Thursday, December 30, 2010

Thank God For Ulrich Schmid

I couldn't believe my eyes.  Less than an hour after I sent a blind request to the great New Testament scholar Dr. Ulrich Schmid of the Universität Münster to help me track down a copy of Hermann Raschke's Werkstatt des Markus-Evangelisten, I actually received a received a response. I was standing in an H & M store shopping with my wife stunned to read this response on my Blackberry:

I might be able to chase up the copy at the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung which I have used back in the early 90ies. If I remember correctly, it was a fairly modest sized publication. Would you be happy with a scan? I might be able to persuade a student to make the scans. Or do you need to have a hard copy?


I should also say that when school reopens next week I will post online John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierma's English translation of the section in von Harnack's Marcion and the Alien God explaining the Philosophumena's report about a 'curtailed' Mark as attributable to Hippolytus's 'confusion' over Marcion's curtailing of Luke.

Feels like I am going back to school ...
I might have talked with him once on the phone a few years back. This was too good to be true. He said in a subsequent email that it might take two weeks to get all this done. When I get it I will pay to have it translated into English and post it at my blog for everyone to use. It will a very important resource for anyone trying to argue that the Mar Saba document is authentic as Raschke is most famous for his observation that the Marcionite gospel must have been the gospel of Mark. It stands to reason then that the reports of Marcion 'openly curtailing' his gospel (Irenaeus AH 1.27.2) as well as the Philosophumena's 'mix up' with Mark's cut fingers and Marcion's cut gospel (von Harnack's observation not mine) all comes from the same 'grund' as Clement's report about Secret Mark in the Letter to Theodore.


Email stephan.h.huller@gmail.com with comments or questions.


 
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