I know most scholars don't care much about the 'heresies' - i.e. those traditions condemned by the Fathers of the Church in the early period In my mind there is a bad quality in very successful people. They have an innate ability to 'organize' their lives AND THEIR MINDS and push away things that 'get in the way' of the system that they devise for themselves. To this end 'the heresies' are an inherent 'problem' for these men. The existence of 'alternative systems' of Christianity in the earliest period challenge the foundation of their INHERITED presuppositions and so they are ignored by a collective unconscious conspiracy of like-minded systematizers ...
Of course when I look at the earliest Church Fathers I can't join these 'experts' in developing a system based on the 'trustworthiness' and 'reliability' of the Church Fathers because I see the whole Catholic tradition as reactionary.
I challenge any of you to name a prominent Father of the Church who lived within a century and a half of Jesus and I will show you someone whose entire theology is a REACTION against the influence of the Markan See of Alexandria.
Yes Irenaeus was probably accurate in some respects. There may well have been a great diversity of sects and opinions within the 'heretical community.' I am also quite certain that Irenaeus' church - the Catholic Church of Rome - looked organized and uniform in its 'orthodoxy' by comparison. However all of this can be attributed to the fact that the Catholic orthodoxy had just been invented the night before.
I won't get into discussion where I think Irenaeus got his ideas but the short answer is that he robbed the beliefs and established scriptures of the very same traditions he condemned.
For twenty years I have tried to rescue something from this 'original faith.' I made a number of novel discoveries, the most intriguing being that they all go back to St. Mark, that most ignored and abused of apostles - so abused and reviled he isn't even considered a 'true apostle' by the Catholics.
I have explained that the name 'Marcionite' means 'those of Mark' as does the 'Marcosian' sect. 'Marcion,' that greatest of arch-heretical caricatures, is only a back formation from the Aramaic 'Marqiyone.' One of a number of Patristic 'boogeymen' invented by this abuse of the general ignorance of how words are formed in Semitic languages. 'Ebion' of the Evyonim is another Frankenstein-figure developed through back formation. 'Elxai' of the Elchasites is yet another.
In short 'Marcion' and his gospel were really just 'St. Mark' and an older and specifically Alexandrian version of the Gospel of Mark.
Yet after all these little victories I came up against a brick wall. It would impossible to reconstruct what the Marcionite gospel looked like because - quite frankly - the Catholics and their Imperial co-conspirators did such a good job systematically destroying the tradition of St. Mark.
The bottom line is that as I tried to explain to my wife every way we can make sense of what the Marcionite gospel 'must have' looked like I realized I was fighting a losing battle. People will always prefer a sure misrepresentation over an uncertain truth.
I think that's why scholars ignore the heresies - there's just too much uncertainty.
I wrote a book called the Real Messiah where I tried to offer the world a whole different paradigm to understand Christianity based on my best 'hunch.' Yet in the end even that proved too large a leap for most people to take seriously.
Then, owing to the direction of my television documentary - which is coming out in July of 2010 - I started re-evaluating the Letter to Theodore that Morton Smith discovered in the Mar Saba monastery in the fifties.
Initially I have to admit I was reluctant to take sides on whether or not the letter was really authentic. You see, when you live at the periphery of scholarship already the last thing you need is to have your arguments depend on a text that most academics reject as spurious in the first place.
As it turned out the documentary people liked the controversy surrounding the letter and so my attention was focussed once more on Morton Smith's amazing discovery.
I had already read everything that had been published for or against the authenticity of the discovery. The truth is that I couldn't see any smoking gun no matter how hard I tried. I kept asking myself - could one of the greatest minds of the last century really have made up a fake letter as a kind of April Fool's joke on the world?
In the end, I decided to go where the evidence pointed me. There was no case against the authenticity of the letter. The Letter to Theodore just happens to say things that most conservative scholars don't want to hear. It brings Alexandria and all those variant gospel traditions which these men have been so successful at ignoring for the last two hundred years into the fore.
So they found a way of finally making it go away.
Yet look at the testimony of Hadrian in the Letter to Servianus. It explicitly testifies on behalf of the fact that Alexandria had a functioning Papacy a half century before we have any parallel witness to the existence of a Roman Church. Yet these same men find any excuse possible to isolate and ignore this piece of evidence so you start thinking that there is an unconscious agenda behind all the personal attacks against Morton Smith for bringing this letter to our attention in the first place.
As such, when we go back to the Letter to Theodore and realize that there is no substantial case against its authenticity we are left with this very strange idea that our canonical gospel of Mark is somehow 'incomplete.' Indeed it forces us to look at the whole manner in which we approach Christianity.
The Letter to Theodore only mentions two additions to the gospel of Mark of course but this statistic is a little misleading as both additions appear in a discussion of a very small section of the text. If this ration held up over the course of the rest of the narrative we would have something approaching the great number of additions and 'alterations' to the canonical gospels which the Church Fathers report about the aforemented heretical sects of Mark (i.e. the Marcionites and the Marcosians).
So I started asking - what was the original Alexandrian tradition which dated back at least to the time of Hadrian and undoubtedly even older? The more I looked I couldn't help but see that the earliest authorities from Alexandria who are typically identified among the ranks of the Church Fathers - Clement and Origen - actually were undoubtedly heretics doing their best to 'fit in' with the new orthodoxy.
I noticed for instance that Irenaeus cites Clement's writings as if he were a Marcosian. It was only a matter of time before I started realizing the commonality - Clement and the Marcosians were both devoted to a guy named 'Mark' who was undoubtedly the author of the original gospel.
As I started to develop a deeper understanding of what they saying, it became apparent that both took an active interest in the SAME SECTION OF TEXT - the latter portion of the Gospel of Mark chapter 10 - as if it were critical to make sense of the gospel as a literary composition.
The idea comes up time and time again in ancient writers but the Marcosians seem to have developed their liturgical system around this section of text identifying 'another baptism' as being present even when none is explicitly mentioned in our canonical gospel of Mark.
I can't explain the Marcosian efforts to connect a baptism with Mark x.38 without presupposing that the Letter to Theodore is real and that its first 'addition' to the Gospel of Mark (called LGM 1 by scholars) was the foundation of what was called 'the redemption' in Markan circles.
This thing called 'redemption' began in chapter 10 and clearly 'ended' when Jesus ended up appearing crucified in Jerusalem. The best surviving summary of WHY it makes sense to connect this material in Mark x.38 with the 'redemption' of Jesus on the cross is interestingly found in the writings of Irenaeus - the very guy I have noted slams the heretics for believing in one thing and then ends up stealing the idea and changing it a little a few days later.
Listen carefully when Irenaeus explains WHY Mark x.38 SHOULD BE identified as the beginning of the redemption which is fully manifested on the Cross (even though again he just attacked the Marcosians for believing the same thing). Look carefully at the very opening words of his discussion:
But he [Christ], emerging from the depth [of Hell], spat out the brine of sins, and rejoiced to plunge into the sweet waters of piety. And now, in like manner, with regard to that mother of Zebedee's children, do not admire merely what she said, but also the time at which she uttered these words. For when was it that she drew near to the Redeemer? Not after the resurrection, nor after the preaching of His name, nor after the establishment of His kingdom; but it was when the Lord said, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and the Son of man shall be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes; and they shall kill Him, and on the third day He shall rise again. [Matthew 20:18-19]
These things the Saviour told in reference to His sufferings and cross; to these persons He predicted His passion. Nor did He conceal the fact that it should be of a most ignominious kind, at the hands of the chief priests. This woman, however, had attached another meaning to the dispensation of His sufferings. The Saviour was foretelling death; and she asked for the glory of immortality. The Lord was asserting that He must stand arraigned before impious judges; but she, taking no note of that judgment, requested as of the judge: Grant, she said, that these my two sons may sit, one on the right hand, and the other on the left, in Your glory. In the one case the passion is referred to, in the other the kingdom is understood. The Saviour was speaking of the cross, while she had in view the glory which admits no suffering. This woman, therefore, as I have already said, is worthy of our admiration, not merely for what she sought, but also for the occasion of her making the request. [Irenaeus Fragment 55]
Irenaeus is clearly developing allegories and arguments from familiar cliches. In this particular case I found it impossible to believe that the reference to Christ having "emerged from the depth [of Hell], spat out the brine of sins, and rejoiced to plunge into the sweet waters of piety" DOES NOT come from Secret Mark. The narrative there presupposes a death and a return from hell as we read that Jesus "went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going near, Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightaway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand." Morton Smith has argued that the text which follows alludes to Jesus baptizing the young man who emerges from the tomb.
Yet most important of all Irenaeus connects the request from Salome (which immediately follows LGM 1) with Christ's 'redemption' in the conclusion. While we cannot accurately how long the original gospel of Mark was (i.e. once all its 'additions' are restored) we can say with some degree of certainty that the ritual called 'redemption' must have formed a central part of the liturgy of the Marcosians and which in turn MIRRORED the original structure of that lost.
This is very important as it turns out because I believe that I can accurately determine that the liturgy of the churches of Mark MUST HAVE identified the gap between baptism and Passion as amounting to EXACTLY thirty days. This inference can be drawn from the testimony of Irenaeus, Hippolytus and the author of the Anonymous Treatise on Baptism.
If LGM 1 is 'day one' we can determine that the baptism occurred on Friday February 23rd, 37 CE in real history. Jesus' crucifixion followed on 'day twenty eight' and Sunday March 25th or 'day thirty' was the date of Christ's resurrection.
We should also keep in mind that Irenaeus tells us over and over again that the Marcosians identified Jesus and Christ as two separate people.
If this was the structure of the liturgy the redemption was based on a gospel which understood the Passion to have begun with Jesus' baptism of his beloved neaniskos (youth) and works its way to their appearance TOGETHER in Jerusalem (Jesus Barsabba and Jesus) and ends with Jesus crucified and Christ watching impassably.
This was the original Alexandrian gospel and this was the original Alexandrian thirty day fast which preceded Easter, both inextricably linked to St. Mark who, it was claimed participated in the very events established in his Church.
Of course thirty days is not the length that would eventually get established as the duration of Lent. The word 'Lent' is a Anglo-Saxon barbarism. The original name of the fast was 'fortieth day' which I believe was merely developed in order to distinguish it from the heretical implications of 'the redemption' which as I noted was thirty days.
Heretical implications?
Thanks to the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library scholarship has started to piece together the idea that the redemption of the Marcosian involved angels coming down into the water and uniting themselves with the mortal body of the initiate. That is undoubtedly why the same ritual is identified among the Marcionites as 'the baptism on behalf of the dead.'
Yet there's more.
I can't help but see that ANY discussion of the redemption of Jesus in the period whether Catholic or heretical reflects THE SAME UNDERLYING FORMULA. It's just that we have been preconditioned to avoid seeing the truth by our formulation of what must have been Semitic truths in the Greek language.
Look at the concept of the Passion of Christ. In English whenever we use this term we are conditioned to think in terms of Christ 'suffering.' But this wasn't the original sense of the term. Look at Clement of Alexandria. As a Marcosian he continually refers to the 'impassability' of Christ and those baptized into him. Impassability is a fancy word which means 'without passion' or feelings.
The original Aramaic word behind 'the Passion' meant something different. The event was known as the Transformation of Christbecause - yetzer - necessarily means that it actually means 'nature' rather than 'feeling.' This is very significant and serves as the proper basis to our reevaluation of both the liturgy and the gospel narrative.
During the course of the thirty day 'Passion' Christ was really understood by Clement and his Alexandrian community to have been prepared for a transformation from mortality to immortality. This was the function of 'the redemption.' Just read Irenaeus' many statements on the subject again. You can see the heretical 'peaking' through even though the Church Father has done his best to 'clean up' all those weird gnostic ideas and terminology.
This isn't just 'a guess' on my part; it is implicit from Irenaeus explanation of the term redemption in the passage cited above. Irenaeus goes out of his way to stress that it is a 'passion' because Jesus suffered. But this does not at all follow from the Aramaic original. Indeed Origen goes out of his way in Peri Pascha to declare that pathe has nothing to do with the Christian Passover.
Yet let's not get away from our original discussion.
Once we acknowledge that the original Christians spoke in the Jewish language and thought in the Jewish language we might begin the process of understanding Easter and the fast which preceded it in Jewish terms.
How so?
Well if you actually look at the manner in which Jews in the Middle East have ALWAYS celebrated Passover you see that the preparations begin - yes you guessed it - thirty days before the fourteenth of Nisan.
What's more the whole period is identified as 'the redemption' just as we see among the first Christians 'of Mark.'
So when I put all these details together I can finally make sense of one of the strangest, most impossible to understand things that Irenaeus has ever uttered in all his writings. He writes:
They further maintain that the passion which took place in the case of the twelfth AEon is pointed at by the apostasy of Judas, who was the twelfth apostle, and also by the fact that Christ suffered in the twelfth month. [AH i.3.3]
You can't imagine how I struggled to make sense of this statement. Everyone knows that Passover can't be in the twelfth month and because we all 'know' that the Passion lasted three days. So the only inference we can make is to accept Irenaeus' suggestion that they were crazy, right?
Well not exactly.
Let's look at the same idea as it is repeated time and again in Irenaeus writings as he notes:
They endeavour, for instance, to demonstrate that passion which, they say, happened in the case of the twelfth AEon, from this fact, that the passion of the Saviour was brought about by the twelfth apostle, and happened in the twelfth month. [ibid ii.20.1]
Indeed the argument occurs over and over again in Irenaeus' writings that there can be no doubt that the original tradition of 'those of Mark' was that the Passion - the 'transformation' - of Christ began in the twelfth month.
Of course when you look at my reconstruction of the thirty day fast which preceded Easter as 'the redemption' of these heretics the liturgical period (based on the lost original gospel of Mark) necessarily would also have started at Purim or the 14th of Adar, the twelfth month of the Jewish calendar.
There is a way to make sense of all of this. All you have to do is incorporate what we have established about a Jewish 'redemption' period which lasted from Purim in the middle of the twelfth month until Passover in the middle of the first month.
In other words, for the followers of Mark 'the Passion' was identical with 'the redemption.' This because this Aramaic speaking community knew the term meant 'the transformation of Christ.'
So how was this possible? How could 'the transformation' be stretched out over thirty days? Well let's go back to the liturgy for a moment. In the fourth century the cetechumen were prepared over forty days. We must imagine that in the churches of Mark their 'redemption' was stretched out over thirty days. In the Catholic tradition that catechumen PLEDGE at the beginning and end up baptized on Easter. I am certain that we reconstruct an understanding of the heretical tradition where initiates were baptized FIRST and then a thirty day redemption period followed developed from the Pidyon Haben ritual of Judaism.
I believe I have already started this process in my previous posts.
For the moment though let's go back to Irenaeus' testimony at the very place we left it to see that he too CONFIRMS the presence of a baptism at the beginning of the Passion in the heretical formula. We read:
There are not, therefore, thirty AEons, nor did the Saviour come to be baptized when He was thirty years old, for this reason, that He might show forth the thirty silent AEons of their system, otherwise they must first of all separate and eject [the Saviour] Himself from the fullness of all. Moreover, they affirm that He suffered in the twelfth month [ibid]
Indeed at first glance again many might be willing to accept Irenaeus at his word. Yet I think we should start over so we don't lose sight of the truth.
The heretics seemed to have held that there were thirty powers in heaven. Jesus came from heaven embodying its 'fullness' and thus had within himself 'the thirty.'
The number twelve has always been significant for Hebrews. The heretics emphasized that the Passion began in the twelfth month AND EXTENDED into the first month owing to a thirty day redemption period already discussed.
As Irenaeus himself acknowledges elsewhere in the same book:
they maintain that those things [above] were not made on account of creation, but creation on account of them; and that the former are not images of the latter, but the latter of the former. As, therefore, they render a reason for the images, by saying that the month has thirty days on account of the thirty AEons [AH ii.15.1]
And again:
they maintain the month to be a type of the thirty and consist precisely of thirty days, but some have more and some less, inasmuch as five days remain to them as an overplus ... It cannot therefore be held that months of thirty days each were so formed for the sake of [typifying] the Aeons; for, in that case, they would have consisted precisely of thirty days. [AH ii.24.5]
But Hippolytus who repeatedly says that he has improved the accuracy of Irenaeus' report makes specific mention of the Marcosians identifying the thirty powers with the thirty days of the cycle of the moon:
the moon, which traverses the heaven in thirty days, by reason of (these) days portrays the number of the Aeons [AH vi.48]
The followers of Basilides connected the Aeons to days of the week. Indeed perhaps the closest parallel between the thirty day redemption and the thirty powers in heaven is the manner in which various gnostics understood to be seven - one for each planet - which is the source for the seven days of the week.
It should be noted that the months of certain Jewish sects and the Egyptian population did indeed have twelve months of exactly thirty days plus the five mentioned here. The real question is of course - did the Marcosians hold that Jesus was 'thirty' so that his disciple 'transformed' himself over the thirty days of the redemption period?
Of course i do. It's obvious.
I also think that it is obvious that Irenaeus tells us that this thirty day period began with a baptism which I identify again with LGM 1 as we read:
But it is greatly to be wondered at, how it has come to pass that, while affirming that they have found out the mysteries of God, they have not examined the Gospels to ascertain how often after His baptism the Lord went up, at the time of the passover, to Jerusalem, in accordance with what was the practice of the Jews from every land, and every year, that they should assemble at this period in Jerusalem, and there celebrate the feast of the passover[ibid]
In other words, Irenaeus points to the Gospel of John to counter the argument that there were thirty days between his baptism and his Passion in Jerusalem. John infers that Jesus went on preaching for years after the baptism and after his going up to Jerusalem. According to Irenaeus the thirty day redemption period was just as stupid as the other things the Marcosians promoted.
Under Irenaeus' REVISED system then:
when He came to be baptized, He had not yet completed His thirtieth year, but was beginning to be about thirty years of age (for thus Luke, who has mentioned His years, has expressed it: "Now Jesus was, as it were, beginning to be thirty years old," when He came to receive baptism ... He suffered, being in fact still a young man, and who had by no means attained to advanced age." [ibid]
Of course Irenaeus follows up by arguing that BECAUSE Christ is identified as the magister by the heretics this means that Jesus HAD TO HAVE BEEN almost fifty on the cross. This is a stupid argument as magister has been deliberately mistranslated. It must have went back to the Greek word arche which as Tertullian notes was used to denote a heavenly power [Adv Hermogenes 19.2]
To this end I think we can revisit the original gospel passage cited by Irenaeus in a strange textual variation - 'Now Jesus was as it were BEGINNING to be thirty' to imply that in the heretical gospel the same passage would suggest that he was an arche consisting of thirty (powers).
It is worth noting that Schaff recognizes that the opinions of 'those of Mark' are ONCE AGAIN identical with what we find in the writings of Clement of the Alexandrian See of St. Mark. Clement writes "and again in the same book: “And Jesus was coming to His baptism, being about thirty years old,” [Luke iii. 1, 2, 23] and so on. And that it was necessary for Him to preach only a year, this also is written: “He hath sent Me to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” This both the prophet spake, and the Gospel. [Stromata vi.11]
As Schaff writes, this passage is "a fair parallel to the amazing traditional statement of Irenæus, and his objection to this very idea, vol. i. p. 391, this series. Isa. lxi. 1, 2."
What has escaped everyone is that the 'year of favor' is a specific Jewish messianic concept - the Jubilee. For those who have read my book I have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the year Jesus was crucified was 37 CE AND THAT FROM PASSOVER OF THAT YEAR UNTIL THE END OF 38 CE WAS THE SAMARITAN JUBILEE.
Read here if you want to know more.
Indeed let's not forget that Epiphanius reports that the heretics say that Jesus' ministry continued AFTER the Resurrection for up to eighteen months. As such Clement is once again identifying his connection with those traditions identified as 'heretical' by the Church Fathers.
