2014 Will be the Year that I Do Some Damage

It's been a long time - reading, studying, thinking.  And for what?  What exactly was the reason that the son of atheist parents started taking an interest in religion.  Honestly?  It was because the field is dominated by weak, inferior minds.  I am just being terribly honest.  The whole study of the Jesus thing is atrocious.  It's just a bunch of people pimping their prejudices. 

I can honestly say that I think that I have figured it all out.  I know that's not a great thing to come out and say.  It's the kind of thing that the crazy guy tells his friend before he goes off the deep end.  Nevertheless the kind of stuff that I am interested is so boring that even if I really did lose my mind, it's not going to get much attention. 

My research has never been to 'prove' or 'disprove' something else.  I always maintained what I thought were rather idealistic objectives - i.e. to know the truth as best as possible.  To this end, I think I have a pretty good handle on what the Marcionites were, what they believed, where they came from.  Marcionitism is sort of like beachhead into ancient Christianity.  I don't know if you can necessarily draw a straight line from Marcion to Jesus but I am pretty sure it's pretty damn close to being one.

The first thing that I should announce is that I am going to work on a serious paper for a fall conference on this very subject.  I think the monograph will be a launching pad to a book.  We'll see.  I have no interest in going any further in higher education.  I don't need to. 

The readers of this blog will see a lot of the research unfold for this project over the next few months.  I don't know if they are going to understand exactly where I am going with any of this.  I should say that I will demonstrate that an important section of 1 Corinthians was the Marcionite 'antitheses' that was affixed at the head of the codex which contained the gospel. 

I will get to all of that over the course of the next few weeks but for the moment the readers may even be more surprised to see what I am going to be working on in the next few days.  I have always taken very seriously Irenaeus's neglected claims that the heretical canon looked 'centonized' - that is that passages were rearranged like a mosaic where stones which depicted a king were made to like a fox or a dog.  I've seen this pattern appear with respect to the Ignatius canon and I have always been sure the same thing would show up in the Pauline letters. 

Starting tomorrow I am going to follow up on a suggestion I ran across in the Acts of Archelaus that 1 Corinthians 15:38 - 53 was somehow 'integrated' with the first chapters of 2 Corinthians.  I know this sounds very crazy to some but I have found surprising amounts of evidence to support this claim in a wide variety of sources related to Marcionitism i.e. De Recta in Deum Fide, the writings of Tertullian and other Church Fathers.  It's sometimes as plain as our earliest sources speaking of 'Corinthians' in the singular. 

I really believe that I can uncover the original antitheses of the Marcionites.  I just want to warn the reader that the exercise may look like complete nonsense beginning with going through a great number of sources which seem to 'blend' their readings of 1 Cor 15:38 - 53 and 2 Corinthians 3:1 - 5:8.  I especially see a strong correlation between material around 1 Corinthians 15:50 and the first verses of 2 Corinthians chapter 5 in the early sources for some reason.

I don't know how many of you are going to follow me for the long haul but this really is an adventure.  We are about explore a whole new world.