up until the end of the second century there was only one unanimous definition for Easter, namely the celebration of Christ's death. Does this not let the pendulum swing towards the proposed solution?

Meiste Eckhart's innovative Trinitarian theology - a paper given at the RIST seminar, King's College London

2011-12-03T19:43:00.000Z

Summary of Markus Vinzent’s paper

by Susannah Ticciasi, King's College

In his paper, Markus offers an account of Meister Eckhart’s innovative Trinitarian theology, showing quite how radical and challenging it is in relation to the tradition, claiming that it ‘destroys a whole system of inherited philosophical theology’. He also indicates the profound ramifications it has for the place of creation in relationship with God.

As Markus shows, Eckhart’s key innovation is to locate the divine potential for generating and being generated, not in the divine Persons, but in the divine essence. This allows the Persons to share even more than they are traditionally conceived to share, since the Father (not generating through his personal properties but through the divine essence) is able to pass on to the Son even the potential to generate. Thus, generativity is a property of transcendental divine essence. Moreover, once the ground of God is reconceived in this way, Eckhart claims that it is more properly named mother than father, since it is a mother’s work to conceive. Motherhood precedes and grounds fatherhood within the Godhead, even in respect of the person of the Father, who conceives the Word. Indeed, as Markus puts it, ‘motherhood, therefore, is a description of the transcendentality of divine essence which allows for fatherhood, sonship, spiritness and creation’. The concept of fatherhood has a more delimited appropriateness in relation to the Father’s activity as expressed in the Son, which is an intellectual work.

The consequence of this rethinking of the divine essence is that it is no longer understood to contain differentiation, but rather is pure potentiality: God’s maternal nature is ‘detachment’. However, this also has far-reaching implications for creation, since God’s potentiality for fatherhood, sonship and spiritness is no longer any different from God’s potentiality for creation. It now becomes clear why Markus began his paper with an account of creation as, like God, ‘beyond eternity’. God is no longer to be opposed to creation as the eternal to the temporal, since creation is invited fully to share in God’s life.

The question this leaves me with is whether distinction between God and creation is nevertheless maintained, as one might infer from Eckhart’s phrase, ‘God is distinct by virtue of being indistinct’. And Markus himself claims that Eckhart does not want to confound God and creation. Such a question, as well as many others which are raised by this fascinating and provocative paper, are a compelling invitation to read the book, just published, whose first chapter is a version of Markus’ paper:

Markus Vinzent, The Art of Detachment (Eckhart: Texts and Studies, Volume 1; Peeters, 2011).

Call for papers - Prize in Patristic Exegesis with focus on Africa

2011-11-30T06:43:00.000Z

The Institute for Classical Christian Studies and the Center for Early African Christianity announced last week at the International Patristic Studies Conference held at Oxford University its 1st annual award for the best paper(s) in Patristic Exegesis. (Please see Announcement below.) We are very excited about this new initiative and believe it will encourage young scholars to venture more deeply into patristic studies in a way that is illuminating for church and society today.

ANNOUNCEMENT

$2000 FIRST PRIZE

ICCS STUDIES IN PATRISTIC EXEGESIS

$1000 ADDITIONAL PRIZES

WITH SPECIAL FOCUS ON TEXTS FROM THE AFRICAN CONTINENT OF THE FIRST MILLENNIUM

Topic: Any subject that advances the thesis of the Ancient Christian Commentary, that patristic commentators on scripture bear incomparable wisdom for contemporary Christian teaching. The subject areas investigated may be in theology, liturgy, linguistics, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, or in ecumenical, historical and socio-cultural studies. A translation of a previously untranslated patristic text may be submitted. Untranslated Arabic, Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian texts are to be given special consideration.

Manuscripts: The paper must be a previously unpublished manuscript submitted in English. The manuscript may be submitted in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Chinese or Korean (all languages in which the ACCS is being translated), but if selected the writer would be responsible for translating it into English. Manuscripts selected may be submitted simultaneously to peer-reviewed journals, or may be published digitally in English for the international community of readers, teachers, and patristic scholarship.

Length: approx. 5,000-10,000 words.

Assessment: Manuscripts will be assessed by quality of argumentation, clarity of exposition, significance of the position argued, degree to which the paper advances the topic under discussion, contribution to global Christianity, depth of understanding of the ancient Christian writers.

African Focus: Since the Institute for Classical Study was founded by the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture Project, and since the ACCS project, having been completed, is now focused on early African Christianity, we especially welcome contributions from African scholars or by other scholars on topics of patristic studies regarded texts written on the continent of Africa.

Deadline: August 1, 2012. Submit manuscript to the Institute for Classical Christian Studies, c/o Dr. Michael Glerup at the address below. The award will be announced by November 2012.

For more info please email: ICCS@earlyafricanchristianity.com or visit earlyafricanchristianity.com

How can God be beyond himself?

2011-11-23T21:37:00.000Z

A summary of a paper given in the RIST seminar, King's College London

In his Philosophical Consolation, Boethius defined ‘eternity’ as ‘totally simultaneous and perfect possession of interminable life.’[1] Where Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260-1329) refers to this quote,[2] he highlights Boethius’ dynamic concept of life (vita) with a God who simply is present: ‘God is “beyond” eternity because of his presentiality.’[3] Now, how can be beyond eternity,[4] beyond being endlessly divine? Eckhart’s reasoning starts with an explanation of Ex. 15:18: ‘The Lord will reign for ever and beyond.’

This hyperbolic ‘and beyond’, which goes further even than ‘for ever’, caught Eckhart’s attention. To Eckhart, the conventional reading of eternity reduced to a radical presentiality was ‘not subtle enough’. Whereas for Thomas Aquinas neither have there been, nor will there be infinite things in reality,[5] since, as he understands his Catholic faith, generation has a beginning and will have a definite end and therefore cannot be infinite,[6] to Eckhart, Ex. 15:18 ‘plainly and briefly intends to say that God’s kingdom will always and infinitely stand beyond any measure of counting or conceiving’.[7] In what is almost no more than a further allusion, Eckhart adds what turns out to be the core of his explanation: ‘What goes for God’s knowledge is equally true about his kingdom and rule. “We will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and beyond that” (Mi. 4:5).’[8] Whereas before Eckhart was speaking of divine knowledge only in which God understands infinite potentiality and actuality, the reference to Mi. 4:5 transfers divine knowledge to ‘us’, to God’s creatures. God’s being beyond himself means that he is enabling ‘us’ to walk in God’s name forever ‘and beyond’. What this walking of creatures in God’s name entails is further expounded in the newly published first volume of Markus Vinzent, The Art of Detachment, Meister Eckhart: Texts and Studies (Leuven, 2011):

[1] Boethius, Phil. Consol. V pr. VI (CSEL LXVII 122,12): ‘Aeternitas igitur est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio’, adapted from Plotinus, Enn. III 7,3,37-8.

[2] Eckhart, Expositio libri Exodi n. 80 (LW II 84,3-9).

[3] Eckhart, Expositio libri Exodi n. 80 (LW II 84,3): ‘Deus est ultra aeterna praesentialitate’ (trans. of this and further passages from this Expositio by B. McGinn, in Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 1986, 71, trans. altered).

[4] An idea, already present in Proclos, see Proclos, Elem. 87; C.J. de Vogel, Some reflections on the Liber de causis (1966), 78.

[5] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. II/1, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance (Edinburgh, 1957), 567.

[6] Thomas Aquinas, S. c. gent. I c. 69.

[7] Eckhart, Expositio libri Exodi n. 86 (LW II 89,4-6): ‘Ultimo breviter et plane, cum dicitur: dominus regnavit in aeternum et ultra, vult dicere quod ultra quam possit numerari aut cogitari semper in infinitum stabit regnum eius’ (trans. by B. McGinn in Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 1986, 73).

[8] Eckhart, Expositio libri Exodi n. 86 (LW II 89,4-6): ‘Et sicut est de scientia dei, sic pari ratione est de regno ipsius et regimine, Mich. 4: ambulabimus in nomine domini dei nostri in aeternum et ultra’ (trans. by B. McGinn in Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 1986, 73).

First International Congress on Patristic Studies: “The Identity of Jesus: Unity and Diversity in the Patristic Period”

2011-11-19T14:09:00.000Z

8.-10.08.2012

In the name of the Universidad Católica de Cuyo, we have the pleasure to announce the First International Congress on Patristic Studies. The main topic of discussion will be: “The Identity of Jesus: Unity and Diversity in the Patristic Period”.
This event will be held in San Juan on days 8, 9 and 10 August 2012 and the four official languages of the congress are spanish, english, italian and french.
Thematic subjects
Speakers can submit works related to the following thematic areas:
-Jesus of Nazareth and his identity: new discussions on “Historical Jesus” and “Christ of faith”
-Devotion to Jesus in Christianity of the first centuries
-Different Christian trends and schools: Jewish-Christians, Prothocatholics, Gnostics.
-Different trends and different evangelic genres: the sayings of Gospel Q, canonical gospels, apocryphal gospels, gnostic gospels.
-The identity of Jesus in the historical record of the time..
-The identity of Jesus and the social world of his time.
-The identity of Jesus in the writings of the patristic writers.
-Current and authors against the divinity of Jesus, Celsus, Porphyry, etc
-The high Christology and the Alexandrian tradition: Bible Greek, Judaism and hellenized Christianity.
-Christology and liturgy in the patristic age.
- Representations about the person of Jesus in literature and art of Christian antiquity.
- Unity and diversity of the experience of the resurrection of Jesus.
-The Identity of Jesus and the philosophical and theological discussions in the councils of the early centuries

For more information, please, consult our website:
http://www.laidentidaddejesus.com/

I look forward to your attendance

Yours sincerely
Pbro. Lic. Ángel Hernández - Dra. Patricia Andrea Ciner
Universidad Católica de Cuyo
Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades
Escuela de Cultura Religiosa
Instituto de Estudios Patrísticos
Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios Integrales
Av. José Ignacio de la Roza 1516
Rivadavia - San Juan - Argentina C.P. (5400)
Tel.: (+54) (264) 4292300 Fax: (+54) (264) 4292310
General Objectives
Clarify/ elucidate, through the analyses of different sources, the unity and diversity of theological, philosophical, historical, social, liturgical, artistic positions, etc. about the identity of Jesus in the Patristic times.
Organizers:
Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades, Escuela de Cultura Religiosa, Instuto de Estudios Patrísticos (IEP) and Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios Integrales (CIDEI) fro Universidad Católica de Cuyo.
Academic Committee:
Dr. Francisco García Bazán
Dr. Oscar Velásquez
Dr. Héctor Padrón
Dr. María Isabel Larrauri
Dr. Rubén Peretó Rivas
Dr. Juan Carlos Alby
Dr. José Antonio Antón Pacheco
Executive Commitee:
Lic. Jorge Bernat (Decano de la Facultad de Filosofía),
Pbro. Dr. José Juan García (Director de la Escuela de
Cultura Religiosa), Pbro. Lic. Ángel Bartolomé
Hernández (Director IEP);Pbro. Lic. Pedro Fernández
(Director CIDEI) Pbro. Marcelo Alcayaga Dra. Patricia
Ciner ; Mgter. Susana Villalonga, Pbro. Lic. Leonardo
Pons, Lic. José Antonio Carrascosa , Pbro. Ariel Ayala,
Srita. María de los Ángeles González.

L'apolegetica in John Henry Newman e nei Padri di IV e V secolo

2011-11-19T13:13:00.000Z

25.-26.11.11
Congress on apologetics in John Henry Cardinal Newman and the Fathers of the 4th and the 5th century, organized by the Pontificia Facoltà Teologica di Sicilia "San Giovanni Evangelista" and the Istituto Siciliano di Studi Patristici e Tardoantichi "J. H. Newman", che si svolgerà a Palermo dal 25 al 26 novembre c.a.

How to date Mark? And what Marcion has to contribute

2011-11-18T19:16:00.001Z

What are the ‘inconclusive … few hints’ that have been advanced 'that Mark's Gospel is earlier than Matthew's and Luke's'? According to Mark Goodacre and many others before (and after) him:

The most decisive pointer is the question of whether or not the Gospels refer, however obliquely, to the key events of 70 CE, when Jerusalem was overrun by the Roman army after the Jewish War beginning in 66 CE. Matthew and Luke both seem to provide hints that they know of the events of 70.[1]

The first hint has been found in Matth. 23:37-9 par. Luke 13:34-5, especially of interest to us, as these Lukan verses are explicitly mentioned as being absent from Marcion’s Gospel:[2]

Luke 13:34-5

Matth. 23:37-9

13:34 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! How often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would have none of it! 13:35 Look, your house is forsaken! And I tell you, you will
not see me until you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!’” (Ps. 118:26)

23:37 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! How often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would have none of it! 23:38 Look, your house is left to you desolate! 23:39 For I tell you, you will not see me from now until you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!’” (Ps. 118:26)

This is a passage from the Double Tradition that is missing in Mark. Almost literally identical in Luke and Matthew, Jesus prophetically announces ‘dramatic events to take place in Jerusalem’, ‘words that would have much more poignancy in a post-70 situation. “Your house”, Jerusalem’s house, clearly refers to the Temple, which in the post-70 period indeed lay “forsaken” and in ruins.’[3] Similarly, Matth. 22:4-8 has been taken as a reference to the destruction of the Temple:

Matth. 22:4-8

Luke 13:17-24

22:4 Again he sent other slaves, saying,
‘Tell those who have been invited,
“Look! The feast I have prepared for you is ready. My oxen and fattened cattle have been slaughtered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.”’
22:5 But they were indifferent and went away, one to his farm,

another to his business.

22:6 The rest seized his slaves, insolently mistreated them, and killed them. 22:7 The king was furious! He sent his soldiers, and they put those murderers to death and set their city on fire.

22:8 Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but the ones who had been invited were not worthy.

14:17 At the time for the banquet he sent his slave to tell those who had been invited,
‘Come, because everything is now ready.’ 14:18

But one after another they all began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it. Please excuse me.’ 14:19 Another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going out to examine them. Please excuse me.’ 14:20 Another said, ‘I just got married, and I cannot come.’

14:21 So the slave came back and reported this to his master. Then the master of the household was furious and said to his slave, ‘Go out quickly to the streets and alleys of the city, and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’ 14:22 Then the slave said, ‘Sir, what you instructed has been done, and there is still room.’ 14:23 So the master said to his slave, ‘Go out to the highways and country roads and urge people to come in, so that my house will be filled. 14:24 For I tell you, not one of those individuals who were invited will taste my banquet!’”

Goodacre comments: ‘The thing that is so striking here is the extent to which this element [of the furious king who sends his soldiers and burns the city] intrudes into a story that can be told quite adequately without it (as in Luke and Thomas). It may be that Matthew is thinking here of the fall of Jerusalem.’[4] In other places Matthew and Luke are more detailed than Mark, from which the conclusion is drawn that they have redacted Mark in the light of the tragic events in Jerusalem, although, it is again admitted, that the evidence ‘is not decisive’ as with Matth. 24:15.21-2 // Mark 13:14.19-20 // Luke 21:20-4,[5] another important passage, as we are told again that Marcion’s Gospel does not display the verses Luke 21:21-2:[6]

*Luke* 21:20-4	*Mark* 13:14-20	*Matth.* 24:15-22
21:20 “But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. 21:21 Then those who are in Judea must flee to the mountains. Those who are inside the city must depart. Thosewho are out in the country must not enter it, 21:22 because these are days of vengeance, to fulfill all that is written. 21:23 Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing their babies in those days! For there will be great distress on the earth and wrath against this people. 21:24 They will fall by the edge of the sword and be led away as captives among all nations. Jerusalem will be trampled down by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.	13:14 “But when you see the abomination of desolation standing where it should not be (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains. 13:15 The one on the roof must not come down or go inside to take anything out of his house. 13:16 The one in the field must not turn back to get his cloak. 13:17 Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing their babies in those days! 13:18 Pray that it may not be in winter. 13:19 For in those days there will be suffering unlike anything that has happened from the beginning of the creation that God created until now, or ever will happen. 13:20 And if the Lord had not cut short those days, no one would be saved. But because of the elect, whom he chose, he has cut them short. 13:21 Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘Look, there he is!’ do not believe him. 13:22 For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, the elect. 13:23 Be careful! I have told you everything ahead of time.	24:15 “So when you see the abomination of desolation – spoken about by Daniel the prophet – standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), 24:16 then those in Judea must flee to the mountains. 24:17 The one on the roof must not come down to take anything out of his house, 24:18 and the one in the field must not turn back to get his cloak. 24:19 Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing their babies in those days! 24:20 Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a Sabbath. 24:21 For then there will be great suffering unlike anything that has happened from the beginning of the world until now, or ever will happen. 24:22 And if those days had not been cut short, no one would be saved. But for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short.

W. Marxsen sees the ‘sings’ of Mark 13:5-14 ‘that are thought of as taking place in the present (wars, rumours of wars, etc.)’[7] pointing ‘to the period of the Jewish War (A.D. 66-70) before the destruction of Jerusalem (A.D. 70)’[8] and Goodacre claims that ‘it is clear that Luke in particular is more specific than Mark’, but this is only partly true. Yes, Luke (like Marcion) speaks openly about Jesus’ announcement of a ‘Jerusalem surrounded by armies’ and ‘trampled down by the Gentiles’, but if one believes that Mark is not specific, this would also account for Matthew who is closely parallel to Mark, not Luke here.[9] Luke (and Marcion) give historical details, and yet, if we read Mark like Matthew attentively, it does not sound as if Jesus spoke ‘obliquely’[10] about the ‘desolation’, because the reference to Dan. 9:27, made explicit in Matthew, was a clear pointer for everyone who knew the Scriptures, a prophetic saying that was not only as drastic and detailed as Luke, but that also provided a theological explanation of the historical events:

9:25 So know and understand:

From the issuing of the command to restore and rebuild

Jerusalem until an anointed one, a prince arrives,

there will be a period of seven weeks and sixty-two weeks.

It will again be built, with plaza and moat,

but in distressful times.

9:26 Now after the sixty-two weeks,

an anointed one will be cut off and have nothing.

As for the city and the sanctuary,

the people of the coming prince will destroy them.

But his end will come speedily like a flood.

Until the end of the war that has been decreed

there will be destruction.

9:27 He will confirm a covenant with many for one week.

But in the middle of that week

he will bring sacrifices and offerings to a halt.

On the wing of abominations will come one who destroys,

until the decreed end is poured out on the one who destroys.”

Whereas in Luke (and Marcion), Jesus is the one who prophecies in his own words, Mark and Matthew make him use Daniel’s prophecy to express the similar message: Jerusalem will be restored and rebuild, but it will be the task of the Messiah. Prior to this reconstruction (the hope of which was a lively one around the times of the Bar Kochba revolt in 132-6 AD), there will be distressful times. Even the Messiah ‘will be cut off and have nothing’. Against Luke’s (and Marcion’s) blaming of the Gentiles, by using Daniel Mark and Matthew make the destruction the work of ‘the people of the coming prince’ and the Messiah, who by destroying the Temple and the city, by halting ‘sacrifices and offerings’ is ‘the one who destroys’. Hence, it seems that all three, Matthew, Mark and Luke (and also Marcion) knew of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, supported in Mark by Mark 15:29 and 15:38 (‘Those who passed by defamed him, shaking their heads and saying, “Aha! You who can destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days” … 15:38 And the temple curtain was torn in two, from top to bottom’),[11] and also by the parable of the tenants (Mark 12:1-12), where in v. 9 ‘the catastrophe of the year 20 is indicated’.[12]

Let us compare Marcion’s gospel with the ‘missing verses’ of Luke 21:21-2 and Luke to see what drastic difference these ‘missing’ or ‘added’ verses make. Like Mark and Matthew also Luke sees the destruction of Jerusalem as a prophetic fulfilment of ‘all that is written’, although he does not detail which scriptural reference he has got in mind, and yet he hinted at Daniel having used the term ‘desolation’ in Luke 21:20. Of course, as we have seen from Mark and Matthew, Luke’s account, as it stands, is inconsistent. While Daniel mentions the Messiah and his people as causes for the destruction of Jerusalem, in Luke this prophecy is fulfilled by Gentiles. Only Marcion’s version without the verses Luke 21:21-2 is consistent, as here, the Daniel-hint of the desolation receives an interpretation which is not a fulfilment of this prophecy, but its correction: Against Daniel, the city and the temple will not and has not been destroyed by the Messiah and his people, but by the Gentiles. There were not ‘days of vengeance’ of the Lord, but days where ‘the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled’. Those who bring the sword and lead away captives will see that such times become fulfilled – overcome, as we will see by an all-loving God. This first comparison may give us a taste of what will be encountered later in the commentary.

Hence, it does not ‘seem that of all the evangelists, Mark is the least explicit about the events of 70’, and that this text provides ‘a potential indicator of Markan Priority’, even not a non ‘decisive’ one,[13] on the contrary, it seems that Marcion’s message has been altered by all three Synoptics in their respective ways.[14]

[1] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 68.

[2] See Epiph., Pan. XLII 11.6(41), while Tert., Adv. Marc. IV 31,1 is silent about the passage which harmonizes with Epiphanius’ statement.

[3] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 68.

[4] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 69.

[5] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 69-70.

[6] Epiph., Pan. XLII 11.6(59), again harmonizing with the silence in Tert., Adv. Marc. IV 39,9.

[7] W. Marxsen, Introduction (1968), 143.

[8] W. Marxsen, Introduction (1968), 143; G. Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus (²2002), 54.

[9] See already Ph. Vielhauer, Geschichte (^{2nd corr.}1978), 347³¹.

[10] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 70.

[11] See A. Jülicher, Einleitung (1894), 304.

[12] Ph. Vielhauer, Geschichte (^{2nd corr.}1978), 347.

[13] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 70.

[14] More on this passage in the commentary.

Roman and early Christian Christmas Gifts

2011-11-16T11:51:00.001Z

A short while ago, when I visited Roman excavations in the south of Britain, I adored the replica in the museum shop and wondered why these products are not available in normal shops, and even difficult to track down in online shops - perhaps, I thought, they are simply commercially not viable. Yet, I thought, they would make perfect Christmas gifts. Hence, I asked a friend and with my help he created a platform for it: The-Romans she called it.
Hope you enjoy it like me.

Soft and hard evidence for the priority of Mark?

2011-11-15T06:40:00.000Z

In his introductory book The Synoptic Problem: A Way through the Maze (2001), Mark Goodacre explains in some detail soft and hard evidence for priority of Mark.

Now what are arguments in favour of a priority of Mark?

a) ‘Some of the material not in Mark makes better sense on the assumption that it has been added by Matthew and/or Luke than on the assumption that it has been omitted by Mark’.[1] And M. Goodacre things of the following material:

a. ‘If Mark wrote third … why it is that he omitted so much material from his predecessors. … Of course the natural answer to this question would be that the Double Tradition pericopae [material that is in Matthew and Luke alone] must have been material that was in some way uncongenial to Mark.’[2] But the contrary seems true, ‘the Double Tradition does not obviously have a clearly un-Markan profile’.[3] Goodacre adds that there are, indeed, passages like Mark 11:20-5 which ‘might have been an ideal location for Mark to have inserted’ texts from Matthew or Luke, like here the Lord’s Prayer, hence the ‘data does not make good sense on the assumption of Markan Posteriority’.[4]

b. So while there are no obvious un-Markan elements in the additional material of the Double Tradition, Goodacre adds, Mark shows an ‘apparent addition of elements not congenial to Matthew and Luke’: Mark 7:33-6 (Healing of a Deaf Mute); 8:22-6 (Blind Man of Bethsaida); 14:51-2 (Man Running Away Naked). He points to the ‘graphic details of Jesus’ healing techniques’ in the first (‘He spat and touched his tongue’) and the third story (the use of saliva) and to the ‘somewhat bizarre story’ of the Blind Man of Bethsaida and concludes that ‘the material unique to Mark makes better sense as material omitted by Matthew and Luke than it does as material added by Mark’. But he also admits that one could see it the other way around that ‘Mark added this material to Matthew and Luke’.[5]

c. A third argument pertains to style and oral tradition. If Mark came third, why is his Gospel ‘the most “oral” in nature’, but being third mostly relies not on oral tradition, but on the text of the other two? Goodacre calles it an ‘anomaly in early Christianity, with relatively little contact with oral tradition in comparison with Matthew, Luke, Thomas and others’,[6] and, yet, we can only speculate to what extent the mentioned texts depend on oral traditions.

b) On the assumption of Mark’s posteriority ‘the supposed omissions and additions’ do not ‘make for a coherent picture’, and, yet Goodacre believes that ‘the addition of banal clarificatory additions is not consonant with the generally enigmatic, ironic tone of Mark’s Gospel’, from which he draws ‘that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, a work of brutish genius, which was subsequently explicated bo both Matthew and Luke’.[7]

c) These soft readings, Goodacre wants to support ‘in other ways’, although even in this category, it is to do ‘whether Mark looks more like the document from which Matthew and Luke worked, or more like a document based on Matthew and Luke.’[8] Indications are:

a. ‘Mark often has the more difficult reading’, but we are not taken to a harder reading than that Mark’s Priority seems the ‘more likely scenario’, because what is unclear in Mark has been clarified by the other two (but if so, why would the earlier source be less precise than authors who write later? How with the growing distance to the events did they increase knowledge and precision?);[9]

b. Or a christological argument taken from Mark 6:5 par. Matth. 13:58: ‘Whereas in Mark the clear impression is that Jesus is unable to do mighty works there, in Matthew we hear rather that Jesus simply “did not” do any mighty works. It is a small but striking point that is usually held to point towards Markan Priority. It is straightforward to imagine Matthew making the change here, but stranger to think of Mark making the change in the opposite direction.’[10] All depends here, of course, whether one see a decrease or increase in power attribution to Jesus over time. Those who think of low-christology as the outset will give Mark historical priority, but those who think of high-christology as the early expressions that were modified towards a low-christology will opt for the contrary. And although, Goodacre had stressed these examples as ‘hard readings’, he admits that this category ‘is an extension of the previous’ one, the soft reading.[11]

c. Editorial fatigue: There are cases in parallel pericopes where sometimes Matthew, sometimes Luke show inconsistencies whereas Mark preserves a consistent story, or, as explained by Goodacre, ‘when one writer is copying the work of another, changes are sometimes made at the beginning of an account that are not sustained throughout.’[12] A first example is Matth. 8:1-4 // Mark 1:40-5 // Luke 5:12-6, where Mark and Luke have a consistent story, but Matthew first introduces ‘many crowds’, hence, sets the story into the public, but then adopts the Mark-Luke-version that Jesus tells the one who has been healed from leprosy that he should not tell anyone. And there are more examples where Matthew displays such ‘lapses’.[13] And it appears that we find similar inconsistencies in Luke when ‘Luke apparently omits features of Mark’s Parable that he goes on to mention in the Interpretation’:[14] in Luke 8:6 // Mark 4:5; Luke 5:19 // Mark 2:4; Luke 5:22 // Mark 2:8. It is interesting to note that all the examples in Luke that Goodacre mentions are elements that are not attested for the text of Marcion’s Gospel, and yet, one also has to ask the question whether the hermeneutical principle of consistency is correct – why would it be more likely for a redactor to fall asleep in his work rather than the principle author writing a story that features inconsistencies which an attentive redactor picks up and corrects. One typical feature of redaction and even copying is precisely a tendency to correct perceived mistakes, difficult readings, inconsistencies, one of the reasons why in textual criticism and redactional criticism the lectio difficilior is normally the preferred text. Even if one would opt for the contrary – this only shows that ‘fatigue’ is certainly not conclusive and far from being ‘strong evidence’, or ‘a clear decisive indicator of Markan Priority’ as claimed by Goodacre.[15]

[1] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 59.

[2] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 58.

[3] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 58.

[4] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 59.

[5] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 59-61.

[6] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 62.

[7] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 65.

[8] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 65-6.

[9] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 66.

[10] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 67.

[11] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 67.

[12] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 71.

[13] See M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 73-4, 73.

[14] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 74.

[15] M. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem (2001), 75.

My new book 'The Art of Detachment' released today

2011-11-07T20:40:00.000Z

After years of writing and re-writing, you hold a copy of the printed book in hands - a strange feeling, and perhaps one realizes the difference between a printed book and an electronically published product. The difference of the print medium from the very medium which I use right now makes the printed book a release that sets it further away. Of course, nothing is set in stone, and as soon as you open any page you think, this and that could have been phrased differently, but its out as it is. And it starts its own life.

This book is about a key concern of Eckhart, detachment, approached from his teaching on divine essence. It also includes a contrasting reading of Augustine's Neo-Platonic model of progressing in spiritual stages and Eckhart's view of approaching the divine.
I am looking forward to reading comments and reviews.

Next King's Patristic Seminar: David Cann speaks on 'How did the Holy Spirit came into the Trinitarian debate?'

2011-11-07T08:57:00.000Z

	David is a PhD student at King's who formerly has worked with Professor Oliver Davies and now with me.

	Tuesday, November 8 · 11:30am - 1:00pm

King's College London, Strand, Chesham Building, Room 2E

Linkedin spam attack

2011-11-07T08:44:00.000Z

I was already wondering over the past weeks about the increased number of Linkedin invitations by colleagues with whom I was already communicating, now I know. By ignoring and clicking off one of these invitations, I must have pressed the wrong button, and, as a result, Linkedin spammed all my contacts and all my email addresses with invitations to Linkedin - which resulted in me writing numerous apologies, emails ...
Again, sorry, to everybody who has received an unsolicited invitation. I can only recommend, NOT to use Linkedin after this experience.

Christ’s Resurrection in Nicola Spanu, review: Early Christianity and the Making of the New Testament by Markus Vinzent

2011-10-27T17:21:00.008+01:00

I have to say that I have really enjoyed reading this book. In particular I have appreciated the author’s effort to locate the making of the New Testament inside the context of the debates held by different school masters and their pupils on the crucial points of the nature of the Christian religion. In my book Plotinus, Ennead II 9 [33] ‘Against the Gnostics’ – a Commentary (forthcoming, 2011/2012) I have made the effort to do the same thing, by showing that Plotinus's philosophy sprung from the debates that followed his lectures. The Enneads themselves are nothing but lecture notes systematized by Porphyry after Plotinus's death.

With regard to the constitution of the canon of the four Gospels, I wonder whether Justin and his pupils might have had a role in such an enterprise. I think of Justin because he was a contemporary of Marcion and, like him, an esteemed teacher who founded his own school in Rome, where Prof. Vinzent supposes that the canon of the four Gospels was established. It is evident that only someone with a strong philosophical and religious education could have started such a difficult enterprise and Justin possessed these requisites.

With regard to Prof. Vinzent’s interpretation of the theme of Christ's Resurrection in early Christian authors, honestly it puzzles me the way in which he and the other scholars he quotes attempt to demonstrate the decreasing importance of the Resurrection of Christ after Paul on the basis of the fact that this concept, though sometimes present in post-Pauline Christian literature, does not possess in it the same centrality as in the authentic Pauline letters. With regard to 1Clement, for example, Prof. Vinzent quotes Aland's position, according to whom 1Clement's conception of Christ as ‘the firstfruit, when God raised Him from the dead’ (1Clem. 24:1) is a ‘depressive’, ‘almost marginal mention of the Resurrection of Christ’. The reason of my perplexity is that, given the non-systematic nature of most of the literature we have (which was the expression of constant dialogue and interaction between opposite views), the fact that a certain theme can be objectively marginal (as in the case of Christ's Resurrection in 1Clement) must not necessarily imply that this theme is de facto marginal and irrelevant for the author of the text considered, who can simply have decided to give priority to other concepts instead of those which we, from our point of view, suppose that he should have treated more deeply.

For example, it strikes me the fact that such a fundamental concept as that of the Son as image of the Father's substance (see Hebrews 1:3) is not further developed by the author of this epistle, although its importance was, I think, fundamental for Christians of the first two centuries, because it concerned the very nature of the Son of God. On the other hand, if we supposed that this idea was irrelevant for Christians of the 1^st and 2^nd century, it would be very difficult to explain why the author of the epistle gave this theme such a prominence by introducing it right at the beginning of the epistle.

I think that in case my criticism were correct, it would not at all put at risk the general structure of Prof. Vinzent’s thesis, because the centrality that Christ's resurrection undoubtedly has in Marcion could well be the final result of decades of academic confrontation on this theme (which in this case would have been central for Christians even before him). With Marcion the debate on Christ's Resurrection would have simply reached a further (and crucial) stage of its development.

I have found very interesting Prof. Vinzent’s reconstruction of the debate around the true nature of Christ’s body, which for Tertullian is neither that of a demon nor that of a ghost. I think that some conceptions developed by Porphyry on the condition of the souls of the deceased could be relevant for this topic. In the lost treatise On the Styx (which we possess only in a few fragments preserved by Stobaeus) Porphyry says that the souls of the unburied retain a ‘reflected image’, an εἴδωλον, of their physical body and of the clothes they wore at the moment of death (ὃτι δ΄οἱ ἄταφοι ἔξω τοῦ ποταμοῦ διατρίβουσιν εἴδωλον φέροντες τοῦ σώματος καὶ τῶν ἀμφιεσμάτων τοῦ σώματος, δηλοῖ τὰ τοιαῦτα.) (See Porphyry, Περὶ Στυγός in: Stob. II. 1. 32. [II. 14. 9-15 3. Wachsm.], 92-94). All souls possess an εἴδωλον of their physical body but the souls of the unburied and of those who have gravely sinned during their earthly life are punished by retaining the memory of their sinful acts, which they are forced to relive until they are judged worthy of entering the Acheron, where they are granted oblivion of their earthly experience (ibid., 27-47).

In the sentence no. 29 of his Sententiae ad intelligibilia ducentes Porphyry describes the descent of the soul through the heavenly spheres, from which it receives a pneumatic body. During its life, the soul's actions leave an imprint on this pneumatic body that becomes an εἴδωλον, an ‘image’ of the soul’s physical body, which does not abandon the soul even in Hades. (See Porphyry, Sententiae ad intelligibilia ducentes, ed. E. Lamberz, [Teubner, 1975]) Other works by Porphyry which could be interesting are De Regressu Animae 290F 2-5, p. 238 Smith ₌ Augustine, De civit. dei, X. 9. (the fragments of the De Regressu Animae have been collected by J. Bidez, Vie De Porphyre [Gand, 1913]); Ad Gaurum VI. 1. p. 42 5-11 Kalb; De Abstinentia II. 39. 1.

This doctrine was endorsed by Christian authors as well. Synesius for example writes: ‘This psychic pneuma, which famous men have called pneumatic soul, can become either a god or a multiform daemon or a ghost (εἴδωλον) and in this one the soul suffers punishments’ (Τό γέ τοι πνεῦμα τοῦτο τὸ ψυχικόν, ὃ καὶ πνευματικὴν ψυχὴν προσηγόρευσαν οἱ εὐδαίμονες, καὶ θεὸς καὶ δαίμων παντοδαπὸς καὶ εἴδωλον γίνεται, καὶ τὰς ποινὰς ἐν τούτῳ τίνει ψυχή). (See id., De insomniis. 7. 2.)

I have thought it useful to cite these conceptions because it seems to me that they are in tune with the Christian debate around the nature of Christ's resurrected body as demonstrated by the fact that Synesius, a Christian bishop (although later than Marcion), wrote about them. Maybe Tertullian knew about these ideas on the afterlife, later on referred to by Porphyry and Synesius (but they must have certainly been developed before them) and stressed the material nature of Christ's body in order to differentiate it from the pneumatic body or εἴδωλον of the deceased and daemons. On the contrary, Marcion's position seems to be more in line with Porphyry's, who in the same sentence 29 says that on the occasion of their descent on earth the most perfect souls (to which Christ’s soul could be associated) receive a pneumatic body of ethereal nature from the stars, while more imperfect souls receive their pneumatic body from inferior natures such as, in hierarchical order, the sun, the moon and finally the humid vapours.

I am sure that Prof. Vinzent’s book will play a fundamental role in fostering the scholarly and non-scholarly debate about such an important theme as Christ’s Resurrection and the making of the New Testament and constitute the solid ground on which further studies will follow.