Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
Rene Salm is currently doing a series of exploratory posts on that early “heretic” Marcion and asking what was the nature of his gospel. We tend to think of a gospel as a written story of Jesus, as in our four New Testament gospels, but the word has often been used in its other sense … Continue reading “What was Marcion’s gospel all about?”
Let me be transparent from the outset: the authors of the Gospels did not imitate Vergil’s Latin epic. . . . [Rather] the Evangelist was aware of the Aeneid and shaped his book to rival it. The affinities between Luke and Vergil thus pertain to genre or, better, to narrative structure and development, not to imitations … Continue reading “Acts and Virgil’s Aeneid: comparison and influence”
I very much doubt that it is possible to tell the gender of an author simply from reading the author’s works. (Surely there are too many times women authors have fooled reading publics with male pen-names and male authors of romance are also on record as having fooled even literary judges with female pseudonyms.) But … Continue reading “Women in Acts (An Acts Seminar Perspective)”
The Acts Seminar was a Westar Institute sequel to the Jesus Seminar. It met between March 2000 and March 2011. It was charged with the task to develop methods for determining the reliability of Acts and produce a comprehensive guide to Acts as history. (Acts and Christian Beginnings: The Acts Seminar Report, p. 1) The … Continue reading “Top Ten Findings of the Acts Seminar”
Matthias Klinghardt responded to Mark Goodacre’s 2002 book, The Case Against Q, with an article proposing a Marcionite solution to the Synoptic Problem: “The Marcionite Gospel and the Synoptic Problem: A New Suggestion” published in Novum Testamentum, 2008. For those of us who like to be reminded, here are the traditional theories on the Synoptic … Continue reading ““The Marcionite Gospel and the Synoptic Problem: A New Suggestion””
Recently, Robert Bumbalough asked, “. . . What of the style and grammar of the Lukan prologue vs. that of the Lukan infancy narrative vs. subsequent sections? Is there evidence [that] portions stem from the same pen?” This question reminded me of a personal, informal study I undertook a short while back, comparing the word selection … Continue reading “Who Wrote That? Verbal Affinities Between the Lukan Prologue and Acts”
This post continues directly on from Ehrman Hides the Facts About Doherty’s Argument, Part 1. Here I show that Ehrman has suppressed the facts about what his own peers think in order to falsely accuse Doherty of arguing without scholarly merit. First, the passage in question, 1 Thessalonians 2:13-16 13 For this reason we also … Continue reading “Ehrman suppresses the facts while falsely accusing Doherty: Part 2”
This continues my series on Paul-Louis Couchoud‘s The Creation of Christ. Full set of posts are archived at Couchoud: Creation of Christ. The previous post was Couchoud’s discussion of view of Christ as a mystical and heavenly being according to early Christian literature, and how in the Epistle of the Hebrews we encounter the first … Continue reading “Christ Descends to Earth: Marcion’s contributions to Christianity (Couchoud continued)”
I’ll try to complete Paul-Louis Couchoud’s explanations for the second-century productions of the canonical New Testament literature starting here with his discussion of Acts. For those who enjoy the stimulation of new (even if old) ideas to spark fresh thoughts, read on. I left off my earlier series on Couchoud’s thoughts on Gospel origins with … Continue reading “Couchoud on Acts of the Apostles”
Marcion was one of the favourite heretics of the second century that “proto-orthodox” Church Fathers like Justin, Irenaeus and Tertullian loved to hate. His “heresy” posed a serious rival to other forms of Christianity, claiming followers from Syria and across Asia Minor (the main base) through to Italy and North Africa. The distinctive marks of … Continue reading “Marcion’s rules for “Mutilating” the Gospel of Luke”
The Gospel of Luke relied heavily on the Gospel of Mark but omits everything in Mark that lies between the miracle of feeding the 5000 to Peter’s acknowledgment that Jesus was the Christ. That is, after following much of Mark closely, Luke omits: Jesus walking on the sea of Galilee Healing many at Gennesarat Controversy … Continue reading “Viewing Luke’s “Great Omission” in a context of Marcionite controversy”
Broken links fixed — 25th November 2009 The Infancy Narratives of Luke, the first 2 chapters of this gospel, are well integrated into the larger narrative of the rest of Luke and Acts (Tannehill). But that does not preclude the possibility that they were added later to an original Luke, with the final redactor reworking … Continue reading “Luke’s Infancy Narratives (Luke 1:5-2:52) as an integrated response to Marcionism”
The early church fathers accused Marcion of mutilating the canonical gospel of Luke. But there are problems with accepting this charge, as discussed in a previous post. Tyson in Marcion and Luke-Acts resurrects the hypothesis that both Marcion and the author of canonical Luke used another text no longer surviving and which he calls, after … Continue reading ““Discovering” an original gospel behind canonical Luke and the gospel of Marcion”
Continuing notes from reading of Tyson’s Marcion and Luke-Acts. . . . After discussing the shifting directions of the scholarly debates over Paul’s characterization in Acts vis a vis the Paul we find in the epistles, Tyson asks if a more definitive answer is to be found to the question of whether the Paul of … Continue reading “Dating the Book of Acts: Characterization of Paul”