Thursday, December 30, 2010

Looking for a Copy of Hermann Raschke's Werkstatt des Markus-Evangelisten

I have been seaching high and low for a copy of Raschke's Werkstatt des Markus-Evangelisten.  I know thatr I am going to like this book.  It would necessarily become an important part of any book that I decided to write on this subject matter.  The problem of course is that it is out of print, Amazon doesn't have it, nor indeed is available in any North American library that I can see from Worldcat and the only libraries that have it are in Germany.  I know that Hermann Detering must have a copy.  But I don't want to bother him right now.  In any event, I keep reading about Raschke's formulations and they seem very similar to my own theories.  I happened to have found a Scottish 'freethinker' from the last century who summarizes Raschke's thought.  It is available only as a 'snippet view' from Google where I live but I managed to piece this much together:

And now arises the question, If that gospel was current as canonical in Tertullian's and Irenaeus's day, how came they to speak of Marcion's elision of the Birth Stories without noting that they are elided in Mark, to comment on the brevity of Marcion's gospel when Mark's was less than half as long as Luke's, or to denounce Marcion for leaving out much of the Lucan record of the Lord's teaching when Mark did the same? Herr Raschke argues (p. 34) that Irenaeus was so completely under the fixed idea of a mutilation of Luke that he could not see the identity of Marcion's gospel with the canonical Mark.  This is a difficult conception.  As a matter of fact, Irenaeus (III, xi, 8), putting his mystical thesis that the gospels must be four, neither more nor less, cites Mark as beginning in the manner of our text, and making " a compendious and cursory narrative."  That is in effect what he denounces Marcion for doing. The question thus insistently arises whether the existing text of Irenaeus, a Latin translation made at the end of the third or the beginning of the fourth century, represents what Irenaeus wrote in the second.  If it does, Raschke's solution must stand, for the inconsistency of the attitude in the existing treatise is gross. That Marcion had before him a primitive compilation of miracle stories, ascribed to Mark, is quite conceivable; but our Mark is not the disorderly thing described by Papias; and apart from the passage cited there is nothing, I think, in Irenaeus to show any familiarity with our text. If he had a copy before him, how could he endorse it while denouncing Marcion? The same question arises in regard to the whole polemic of Tertullian against Marcion [John M Robertson Jesus and Judas p 226]

Herr Raschke comments, that description just fits Mark. When we come to the specific charges of mutilation, the surmise is confirmed. Epiphanius, for instance, complains that Marcion's gospel mutilates the text about Jonah, saying merely that " no sign will be given," and lacks the mention of Nineveh and the Queen of the South and Solomon. But all this applies to our gospel of Mark! As Herr Raschke puts it, Epiphanius was commenting on the text of Mark. When yet other patristic charges of mutilation against Marcion are found to impinge on Mark, and further charges of adding to Luke are likewise found applicable to Mark, the inference, Marcion's gospel = Mark, becomes so urgent that only a new body of evidence, accounting for these strange coincidences, can repel it. [ibid 229]


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