Monday, August 18, 2008
the Marcionites didn't identify 'Paul' as 'Paul'
A sample of what appears in the Real Messiah order it here
Everyone in scholarship just assumes that Paul's name was 'Paul.' After all you can count the number of academics who think that the Catholic faith is essentially a false tradition on one hand. So it is that when they run across evidence in the Church Fathers which points to the fact that the Marcionites used our 'Pauline canon' they simply take for granted that our inherited assumptions about this apostle remained consistent in this 'heretical' tradition. This assumption is very questionable for various reasons which include:
1. The Marcionite canon looked very different than ours.
2. Many letters had different titles and where understood to be addressed to very different communities in the Roman Empire (our Epistle to the Ephesians was identified as the Epistle to the Laodiceans).
3. Whole sections of text were 'missing' from the various texts in Marcionite canon.
4. The Marcionite gospel was understood to have been written by the apostle we call Paul but was not attributed to someone named 'Paul.' In other words it wasn't called 'the Gospel of Paul.' This was identification explicitly denied by the Marcionites.
5. The Marcionite claimed in fact that their gospel was written by someone called 'Marcus.'
For all of these reasons and those which will follow in this post I am quite certain that the actual name of the apostle 'Paul' among the Marcionites was 'Marcion' or indeed 'Marcus' (a nickname which is derived from Marcus). The proofs for this assertion will follow.
Everyone in scholarship just assumes that Paul's name was 'Paul.' After all you can count the number of academics who think that the Catholic faith is essentially a false tradition on one hand. So it is that when they run across evidence in the Church Fathers which points to the fact that the Marcionites used our 'Pauline canon' they simply take for granted that our inherited assumptions about this apostle remained consistent in this 'heretical' tradition. This assumption is very questionable for various reasons which include:
1. The Marcionite canon looked very different than ours.
2. Many letters had different titles and where understood to be addressed to very different communities in the Roman Empire (our Epistle to the Ephesians was identified as the Epistle to the Laodiceans).
3. Whole sections of text were 'missing' from the various texts in Marcionite canon.
4. The Marcionite gospel was understood to have been written by the apostle we call Paul but was not attributed to someone named 'Paul.' In other words it wasn't called 'the Gospel of Paul.' This was identification explicitly denied by the Marcionites.
5. The Marcionite claimed in fact that their gospel was written by someone called 'Marcus.'
For all of these reasons and those which will follow in this post I am quite certain that the actual name of the apostle 'Paul' among the Marcionites was 'Marcion' or indeed 'Marcus' (a nickname which is derived from Marcus). The proofs for this assertion will follow.
Email stephan.h.huller@gmail.com with comments or questions.