Thursday, December 23, 2010

Aldoph Von Harnack Writing Over Thirty Years Before the Discovery of To Theodore Asks - "Why on Earth Does Hippolytus Think There is Such a Thing as a 'Shortened' Gospel of Mark?"

It is 1:00 AM and I am very tired but I just stumbled across something very important in von Harnack's Marcion: das Evangelium vom Fremden Gott.  German scholars are often superior to their English counterparts because they go beyond the literal word of the page.  I have noticed this often with von Harnack.  He tries to take into account the overall sense of the passage.  Here is a very good example.  I will attempt a better translation tomorrow after some sleep.  First the original German:

Daß Hippolyt, der in dem Syntagma (s. Pseudotert. unter "Cerdo", Filastr. , haer. 45) dies ausdrücklich sagt, in der Refut. VII, 30 Marcions Evangelium auf das Markus Evangelium zurückführt, gehört zu den mancherlei Unbegreiflichkeiten, die dieses Werk im Verhältnis zum Syntagma aufweist. Hippolyt muß geschlafen haben, als er dies niederschrieb, oder die Erinnerung an den wahren Tatbestand muß dem alten Manne so verblaßt gewesen sein, daß sich ihm das kurze Evangelium des Markus und der "stummelfingerige" Markus - so nennt er ihn, auf eine alte überlieferung über ihn anspielend - mit dem verkürzten Lukas in einem wirren tertium comparationis vermengte.

And now my rough attempt at translation which needs more work tomorrow:

The fact that Hippolytus, in Syntagma (see pseudo-Tert. under "Cerdo" Filastr., haer. 45) says this explicitly in the Refute. VII, 30 - Marcion's Gospel goes back to St Mark's Gospel - represents one of the many incomprehensible things that this work has compared to Syntagma.. Hippolytus must have been asleep when he wrote this, or the memory of the true facts must have faded for the old man so that he confused the short Gospel of Mark and "stump-fingered" Mark (so he calls it from an old tradition alluding it) having mingled it with the shortened Luke in a confused point of comparison [von Harnack Marcion das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, 2nd edn.; Leipzig: JC Hinrichs Verlag, 1924, II p. 240]

This is a very important reference.  Perhaps the most important Patristic witness for the gospel paradigm described in Clement's To Theodore.  I certainly do not possess von Harnack's command of the Greek language and he was writing this long before Morton Smith's discovery of the Mar Saba letter. 

Does the Philosophumena when read in its original Greek bear out von Harnack's interpretation that ho kolobodaktulos means not only 'shortened gospel' but that Marcion was being accused of shortening a 'fuller' Gospel of Mark?  Isn't that the exact inverse of what Clement says about Mark in to Theodore?  My experience there are always two sides to a dispute. Perhaps Hippolytus and Clement represent opposite ends of the same historical problem. 


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