Boid on Dating Marqe to the second century or earlier

I received this letter from my best friend in the whole, wide world:

I see I wrote in my haste that the explicit repudiation of a recent unnamed heresy was in the hymns by Mårqe. That was a slip. It is in the little Durrån collection. What I should have said was that the Durrån (Elders) collection is made up of hymns by Mårqe which have been rewritten (or perhaps just expanded). I can’t prove that at the moment. I think the collections by Ṭîṭe (Titus) and Ninnå (Johnny) are from Mårqe as well. The question then is why these collections were excerpted from the corpus. Well, the ones labelled Mårqe can equally well be considered an excerpt.

Second question. WHY WAS THERE ANY NEED FOR NEW HYMNS BASIC TO THE ORDER OF SERVICE AFTER THE TIME OF MǠ RQE? Does that mean some hymns were dropped? Why? When?

I think the Durran (Elders) collection is the manifesto of the Dositheans, not at their start, but in the early 2nd c. AD. I don’t know why this was needed then. I don’t think they are rejecting Dositheanism. I think they were rejecting their own accommodation with another party, and re-defining their mission, using OLD hymns but with additions.. I also think the Dustân collection is what the name indicates

Please be advised of this when reading the following post.

(1) Cite the article by Kippenberg, Gebetbuch etc. Add that aside from the evidence for an early date, Kippenberg shows that the evidence for a late date evaporates when you look at it and see that it is no more than the setting of fictitious (and tedious and silly) stories, which Abu ‘l-Fateh. tells the reader he doesn’t believe and would have preferred to leave out. Look at the index to my unpublished monograph A Pair of Ancient Samaritan Eschatologies. Note carefully my partial disentangling of the chronology in Abu ‘l-Fatheh. Notice what I say about the point of changeover from one chronology to another, the Pontificates of several people in DIFFERENT lists called Iqbon. Add that the best explanation for the confusion is that one of the histories used by A.F. must have been Dosithean, without him realising. They would have had their own High Priests. Explain the fact that he didn’t realise he had got hold of a Dosithean booklet by pointing out that A.F. lived at the time when the Dositheans(= Sebuaeans) had finished merging with their opponents, the Gorothenians (= everyone else). A historical book might not have been obviously Dosithean. You could add that the process had been going on since the start of the 11th century at the very least, since the two main codes of doctrine and halachah for all later centuries, which were written in the early 11th c., take great care to speak of the practice of all communities with respect and politeness, and even note some opinions as worthy of serious consideration as perhaps being better. That some of these communities were Dosithean and some not is proven in my book Principles of Samaritan Halachah, in the conclusions, and in my chapter The Samaritan Halachah (= ch. IX) in the collective vol. by various authors The Samaritans, Tübingen 1989. The Dosithean doctrines of Resurrection and the Tâ’eb were incorporated into orthodox theology, a new new orthodoxy. Cite the Introduction to Ben-Hayyim’s edition of Marqe, Tîbat Marqe, Jerusalem 1988. Ben-Hayyim proves that these two doctrines are not in the parts written by Marqe, but they are in the late parts.
(2) No. There are no allusions to Christianity in Marqe. There are points of contact with some aspects of Christian theology. Cite Macdonald’s book The Theology of the Samaritans, but warn the reader against relying on anything in this without verification, because of Macdonald’s unbelievable habitual carelessness and the inadequacy of his command of any form of Aramaic other than Syriac.
(3) Just state that Mem = 40, Resh = 200, Qoph = 100, and He = 5, making 345 for Marqe MRQH; then Mem = 40, Shin = 300, He = 5, making 345 for Mushi (Jewish Moshe) MShH
(4) Say the fragment is unpublished. Say the handwriting and lay-out show it to be a fragment from the unique ms. containing the older recension of Marqe, which was the basis of Ben-Hayyim’s edition. Quote the information in Tsedaka’s name, saying that he found it and read it. Add that the fragments in the Firkovitch Collection of the National Library of Russia have been catalogued only generally, that is, many fragmentary mss. have not been fully described. It is not unusual to find a bound volume of fragmants, or a bound volume with an old book followed by fragments. The binding would have been done in the mid nineteenth c., to save the fragments from damage, before they were sold to Firkovitch. This fragment consists of several leaves