Thursday, July 11, 2024

Laughableness about putting Marcion as the First Gospeller

 I may not quite be done with responding to stupidity at r/AcademicBiblical, as the Marcion fellation continues there.

A post there last month had a commenter link to Markus Vinzent's "Marcion's Gospel and the Beginnings of Early Christianity."

I find three problems in the first 10 or so pages..

One, like some other materials I've seen posted there, and not all Marcion-related, Vinzent strawmans on what he says others have proposed for dating of New Testament books.

I myself have, re the canonical Gospels, considered Luke to be written at the end of the first century. Yes, that is still first century, but just barely, and I'm open to a few years later than that. John I have always dated second century, and don't think it reached anything even close to its current form until no earlier than 125 CE.

Other books of the New Testament? Does anybody believe the Pastorals or Second Peter, at a minimum, are second century? I think they are, that Jude also presumably is, that Acts is, and that the three Johannines may be.

So, strawmanning, Prof. Vinzent.

Second, even if Marcion DID write first, you STILL have to solve the Synoptic Problem, and Marcionite Priority in and of itself does nothing to do that.

Third, the degree of credence that Vinzent gives to Papias' credibility looks laughable. That's especially when, on the other hand, he pretty flatly rejects Irenaeus' take on Marcion.

That said, per his Wiki page, Vinzent has plenty of other ideas which it would be charitable to only call them "idiosyncratic." Per his strawmanning above, I'm not inclined to be charitable, so I'll call them "thrown off" instead. Further explication of Marcionite Priority has him not explaining why Mark doesn't have birth and resurrection narratives, for example, and also why it doesn't show the "expansiveness" that younger gospels do in general vs older ones.

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I last wrote about this just a few months ago; I think that Pytine/Poutine was one of the instigators a few days ago, like he was then.

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