On Marcion and 'little Mark'

After having a number of top experts in the field of early Egyptian Christianity read my article on the throne of St. Mark and give me positive feedback I am ready to move on to the next stage in the campaign. The article is written in my usual bombastic style (if I was to give a review of an episode of Dora the Explorer I could somehow tie it to something written in Heidegger!). It goes way beyond merely identifying the throne as the original Episcopal chair of Alexandria (why would I just want to do that). I actually demolish the inherited Western scholarly notion that the tradition of St. Mark in Alexandria necessarily went back to the beginning of Christianity in the city.

Indeed, more importantly I show that the idea that Mark was venerated AS A LITTLE CHILD from the beginning too.

Now I don't want to reopen the whole debate on the meaning of NEANISKOS. It is enough to say that it is an ambiguous term which can apply to someone ten years old or so.

What I am more interested in doing with my next paper is FINALLY demonstrate to these morons who call themselves 'experts' in the early Church (Ehrman are you listening) THAT MARCION WASN'T THE HERETIC'S REAL NAME. It is rather merely the preservation of the original Alexandrian veneration of 'little Mark' i.e. that boy who appears in the Passio Sancti Petri.

When are these idiots ever going to THINK about what they study!!!!!!!!!

Once you realize that 'Marcion' is only a reference to the cult of St. Mark the neaniskos the whole illusion of Catholic primacy comes crashing down.

Polycarp was lying when he said he actually 'met' Marcion. Marcion didn't actually 'invent' his tradition in the late second century. The Catholic Church (i.e. the tradition cited by Irenaeus and connected to his being a devoted 'hearer' of Polycarp) only made war against the tradition in the period and claimed that some supernatural boogeyman was running around 'corrupting' its 'true faith' from John (John is Mark's other name, so 'Marcion' is deliberately isolated and kept in the cold as 'not being' of John-Mark.

Does the world understand what I am revealing? The present day Coptic Church is an abused and deflated remnant of an original tradition WHOLLY devoted to this 'little Mark.' As such they finally had to succumb to the Irenaean invention of a 'fourfold gospel' and his reworking of Polycarp's original Acts of the Apostles (which as I show in another paper is held together by the claim that John Mark was ONLY a devoted disciple of BOTH Peter and Paul - think about the structure and you will see this).

In other words, in the 'Marcionite' (i.e. the tradition of little Mark centered at Alexandria) canon there was just one gospel (ur-Mark) and a series of apostolic letters written by this same 'Marcion' (it is only the Catholic Church which invented the figure of 'Paul'

As such I have always argued for the deliberate tampering and corruption of a messianic religion wholly devoted to 'little Mark' by Roman agents (Irenaeus) who were fearful of an expression of faith that someone was the true king of the kingdom of God BESIDE CAESAR.

For those morons who say 'but Marcion is identified as coming from Pontus' and 'little Mark' was from Alexandria I need only point them in the direction of a consistent conflating of the early Alexandrian Christian cult AND the devotees of Serapis (see Hadrian's letter, the Acts of Mark etc).

Why does this matter?

Just read Clement's Exhortation to the Heathen chapter four where the identification of a 'Pontic' Sarapis is revealed. The Church Father writes that people in his day:

say that the Serapis was a Pontic idol, and was transported with solemn pomp to Alexandria. Isidore alone says that it was brought from the Seleucians, near Antioch, who also had been visited with a dearth of grain, and had been fed by Ptolemy.

The story ultimately comes from an early source known to Plutarch and a number of other ancients including Tacitus, who in the course of writing about an Alexandrian Basilides:

These events gave Vespasian a deeper desire to visit the sanctuary of the god to consult him with regard to his imperial fortune: he ordered all to be excluded from the temple. Then after he had entered the temple and was absorbed in contemplation of the god, he saw behind him one of the leading men of Egypt, named Basilides,5 who he knew was detained by sickness in a place many p163days' journey distant from Alexandria. He asked the priests whether Basilides had entered the temple on that day; he questioned the passers-by whether he had been seen in the city; finally, he sent some cavalry and found that at that moment he had been eighty miles away: then he concluded that this was a supernatural vision and drew a prophecy from the name Basilides.

The origin of this god has not yet been generally treated by our authors: the Egyptian priests tell the following story, that when King Ptolemy,6 the first of the Macedonians to put the power of Egypt on a firm foundation, was giving the new city of Alexandria walls, temples, and religious rites, there appeared to him in his sleep a vision of a young man of extraordinary beauty and of more than human stature, who warned him to send his most faithful friends to Pontus and bring his statue hither; the vision said that this act would be a happy thing for the kingdom and that the city that received the god would be great and famous: after these words the youth seemed to be carried to heaven in a blaze of fire. Ptolemy, moved by this miraculous omen, disclosed this nocturnal vision to the Egyptian priests, whose business it is to interpret such things. When they proved to know little of Pontus and foreign countries, he questioned Timotheus, an Athenian of the clan of the Eumolpidae,7 whom he had called from Eleusis to preside over the sacred rites, and asked him what this religion was and what the divinity meant. Timotheus learned by questioning men who had travelled to Pontus that there was a city there called Sinope, and that not far from it there was a temple of Jupiter Dis,8 p165long famous among the natives: for there sits beside the god a female figure which most call Proserpina. But Ptolemy, although prone to superstitious fears after the nature of kings, when he once more felt secure, being more eager for pleasures than religious rites, began gradually to neglect the matter and to turn his attention to other things, until the same vision, now more terrible and insistent, threatened ruin upon the king himself and his kingdom unless his orders were carried out. Then Ptolemy directed that ambassadors and gifts should be despatched to King Scydrothemis — he ruled over the people of Sinope at that time — and when the embassy was about to sail he instructed them to visit Pythian Apollo. The ambassadors found the sea favourable; and the answer of the oracle was not uncertain: Apollo bade them go on and bring back the image of his father, but leave that of his sister.9

When the ambassadors reached Sinope, they delivered the gifts, requests, and messages of their king to Scydrothemis. He was all uncertainty, now fearing the god and again being terrified by the threats and opposition of his people; often he was tempted by the gifts and promises of the ambassadors. In the meantime three years passed during which Ptolemy did not lessen his zeal or his appeals; he increased the dignity of his ambassadors, the number of his ships, and the quantity of gold offered. Then a terrifying vision appeared to Scydrothemis, warning him not to hinder longer the purposes of the god: as he still hesitated, various disasters, diseases, and the evident anger of the gods, growing heavier from day to day, beset the king. He called an assembly of his people and made known to them p167the god's orders, the visions that had appeared to him and to Ptolemy, and the misfortunes that were multiplying upon them: the people opposed their king; they were jealous of Egypt, afraid for themselves, and so gathered about the temple of the god. At this point the tale becomes stranger, for tradition says that the god himself, voluntarily embarking on the fleet that was lying on the shore, miraculously crossed the wide stretch of sea and reached Alexandria in two days. A temple, befitting the size of the city, was erected in the quarter called Rhacotis; there had previously been on that spot an ancient shrine dedicated to Serapis and Isis. Such is the most popular account of the origin and arrival of the god. Yet I am not unaware that the same some who maintain that the god was brought from Seleucia in Syria in the reign of Ptolemy III;10 still others claim that the same Ptolemy introduced the god, but that the place from which he came was Memphis, once a famous city and the bulwark of ancient Egypt. Many regard the god himself as identical with Aesculapius, because he cures the sick; some as Osiris, the oldest god among these peoples; still more identify him with Jupiter as the supreme lord of all things; the majority, however, arguing from the attributes of the god that are seen on his statueº or from their own conjectures, hold him to be Father Dis. (Tacitus, Histories Book 4, 82 - 84)

I of course will have more to say about this but let's understand why scholars will never recognize these ideas.

(1) the Church Fathers tell them that 'Marcion' was a heretic who simply came down from Pontus to screw up the Church.

(2) they ignore the testimony of Hadrian which identifies Christians as being devoted to Sarapis because IT DOESN'T FIT IN WITH THEIR INHERITED PRESUPPOSITIONS!!!!!

And do I need to spell it out for these dingbats? THE SOURCES HERE ARE ESSENTIALLY SAYING THAT CHRISTIANITY WAS A CULT LIKE THAT ASSOCIATED WITH SARAPIS IN THE SAME WAY THAT IT ALSO IDENTIFIES IT AS LIKE THAT ESTABLISHED BY HADRIAN IN HONOR OF ANTINOUS (do I sense a little envy and jealousy of Agrippa in Hadrian's report?).

Again to make it clear - I AM NOT SAYING THAT CHRISTIANITY DEVELOPED FROM THE CULT OF SARAPIS. Rather it was COMPARED with SARAPIS by pagans in the same way we see Plutarch compare Judaism to the cult of Dionysus.

Of course to get these fools to EVEN ACKNOWLEDGE that the pagans saw Sarapis IN CHRISTIANITY impossible or that the reports about Marcion were so old that they were tainted by this pagan observation is utterly impossible (yet notice how much of Celsus' anti-Marcionite polemic filters into Irenaeus' writings) Indeed why haven't scholars noticed this!!!!

Indeed how do you fight this ignorance prevalent among the ignorant? How do you enlighten those who by their very nature don't have the capacity to see the light? The problem of my entire existence in a nutshell.

I have a brother in law who is training to go to Hawaii to compete in the ultimate Iron Man event. That's HIS impossible goal.

I tell you again - mine is even MORE IMPOSSIBLE.

A sample of what appears in the Real Messiah order it here