Another Email From a Reader to Support My Ideas About the Original Canon

Well I guess I will have to find a way to recover in order to prepare for 'Polycarp Week' which is coming up. I really want to have good material for everyone to celebrate the most important figure in the history of the Church!

In any event before I get into all that I would like to take the time to respond to another email. I should mention that almost all of the readers of my blog end up corresponding with me by email. I guess that's because there is a 'blogosphere' culture and then there is the 'real world.'

In any event, one of my favorite readers (a guy who was nice enough to take time out of his life to write a positive review of my book over at Amazon) wrote the following to me just now, telling me about a book by Karel Hanhart which seems to fit in with my theories about the origin of the canon.

Anyway here is the link. And here is the book:

The Open Tomb: A New Approach, Mark's Passover Haggadah

Karel Hanhart. A Michael Glazier Book. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1995. Pp. 865. $59.95.

Hanhart makes serious use of the familiar observation that the Gospels were written, read, and circulated among church communities familiar, in varying degrees, with the Pauline epistolary corpus. This means for him that Mark has interpreted the crisis of 70 C.E. in terms of Paul's theology of God's salvific plan. That helps us appreciate the novel strategy pursued here of claiming that Mark has retrojected Paul into the passion narrative itself, as the naked youth and the youth in a white robe in the tomb. Such a move is not only admittedly imaginative and speculative but is also the kind of argument from silence of which many scholars are suspicious.

The reader noted that "if I read 'Paul' for Markus Agrippa I think that this fit's nicely with the paradigm that you put forth in your book."

Yes and it goes a lot deeper than that, I think (although I have to confess I haven't read the book yet). I usually avoid talking about the Agrippa connection at this blog because - well - my next book is going to focus more on the development of what I propose to be the Alexandrian New Testament canon in Rome. Nevertheless, I am pleased that at least some people can read my Real Messiah and accept it for what it is - a wholly speculative work that dares to posit a wholly separate paradigm for the origins of Christianity.

The bottom line for me was that I didn't want to just end up ATTACKING Christianity, to just throw up a whole bunch of facts and figures to ridicule the Church. I think what starts off as an Alexandrian religion becomes developed for universal consumption after the destruction of the temple. I even get emails and reviews from atheists who tell me 'how implausible it is that Mark could have developed a narrative where he traveled around with Jesus as an eight year old boy.

These people 'get it.' There is an old story about Charlesmagne which says that because he held a sword in his hand from birth he was unable to use a pen. I think it is time people stopped attacking one another for the sake of scoring points with 'the crowd.'

What we have to do is look at the evidence of a traveling band of disciples accompanying their teacher Jesus and within that group there is 'the mother of Christ.' Now what makes more sense - that a thirty year old man walked around everywhere with his mother or a young boy? Then Tertullian tells us that the Mary who accompanied Jesus WAS NOT his mother. And then there is the obvious effort of the editor(s) of our canon to make it seem finally that 'a plethora of mother Marys' were walking with the disciples.

Why would Mark have written a gospel where he was claiming to have walked around Galilee, Samaria and Judea with Jesus when he was just a young boy? The obvious answer is that there was a real historical 'event' behind the Passion. Something happened and Mark could only say that he was so many years old in the year of that crucifixion.

Someone certainly thought that there was a gospel secret about a little boy who was hidden in the narrative because - as I have just showed in a previous post - it gets developed by almost everyone in antiquity. The Alexandrians said that it was their Mark also called John who was the disciple whom Jesus loved. The Antiochenes that the youth was Ignatius. The Jerusalem Church thought it was their Jacob (James).

Whatever the case may be we have the obvious AGREEMENT against our idiotic European Church that there was this 'gospel secret' thread running through the narrative. And I am supposed to be crazy for trying to make sense of what the original Christians believed?

That is always my point of view. It all comes down to one question for me - what did the ancient Alexandrian Christians believe? This is why I am interested in the Letter to Theodore. I think that it gives us a glimpse into what Christianity looked like before the reforms of Irenaeus.

And you know what? It took me this long to get other people who argue for the authenticity of the Mar Saba document to even start to branch out and think of things beyond the paradigm that the hoaxers have set up for us to work within - i.e. 'prove it's not a fake.'

I am the only scholar who started to think in terms of the IMPLICATIONS of the text in terms of what it might testify in terms of 'earliest Christianity.' You see, I divined that half the reason that most of these 'hoaxers' thought it was a forgery is because it turns our whole understanding of Christianity upside down.

No, they couldn't make sense of what it was saying, but they could see that Clement was shining a light on something that most of them had never wanted to consider - i.e. an Alexandrian or Markan center of gravity in the Church.

The only one of the hoaxers I know really well is J Harold Ellens and I figured out his perspective within a few emails being sent back and forth. He doesn't believe there was a Markan tradition in Alexandria before the fifth century.

I think that there as many reasons for disbelieving the document as there are hoaxers of course and I don't want to get into an explanation of why each of them chose to take up the cause of doubting Smith's discovery. All I want to say for the moment is that almost no one who has ever written anything in favor of authenticity has actually been allowed the piece of mind to just HEAR what Clement is saying and allow it to sink into their subconsciousness and let those seeds grow up into tall oak trees.

What has happened is that because everyone has been overreacting to the outrageous claims from the hoaxers, that almost no one has noticed that the text tells us a great deal about the canon and liturgy of ancient Alexandria in the late second century.

Getting back to the reader's original point, I spent five days spelling out Trobisch's understanding of the canon because I wanted to emphasize that what survives is entirely artificial. It was obvious developed as a reaction to something else. But because no one has been allowed to do anything other than DEFENDING to Theodore's authenticity, no one has seen that Clement is actually describing a twofold division to the canon in ancient Alexandria.

As I noted in previous posts, both Clement's letter to Theodore and Irenaeus' knowledge of many of the general arguments contained therein, say that the Alexandrians clearly had a Petrine text developed for general consumption in the Church. Whether the 'account of the Lord's doing' written out in the name of Peter was the 'Gospel of Peter' found in Egypt in the last century or the kerygma Petrou cited in Clement's writings (or whether the kerygma Petrou was one and the same with the Gospel of Peter) cannot be decided here.

What is clear from the letter is that the Gospel according to Mark held a special place in the Church of Alexandria. There has been much debate lately as to whether it was actually 'hidden' as Morton Smith translates the text or whether it was just 'safely preserved' by the Church. My guess is that it was indeed formerly 'hidden' but by the time Clement was writing the claims of the so-called 'Carpocratians' regarding their possessing the true Gospel written by Mark caused the community to rethink its official position regarding the gospel and not just the gospel ...

By the time that Clement wrote Quis Dives Salvetur the official policy of the Alexandrian community was to openly identify the Gospel as 'the Gospel according to Mark.'

Nevertheless because I think that the Alexandrian community bears some relationship with the Marcionites (Aram 'those of Mark') I think that in former ages the two parts of the canon were left blandly anonymous - i.e. 'the Evangelium' was followed by the 'Apostolikon' with no specific references to the identity of the author(s) of this material.

Just as the name 'Mark' now only appears splashed across the top of the page of the canonical 'according to Mark' I am certain that the earliest copies of the apostolic epistles had no internal references to the author's identity as 'Paul' either. It was the Catholics who developed the various self-references of the apostle.

The point is that from the perspective of an outsider the 'Marcionites' had a gospel AND a collection of letters without any clear effort to identify who wrote any of this stuff. I have demonstrated the manner in which the Marcionites denied human authorship to the gospel. Now let me cite from Tertullian the second part of this formula:

I desire to hear from Marcion the origin of Paul the apostle. I am a sort of new disciple, having had instruction from no other teacher. For the moment my only belief is that nothing ought to be believed without good reason, and that that is believed without good reason which is believed without knowledge of its origin: and I must with the best of reasons approach this inquiry with uneasiness when I find one affirmed to be an apostle, of whom in the list of the apostles in the gospel I find no trace. So when I am told that he was subsequently promoted by our Lord, by now at rest in heaven, I find some lack of foresight in the fact that Christ did not know beforehand that he would have need of him, but after setting in order the office of apostleship and sending them out upon their duties, considered it necessary, on an impulse and not by deliberation, to add another, by compulsion so to speak and not by design. [Tertullian Against Marcion v.2]

It because we have been DELIBERATELY preconditioned by the fables of the Acts of the Apostles that we don't realize that just like Paul - 'Mark' is nowhere explicitly mentioned in the gospel. It is because of this silence that the Catholics could claim he was a figure of secondary importance. The Alexandrians clearly believed that he was hidden behind references to 'neaniskos' and other terms.

The fact that the Marcionites did not clearly identify EITHER the identity of the author(s) of the gospel and the epistles is clear from what follows in Tertullian's discussion of the latter when he writes:

So then, shipmaster out of Pontus, supposing you have never accepted into your craft any smuggled or illicit merchandise, have never appropriated or adulterated any cargo, and in the things of God are even more careful and trustworthy, will you please tell us under what bill of lading you accepted Paul as apostle, who had stamped him with that mark of distinction, who commended him to you, and who put him in your charge? Only so may you with confidence disembark him: only so can he avoid being proved to belong to him who has put in evidence all the documents that attest his apostleship. He himself, says Marcion, claims to be an apostle, and that not from men nor through any man, but through Jesus Christ.a Clearly any man can make claims for himself: but his claim is confirmed by another person's attestation.

One person writes the document, another signs it, a third attests the signature, and a fourth enters it in the records. No man is for himself both claimant and witness. [ibid]

Now that my readers have read Trobisch's work they can see what Tertullian is getting at here. The Marcionite canon, unlike the later Catholic parallel collection, did not have a chorus of witnesses identifying each of the eight principle authors of the Church as orthodox spokesmen. It just had an Evangelium and an Apostolikon and no hint as to who was behind the material.

That is why Tertullian goes on to recount the EXPLICIT Catholic story from Acts which claims to identify Paul to its readers. That the Marcionites never identified the person behind their canon is obvious from what follows:

if you have your eye on our belief, accept the evidence on which it depends. If you challenge us to adopt yours, tell us the facts on which it is founded. Either prove that the things you believe really are so: or else, if you have no proof, how can you believe? Or who are you, to believe in despite of him from whom alone there is proof of what you believe? So then accept the apostle on my evidence, as as you do Christ: he is my apostle, as also Christ is mine. [v.2]

The point then is that the Marcionites weren't saying who wrote any of their New Testament canon. It is absolutely clear that they were saying though, that the person who wrote the canonical epistles ALSO WROTE the gospel. As such, when a Catholic saw that these letters resembled those of our 'Pauline canon' the argument naturally came forward that the Marcionites claimed that Paul must have been also responsible for the composition of the gospel. However both Tertullian and Irenaeus come across EXPLICIT Marcionite denials of this interpretation.

The only Church Father who actually got close to a real live Marcionite canon appears to be Hippolytus who bucks the trend by writing:

When, therefore, Marcion or some one of his hounds barks against the Demiurge, and adduces reasons from a comparison of what is good and bad, we ought to say to them, that neither Paul the apostle nor Mark, he of the maimed finger, announced such (tenets). For none of these (doctrines) has been written in the Gospel according to Mark.[Hippolytus Refutation i.18]

The only reason that anyone would be saying what Hippolytus does here is if Mark was somehow understood to be the author of the Marcionite canon.

Now I don't want to get too far removed from my present discussion but I think that already here we are at a point where we can say that the Marcionites (i.e. 'those of Mark') had a canon of Mark. How far are we then from seeing that the intimate attachment of the Alexandrian community to its Gospel according to Mark goes beyond anything which could allow 'another three gospels' to be included alongside of it in their Church.

The initiations allude to in To Theodore are developed ONLY from the 'Gospel according to Mark.' Can anyone imagine that it was still according 'second place' in the Alexandrian canon. No, for these and many other reasons I have developed in previous posts, the Alexandrian canon undoubtedly looked EXACTLY like the Marcionite canon. The only difference now was that over time we must imagine that that the Roman collection of apostolic writings took the place of whatever exoteric text originally written 'according to Peter' at the time of to Theodore.

This is why Irenaeus railed against the Alexandrian 'heresies' throughout his works. They had already set in place a way of accepting a group of texts SUPERFICIALLY while secretly maintaining a shadow canon behind the scenes ...