A sample of what appears in the Real Messiah order it hereThanks to a paper I am now writing on the Throne of St. Mark I have stumbled upon an important piece of information. The traditional scholarly mindset can't get around their inherited assumptions about the Church being founded on the authority of St. Peter. Yes, they would acknowledge, the Church Fathers speak of various 'heresies' existing contemporaneously with the Catholic Church. Yet they also go along with the underlying assumptions in these reports that these 'heretical' communities were little more than a bunch of 'freaks' who no one need to take too seriously.
Irenaeus and his successors warn the presbytery against these variant forms of Christianity while at the same time making them seem as ridiculous as possible.
To this end these academics who rely upon these ancient Catholic authorities naturally fall into the trap of simply taking their word at face value that no other form of early Christianity had any substance. These traditions were founded on men like 'Marcion,' 'Valentinus' and other essentially secondary sources. They are always portrayed as being removed from individuals who actually saw and heard Jesus.
I can't believe that scholars can even imagine such a ridiculous situation. I mean one would expect that even if someone was making up a tradition about Jesus they would have put in the mouth of an actual eyewitness. Even the texts of the Catholic Church - i.e. the gospel of Luke for example - make reference to this 'eyewitness' reporting. How could it be imagined that the heretics even if they are assumed to have been 'faking it' didn't do the exact same thing?
To this end, when we come across the ultimate survival of a rival Christian tradition from Alexandria which claims that Mark was of a status equal to or greater than Peter academics have to find a way to dismiss it as a way of getting back to the 'safety' of a one tradition universe. It is always about 'absolute' truth. There is no relativity here.
The unconscious argument essentially goes something like this. God is absolutely true and good THEREFORE there can only be an absolute truth about his religion. There can't have been any corruption of his doctrine because this would imply weakness on the part of God as the original transmitter of that message.
Even when these arguments aren't made explicit they lurk somewhere in the depths of the actual dismissal of the Coptic tradition and its traditional emphasis of the authority of St. Mark. Yes to be certain the word Copt was originally intended to signify that it was the 'Egyptian' faith, the tradition of native born Egyptians as opposed to the Greek 'Melkite' faith associated with Constantinople in the sixth and seventh centuries. Yet the development of this faith must have went back many more centuries than that.
I have already noted that Clement and Origen seem to have been odds with the official Catholic faith of Irenaeus. Yes to be certain they accepted the canon. However it is equally clear that this canon was imposed on them. There is no way to avoid the fact that Demetrius was an outsider to this tradition and came as an enforcer of a foreign doctrine that was secretly resisted by men such as these. Clement and Origen were attached to Mark - my argument would go - while Irenaeus and Demetrius were of Peter.
Of course for scholars this seemed over-simplistic and worse yet there seems to be little proof that this 'alternative tradition of Mark' ever existed before the establishment of the Coptic faith. Yes, there is the Letter to Theodore - but isn't this a 'disputed' epistle? I needn't go into the question of whether Origen 'hid' his heresy. It is acknowledged that he was eventually anathematized for holding heretical views. His existing texts were censored. And look at the anti-Petrine argument in large parts of his Commentary on Matthew.
Yet the elusive thing has always been finding 'the cult of Mark' as the Copts present it to us now before the sixth or seventh centuries. I think I have found it in the example of Alexandria's most famous heretic - Arius.
