Markus Vinzent's Blog

Sunday 30 November 2014

The Gospel's biographical and historical nature vs the Gospels as allegories


Dear Giuseppe,

as with your other questions and doubts, you always hit an important problem which allows me to develop things a bit further.

With regard to your observation that Mark is allegorical, and even more so is Matthew (although I would need to understand which parts you find allegorical, as there are certainly sections which are and others which are less), here is how I see it:

As Luke is the closest copy of Marcion’s Gospel, and Marcion’s Gospel is biographical in its basic structure (although it omits the birth and youth of its protagonist) – very similar to the geo- and historiographical structure of Marcion’s collection of Paul’s letters –, it is no surprise that Luke like Marcion’s Gospel is the one that sounds most biographical.

Yet, despite the straight copying of Marcion’s Gospel by Luke, Luke has altered many features of Marcion’s Gospel – by introducing a birth and youth story of Jesus, emphasising him as Lord, making the many links to his Jewish lineage and Davidian heritage and more. And yet, you are right, the biographical character it preserved, and even tried to strengthen through those additions. As Marcion’s biographical nature of his Gospel was antithetical, meaning that through biography and history, Marcion wanted to point out the non receptive nature of history and the incomprehensiveness of the Jewish people for the transcendent and unknown God and his Messiah, Luke counters this programme by his emphasis on history.

Mark, in contrast, deviates more in wording from Marcion’s Gospel, yet, he chooses a different approach to counter Marcion’s Gospel by, like Luke, adopting certain features, others than Luke. For Mark, the Gospel of Marcion disentangled Jesus from the Prophets, hence, Mark starts with making this link. He had less issue with Marcion’s criticism of history, on the contrary, Mark even emphasises the hidden and mysterious character of Jesus – therefore, he even pushes Marcion’s message more into this direction, something you call allegorical.

Matthew in his turn, picks up Marcion’s Gospel (presumably before Luke and after Mark) and is the one who extends Marcion’s Gospel with the birth story, underlines the historicity, but not as in Marcion, to dispute history as such. Instead, he turns Marcion’s antithetical relation between Jesus and the Jews (especially the leading groups, people and institutions) into an anti-Jewish position.

Hence, if you adopt my new dating of Mcn being first (but note – I am giving up the idea of straight dependencies of the Gospels, as I see only Mcn’s draft being the first Gospel, while his published version with the Antitheses has clearly known and read the canonical Gospels), I would rather think that we don’t see a straight move, but that a history critical historical biography (Mcn) created different responses, more allegorical ones (to save the mysterious – Mark, to save Jesus as heir of Israel – Matthew), and a more historical one (Luke with added Acts to also accomodate and position Marcion’s collection of Paul’s letters).

 

11 comments:

  1. With ''Marcion’s criticism of history'' you mean that:

    As Marcion’s biographical nature of his Gospel was antithetical, meaning that through biography and history, Marcion wanted to point out the non receptive nature of history and the incomprehensiveness of the Jewish people for the transcendent and unknown God and his Messiah...

    The historicity in Marcion is underlined

    ...to dispute history as such.

    This use of history to criticize the limits of the story itself, conveying deliberately an antithesis between mere, obscure human history and luminous Divine Mission of Son in it falls definitely in the area of what I would call allegory and symbol (something similar and reminiscent to the theme of Messianic Secret in Mark, where the true identity of Jesus is luminous but hidden for all time, and claims to criticism of human history, too).

    But breaking this antithesis to all benefit of history Matthew and Luke seem to want to use the same history as an anti-marcionite tool – insisting on the arrival of Jesus ''in the flesh'' – and therefore to that extent also their emphasis on history has an exquisitely theological reason, behind.

    Really impressive, logical and deep. I thank you for that.

    Giuseppe

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    1. Dear Giuseppe,
      you clearly set out what I wanted to say in my rather obscure manner. Thanks for such clarity,
      yours Markus

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  2. (I'm not sure if my above comment was posted, thus what follows in this comment may be a clone of it)

    with Marcion’s criticism of history you mean:

    As Marcion’s biographical nature of his Gospel was antithetical, meaning that through biography and history, Marcion wanted to point out the non receptive nature of history and the incomprehensiveness of the Jewish people for the transcendent and unknown God and his Messiah

    The historicity is underlined

    ...to dispute history as such

    This use of history to show the limits of history himself (and of creation of just god), by conveying an antithesis between an obscure, doomed human history and the luminous Divine Mission of Son in it (something partially similar and reminiscent to the topic of Messianic Secret in Mark, where the true identity of Jesus, luminous but hidden to eyes, claims to similar criticism of human history, too), falls definitely in what I would call the area of allegory and symbol.

    But Matthew and Luke show as well as Marcion an use of history for exclusively theological reasons: their emphasis on history and continuity with previous Jew history, genealogies & traditions is meant polemically to insist on the historicity of Jesus ''on the flesh'' against the docetism of Marcion.

    Very impressive, logical and deep. Thank you for that.

    Mark can be considered a first timide attempt to coopt the same topics in Mcn but using them in a proto-orthodox orientation. What I always find ''not orthodox'' in Mark is maybe his excessive emphasis on correct knowledge: the idea that only some people can recognize the Son, unlike others. But for Marcion the knowledge of Son is a gift coming totally from the same Son: alone the men are not able to acquire that salvific knowledge. Introducing the possibility of knowledge acquired from men by themselves, I wonder if Mark is opening indirectly the way to later gnosticism. Can be this another reason to the need of a more ''correct'' proto-orthodox Gospel (precisely: Matthew) to change the points of Marcion and Mark?

    Thanks,
    Giuseppe

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    1. worth while idea on Mark; moreover, one might follow up your idea of 'correction' or 're-writing', what Marcion calls 'aemulatio'

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  3. Another doubt, another question.

    According to the old dating (with Mark first), the more convincing (for me) view of the first Gospel, Mark, is that in it Jesus is predominantly a literary tool functioning as a symbol of spiritual Israel that dies in 70 C.E. and rises in the form of a Hellenized and de-tribalized Judaic offshoot, Christianity.

    In story time an account is given of Jesus’ mission and tragic death on a Roman cross circa 30 C.E., but Mark wove the national tragedy of 70 C.E. in real time into his structural design for his revised post-70 passion story. Its purpose was to write a theodicy concerning the crucifixion and the trauma of 70.

    The motivation for Mark included the need, somehow, to survive the impending cultural destruction of the Jews. It was the Jews (not, or not only, the single man Jesus), who were crucified - literally, and in largee numbers. The Jesus of Mark then is, first of all, a midrashic creation by a culture under siege, meant to embody and idealize that culture, and to stand for the holy and immortal one who triumphs in and through his own persecution and death.

    For example, The epilogue is 15.42 – 16.8. It consists of (a) the vain attempt to bury the “body of Jesus” and (b) the women’s vision of the opened tomb. Thus a window to the future is opened in which Jesus’ victory over death and his mission to Israel and the nations is prophesied. The women heard in a frightening vision the angel’s message. Jesus had been raised, he was “not here” (in Zion) but was going before his disciples into the Galilee of the nations; “there” they would see him. They were terrified for in their vision for they saw the imminent devastation of Zion, just as the women did in LXX Isaiah 32.9ff.; 33.14. The “here – there” contrast was taken from Isa22.15, 18, but with an inverted application. The wicked Shebna was denounced by the prophet “here” (in the temple); he would be hurled “there” (into exile).

    The fear and their silence of the women after this vision of the future, form the climax of the messianic secret. The secret would be revealed in real time in the tragedy of 70 (!) negatively and positively. It is a theodicy; negatively: they were seeing the catastrophe of 70 and run away in bewilderment; positively: they were to understand that even that disaster was necessary (cf. 13.10). The way to the Gentiles was now opened and the risen Christ would go before them.

    Now, given this premise, the later Gospels have only converted this Jesus of Mark in a mouthpiece and demonstration for their different theological perspectives.

    If I assume your new dating with Mcn first, I do not run the risk of forgetting, in Mcn, this particular aspect of Jesus as an allegory of the trauma of 70, to see in Jesus of Mcn especially and first of all the mere exponent of the theology of Marcion? The risk would be that of ignoring excessively the link between a concrete historical fact - the threatened extinction of Judaism in 70 C.E. - with the genesis of first Gospel.

    Very thanks for any reply,

    Cordially,
    Giuseppe

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    1. Dear Giuseppe,
      another of your intriguing set of thoughts with which I love to engage:
      Without repeating the first part, let me pick up your last paragraph: “If I assume your new dating with Mcn first, I do not run the risk of forgetting, in Mcn, this particular aspect of Jesus as an allegory of the trauma of 70, to see in Jesus of Mcn especially and first of all the mere exponent of the theology of Marcion? The risk would be that of ignoring excessively the link between a concrete historical fact - the threatened extinction of Judaism in 70 C.E. - with the genesis of first Gospel.”
      If I understand you correctly, you will not run the risk of the social relevance, on the contrary, I do not see Mcn in the first instance as a theological tract (it is this, too), but an immediate (and limited) response of Marcion to the disaster of the years 132-135 AD. While 70AD was certainly traumatic too, we are somehow blinded by the fact that with the writings of Josephus particularly, we know so much details about the first war against the Romans, while we have comparatively little about the last war, and yet, from what we know, after 70AD there was still hope amongst Jews for the temple to be rebuilt and the nation to be restored. True, Jerusalem, and especially the temple mountain was deserted, but as we can see over the next decades up to Bar Kokhba, Jews had not given up to fight for a new beginning. The Bar Kokhba war, then, was incomparably more bloody and more devastating than the first, it was deeply divisive for the Jewish communities, it was the worst war Romans had ever fought, and for the first time, the Emperor did not declare himself and his soldiers to be ok in senate, after the war had ended. If we follow Justin, then Bar Kokhba had even killed Christians, apparently because he had still thought they should have supported his case. For the time after 135AD, in my eyes, those apocalyptic narratives about the war against Jerusalem are better placed than for the time after 70AD. Hence, there are no signs for an extinction of Judaism in 70 AD, while there were severe changes for Jewish communities after 135AD. For a very long time, Jews were not allowed to go back to Jerusalem, except once a year, only around that time had the Romans started to convert Jerusalem into Aelia Capitolina with the temple mounting becoming a Roman sacred space. To such events, in my eyes, Marcion’s Gospel and the subsequent Gospel tradition is a reaction.

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  4. The fathers of the Church took the fall of the Temple and the Wars as another proof of the Christian truth (and a divine punishment for the 'deicide' Jews). Maybe this can be another subtle difference between Mcn and later gospels: the Mcn’s emphasis on the soteriological significance of the crucifixion of Jesus can only be explained with reference to trauma of Bar Kochba War - Marcion mirrored so what had happened to many Jews during the last siege of Jerusalem, because the concrete risk was that what had dramatically happened threatened to refute the glad message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ -, while in other Gospels the allusion to War was seen only as a further proof of divine anger already prophesied in Scripture against the Jewish people (triggering as a side effect the rise of anti-Judaism).

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  5. I agree with you on this - of course, as another reader of the blog rightly insisted: 'I do believe we cannot stress the traumatic event of the destruction of the Temple enough. Yes, there might have been hope to one day rebuild it (although maybe this hope might have only been cherished by few since this was the second time the Temple had been destroyed: a bad omen? cf much later when Julian decides to rebuild the Temple and then dies), but it is not so much the option of rebuilding which is at stake here, but rather the consequences of the destruction. The destruction of the Temple meant that the Jews were not able to fulfill God's commandments anymore since there was no Temple to sacrifice. Not being able to fulfill this mitzvah has severe implications and touches upon the essence and existence of Judaism. In order to better understand the severity of the destruction it could maybe best be compared to the Shoa (cf. Martin Goodman). Maybe (and this is me speculating) the events that would follow - i.e. the Bar Kokhba revolt and the Emperor's reaction to it even to the renaming of the land as 'Palestine' after the Jews' arch enemy the Philistines - could even be interpreted as results of a "failure" (rather inability because of destruction) to fulfill that central (essential, existential?) commandment?'
    Again - I agree, highlighting the 132-135 war is not downplaying the traumatic events of the late 60th. Looking at the years after 70, we notice, however, that people like Josephus try to make sense of this war, right in the opening still presents himself as a 'priest', and so does he in his autobiography written in the times of Domitian. Yet, lots more thinking needs to go into this.

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  6. Harnack, in his Marcion — The Gospel of the Alien God, says this:

    … for his purifications of the text—and this is usually overlooked—he [Marcion] neither could claim nor did claim absolute certainty. But this is evident also from the history of his text; his pupils constantly made alterations in the text—sometimes more radical than his own, sometimes more conservative—perhaps under his very eyes, but certainly after his death. We are told this most definitely by Celsus, Tertullian, and Origen, and also by Ephraem, and we possess examples of it. Thus the Marcionite church did not receive from its master the gospel and the ten letters of Paul with the instruction to revere the re-established text as a ‘noli me tangere’ [do not touch], but the master gave to them the liberty, indeed perhaps left behind him the obligation, to continue the work of establishing the correct text.
    (p. 30)

    Some scholars derive from these words the possibility that Marcion even didn't write no Gospel!

    But this scenario is expected because, as you rightly write in your book,

    The Gospel themselves (Marcion's, Justin memoranda and potentially our later canonical ones), however, are only just about to become 'proof'-texts, and still lack the (apostolic) authority they will gain only with Irenaeus.
    (Marcion and the Dating of Synoptic Gospels, p. 46)

    And yet, you write that:

    ...Marcion strongly believed in his Gospel as the expression of the truth itself, as revealed and laid down by Paul alone...
    (p. 78)

    This apparent contraddiction may be resolved supposing that Marcion represented in some way the 'domestication' of previous anarchic Christian tendencies ('anarchic' because based on different traditions and enthusiastic revelations of apostles like Paul).

    Marcion may represent the first step, the first move toward nascent Orthodoxy. This represents a disillusionment, a decline from a period of initial sectarian enthusiasm, hints of spiritual decline, the loss of the first love and fervency.

    Marcion taught his Gospel openly, not as a privately held secret that would be known only to a few chosen ones. His intent was to found a public institution. By contrast, Valentinians, Simonians and others existed as secret groups within Proto-Orthodox congregations.

    I wonder if in this attempt to institutionalize a movement (otherwise anarchic) Marcion can be compared to Paul, with the difference that Paul failed during the process, whereas in the case of Marcion his Proto-Orthodox opponents succeeed for him.

    Giuseppe

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  7. Dear Giuseppe,
    this is precisely what I think, too. Marcion is not the rebel, as he is being portrayed later in time, but another step in nascent orthodoxy. Although he is not thinking of his Gospel or the Pauline letters as benchmark literature (he only complaints about the linking of them with und integration into the Jewish writings), the fact itself that he is writing down the oracles of the Lord, combining them with narrative frames and, like Paul's letters, to bring them in a biographical and geographical order makes him the trigger of one of the most powerful changes in post-Bar Kokhba Judaism for what becomes 'Christianity'. What at the time was certainly a marginal event for Judaism overall and a minimal 'falling over of a flower sack in China' for Rome, has become an important moment in the history of Christianity. I would even call anything prior to the end of the Bar Kokhba war 'anarchic' looked through the glasses of Christianity. Marcion like Paul were strong minds, Paul, I would not think, had failed, but it took some time, until his congenial (and likewise problematic) reader Marcion picked him up and provided fellow Jews with this powerful literature. As a result they were given the basis for identifying themselves with the shame name 'Christian' and to form a 'true Israel' - not as Marcion wanted in antithesis and otherwise unrelated to Judaism - at the expense of Judaism.

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  8. Hi prof Vinzent,

    I am very grateful for your view on Mark when you write:

    Mark even emphasises the hidden and mysterious character of Jesus – therefore, he even pushes Marcion’s message more into this direction, something you call allegorical.

    Mark goes beyond Paul, specifically in areas where – in my view – he is dependent on Marcion...

    Seeing how Mark is deeply indebted to Paul's letters much more than it is Mcn, arises really the suspect that Mark had insisted in his paulinizing Jesus beyond measure (I would define it almost an obsession, and therefore a deliberate, radical ''Reductio ad Paulum'') for the clear purpose to claim for itself the legacy of the Apostle Paul and remove it from Marcion. Paulinizing Jesus more than did Marcion, to the eyes of Mark, seems almost first of all a deliberate way to convince himself, ''Mark'', that yes, the apostle Paul was truly the legitimate precursor of the Gospel of Mark, and not of the Gospel of Marcion.

    Only in this way I could be able to explain the almost obsessive way with which Mark reduces almost every time his Jesus to an action, a doctrine or a passing thought made earlier by Paul in his letters. If the markan Jesus is extremely repetitive in his doing always an action that alludes allegorically to Paul, then Paul himself in turn becomes more firmly anchored in the field of Mark in opposition to that of Marcion.

    If this ''Reductio ad Paulum'' operated by Mark is not seen as a reaction to Marcion (as a way to contend the legacy of Paul with the ''wolf of Pontus'' Marcion), then scholars will find themselves in trouble in the vain attempt to explain it otherwise.

    Very Thanks and the best for your future work on Marcion,

    Giuseppe

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