Priority of the Gospel of Marcion
Theory Information | |
---|---|
Order | Marcion John, Matt, Mark Luke |
Additional Sources | Gospel of Marcion |
Theory History | |
Proponents | Markus Vinzent, Matthias Klinghardt |
Opponents | Christopher Hays |
Some scholars believe the hypothesis of the chronological priority of the
.A contemporary proponent of this hypothesis is Matthias Klinghardt.
Context
Marcion of Sinope (c. 85 – c. 160) is the founder of a Christian movement called Marcionism. Marcion is regarded by numerous scholars as having produced the first New Testament canon. He also wrote a gospel, or adopted a preexisting one, called the Evangelion, now commonly called the Gospel of Marcion.[1][2][3][4][5]
Church Fathers say Marcion wrote the gospel of Marcion himself, and that the gospel of Marcion is a revision of the gospel of Luke with some passages expunged from it to fit Marcion's theology; this hypothesis on the relationship between the gospels of Marcion and of Luke is called the patristic hypothesis. However, this is not the only hypothesis. Some argue that the gospel of Marcion precedes the gospel of Luke and that the gospel of Luke is a revision of the Gospel of Marcion (Schwegler hypothesis). Others argue that the gospel of Marcion and the gospel of Luke are two independent versions of a common source, and that the gospel of Marcion is an unaltered version of this source or is more faithful to this source than the gospel of Luke is (Semler hypothesis).[3] Others go further and consider that the Gospel of Marcion was the very first gospel ever produced, preceding all others including the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John[4][5] (Marcion hypothesis).
"[T]here has been a long line of scholars" who, against what the Church Fathers said, claimed "that our canonical Luke forms an enlarged version of a '
Gospel of Marcion as the first of all gospels
In his 2013 book, The First New Testament: Marcion's Scriptural Canon,
In his 2014 book Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels,
In his 2015 book, Matthias Klinghardt changed his mind comparing to his 2008 opinion. In a 2008 article he said that Marcion's gospel was based on the Gospel of Mark, that the Gospel of Matthew was an expansion of the Gospel of Mark with reference to the Gospel of Marcion, and that the Gospel of Luke was an expansion of the Gospel of Marcion with reference to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.[12]: 21–22, 26 In his 2015 book, Klinghardt shares the same opinion as BeDuhn and Vinzent on the priority and influence of the Gospel of Marcion, as well as on its adoption by Marcion.[13][9] He considers that the Gospel of Marcion preceded and influenced the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).[13] Klinghardt and BeDuhn reaffirmed their opinions in two 2017 articles.[14]
The Marcion priority also implies a model of the late dating of the New Testament Gospels to the 2nd century – a thesis that goes back to
Criticism
Christopher Hays contends that Klinghardt's 2006 case makes a number of philological errors, misunderstands the nature of how Marcion is contended to have redacted Luke, and offers an inconsistent case on how he views that Luke had redacted Marcion. For example, while one argument for Marcionite priority over Luke rests on the claim that it is unlikely that Marcion deleted significant portions of Luke rather than Luke having expanded significant portions of Marcion, Hays holds that Marcion also deleted significant portions of Paul's letters to create his Apostolikon. Thus, Hays sees it as special pleading to acknowledge that Marcion edited down Paul and to also hold that Marcion did not edit down Luke.[17] In addition, Moll says that all surviving sources say that Marcion is the one who edited Luke, and therefore the burden of proof is on advocates of Marcionite priority to provide the counter-argument.[6]
Dieter Roth has responded to Markus Vinzent's thesis (that Marcion was the author of the first Gospel and that the
Notes
- OCLC 1238089165.
See also
- Farrer hypothesis
- Gospel of Marcion
- Griesbach hypothesis
- Markan priority
- Synoptic problem
- Two-source hypothesis
References
- ISBN 978-0-334-02450-7.
- ^ Price, Chris (2002). "Marcion, the Canon, the Law, and the Historical Jesus". christianorigins. Retrieved 2008-01-14.
- ^ a b BeDuhn, Jason (2013) The First New Testament: Marion's Scriptural Canon
- ^ a b Vinzent, Markus (2014) Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic gospels
- ^ ISBN 9789042943094.
- ^ ISBN 9783161515392.
- OCLC 857141226.
[S]tudy of Marcion's New Testament has generally been subservient to investigations of Marcion as a theologian and key figure in Christian history. But Marcion did not compose these texts (even if there remains the separate question of whether he edited them to some degree); he collected them from a broader existing Christian movement, and bestowed them in their collected form back to living Christian communities. As we will see, there are good reasons to question the assumption that these texts were fundamentally altered for service only to Marcionite Christians.
[...]
These points of textual evidence and historical circumstance, therefore, suggest that Marcion may not have produced a definitive edition of the Evangelion after all, but rather took up a gospel already in circulation in multiple copies that had seen varying degrees of harmonization to other gospels in their transmission up to that point in time. The process of canonizing this gospel for the Marcionite community involved simply giving it a stamp of approval, acquiring copies already in circulation, and making more copies from these multiple exemplars, so that their varying degrees of harmonization passed into the Marcionite textual tradition of the Evangelion. - OCLC 857141226.
- ^ a b Vinzent, Markus (2015). "Marcion's Gospel and the Beginnings of Early Christianity". Annali di Storia dell'esegesi. 32 (1): 55–87 – via Academia.edu.
- ISSN 1570-0720.
- ^ Vinzent, Markus (2016-11-24). "I am in the process of reading your book 'Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels' ..." Markus Vinzent's Blog. Retrieved 2020-09-05.
- JSTOR 25442581.
- ^ ISBN 978-3-7720-5549-2.
- ^ Gallagher, Ed (2017-03-14). "Marcion's Gospel and the New Testament". Our Beans. Retrieved 2020-08-01.
- ISBN 3-7278-1075-0(Univ.-Verl.) (= Novum testamentum et orbis antiquus 31).
- ISBN 978-3-7720-8640-3.
- S2CID 170757217.
- OCLC 892620587.
- ^ "Roth on Reading the Sources for Marcion". Larry Hurtado's Blog. 2015-03-25. Retrieved 2021-04-08.
- ISSN 1613-009X.
Further reading
- BeDuhn, Jason (2013) The First New Testament: Marion's Scriptural Canon
- BeDuhn, Jason (2015) "The New Marcion: Rethinking The Arch-Heretic". Forum. 3 (Fall 2015): 163–179.
- Farrin, Cassandra J. (2013). "Marcion: Forgotten "Father" and Inventor of the New Testament". Westar Institute. Retrieved 2020-09-05.
- Guignard, Christophe (2013). "Marcion et les Évangiles canoniques. À propos d'un livre récent". Études théologiques et religieuses (in French). 88 (3): 347–363. – via Cairn.info.
- Klinghart, Matthias (2015) Das älteste Evangelium und die Entstehung der kanonischen Evangelien, Francke A. Verlag (in German); translated in English as The Oldest Gospel and the Formation of the Canonical Gospels. Peeters Publishers. 2021. ISBN 9789042943094.
- Klinghardt, Matthias (2018), The Oldest gospel: Klinghardt Edition, Quiet Waters Publications ISBN 978-1931475716
- Vinzent, Markus (2014) Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels, Studia Patristica, Peeters.
- Vinzent, Markus (2015), Marcion's gospel and the Beginnings of Christianity
- "Quaestiones Disputatae". New Testament Studies. 63 (2): 318–334. April 2017. Retrieved 2020-08-01 – via Cambridge Core.