In my last post I began to explain 'where I am coming from' in Biblical scholarship. Unlike most scholars in the field, I am not a Christian. I was not born into a household that accepted the (untenable) proposition that someone like Jesus could have mistaken himself to be the awaited messiah of the Jews. As I have noted before the Alexandrian Church of St. Mark always emphasized his divine status. That is the essence of monophytisism. For us, Jesus the messiah is a DEMOTION (aside from being an illogical construct) from his ORIGINAL status as God or the angel of the divine presence.
But I digress ...
The point I was trying to make is that once you throw 'Jesus Christ' in the garbage and posit instead the original Markan ('Marcionite') notion of Jesus Chrestos - i.e. Jesus A.K.A. the archangel Israel, the hypostasis that came to establish SOMEONE ELSE as the awaited messiah of Israel in the same way that the Logos/column of glory is envisioned in traditional Jewish thought - you start to have the makings of a RATIONAL understanding of what Jewish (and Samaritan) converts to Christianity originally believed.
Understanding what one first century Jewish convert to Christianity used to justify his faith is in my mind worth a trillion ignorant Gentile converts from the third and fourth centuries.
But that's just me ...
The apostle Mark and original evangelist is of course THE MOST VALUABLE Jew of the first century period. Understanding what he thought WHEN HE WROTE THE GOSPEL is priceless.
That's why I am so interested in the writings of Mark from the Samaritan tradition. They can be argued to have come from the first century and - as MacDonald notes - have verbatim quotes from the gospels and especially the Gospel of John.
Yet how do you reconcile 'Mark' writing the material which now looks like it came from the canonical gospel of John?
There is curious acrostic at the beginning of the Borgian manuscript of the Diatesseron as well as the Old Latin 'gospel harmony' which seems to be connected to the name Marqe:
out of the four evangelists-Matthew the elect, whose symbol is M, Mark the chosen, whose symbol is R, Luke the approved, whose symbol is K|, and John the beloved, whose symbol is H|.
As my best friend in the whole world - Dr. Ruairidh (Rory) Bóid Honorary Research Associate Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology School of Historical Studies Monash University explains:
This is very important. The introduction is the work of the scribe of this ms. or the work of the scribe of an ancestral ms., but not the words of Tatian himself. Either way, the words are an recent expansion of an old tradition. What is really important is that the name formed only fits SAMARITAN Aramaic, not Palestinian Jewish Aramaic and not Syriac. HERE YOU HAVE THE DOCUMENTATION OF THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE SAMARITAN MARQE WITH THE ORIGINAL SINGLE EVANGELIST. You already have the identification of Marqe the Samaritan with Marcus Agrippa from the names of the son and the father, which are too much for coincidence. You now have to distinguish between the person Marqe the Samaritan and the school that produced the hyms that speak of very recently rejecting former error and taking on the new orthodoxy. If the scribe’s explanatory words are old, they are a clue to the origin of the four names as the three TITLES or THRONE-NAMES of one person named Mark. Matthew and John are easily explained, as you have shown in detail yourself. Luke remains. I hope to send you something on this name or title soon. We can now account for the name Matthew (Hebrew Mattityahu, diminutive Mattai) = Dositheos being the name of the representative of ALL sects disapproved of by the later Samaritan orthodoxy. Dositheos is Matthew who is Mark. He represents the original religion, rejected by the new orthodoxy. He is then re-cast as an innovator. This was made easier by combining descriptions of later sects still bearing some resemblance to the original, on one hand, and the original system, on the other hand. He is called Dositheos = Matthew in all Samaritan writing to hide the fusing of the application of the name Mark to both the original Marcus Agrippa son of Titus author of the texts lying behind the hymns attributed to Marqe, who is Matthew and Dositheos, on one hand, and the school or fictional identity behind some of the hymns attributed to Marqe and speaking of very recent rejection of error, on the other hand.
Dr Boid has developed his theory that the four names of the evangelists could have been taken from the opening lines of what is now John. I have in turn argued that the 'Marcionite' gospel was itself the oldest witness to this 'fuller' gospel of Mark.
It is my guess that whoever affixed that acrostic to the Diatessaron was saying that it was a descendant of that original text written by Marqe (i.e. Mark).
