Professor Markus Vinzent Responds to His Critics About His Theory of Marcionite Primacy

I have to leave work right now but I happened to discover that Professor Vinzent not only responded to my (positive) comments about his research but also attempted to explain his position to a noted critic, Roger Pearse.  I happen to love Roger's site.  We may not agree on everything but his work is so invaluable - i.e. for translation of texts and making them publically available - it is hard not to love him.  In any event, here is his response to Roger's relatively hostile questioning of his published position in favor of Marcionite primacy:

Dear Roger,

thanks for both your comments on this blog here as well as on your own. Let me take them together (that is why I copied your comments from your own blog into this one), and, for clarity and comprehensiveness, let me please answer in between your text (marked by a > here):

>This theory seems rather perverse.

I know of the novelty of my hypothesis, but ‘perverse’ is a strong word, but maybe you are right, as it ‘turns on its head’ our previous understanding of Marcion. But be assured, it is the same old patristic scholar who has diligently (as much as I can) worked in other fields and is not interested at all in any kind of novelty for novelty’s sake, or ideologically inclined towards any form of revisionism. What I propose (and you have only here the very condensed form of an abstract of an abstract, but I am happy to forward you the pdf of the final text which is with the publisher now), has grown out of almost 20 years research on the Resurrection of Christ in Early Christianity.

>It does, after all, contradict every scrap of primary evidence that we have about Marcion.

It does, indeed, contradict most of how we read our primary evidence so far, but I think, it does not contradict the primary evidence itself – let me give you a few examples below.

>It also forces us to consider that our best detailed source on Marcion — Tertullian — is rubbish.

I know, how well you know Tertullian, and I would be mad if I thought for one moment that Tertullian were rubbish. He is highly intelligent, certainly our best rhetorician in the first three centuries, and because of that – I had already suggested in earlier papers that we have to read him as a rhetorician and apologetic author (which not always is being done).

>If so, then just what do we objectively know about Marcion? Nothing much, I suggest.

If we read Tertullian carefully, I think, a lot of knowledge about Marcion can be gained, and I think, slightly more than has previously be seen (especially since a lot of what is being written about Marcion is either taken from Harnack or – as more recent studies show – is read against Harnack, while I think, one has to start by reading the sources, instead.

>At that point, which piece of evidence requires the theory proposed? None, as far as I can tell.

That needs to be seen. You will find a very detailed, and hopefully nuanced discussion in the monograph. At least all those colleagues who have read the manuscript so far could not fail the arguments, even if they said that they go against their inner feelings – but these are shaped by our traditional views.

>This whole process all seems very stale to me. We’ve all seen this kind of “logic” so very many times before, and it’s called revisionism. It always works in the same way — it invents a theory which is the reverse of what everyone has always thought, and then selectively debunks the data in order to create “evidence” for it. It’s tedious, to give it no worse name.

hopefully not – and let me assure you, instead of having had a theory from which I worked, it was the other way around. The beginning, those many years back, I only wanted to write a conference paper on early Christian narratives of Christ’s Resurrection – and there are a few, though not many, less than I first thought. More important, I discovered that almost nobody had written about Christ’s Resurrection in Patristics. The French scholar Adalbert Hamman, certainly not a revisionist, published two articles on this topic in 1975 and drew attention to the incongruence between New Testament and early Christian studies: ‘While there is an abundant exegetical literature on the question of the Resurrection, early Christian studies are practically inexistent’ or, in short, show a ‘virgin territory’. And although, three years ago, N.T. Wright published his over 700 page monograph on the Resurrection, it is still predominantly a NT-monograph, not a thorough study of Patristics. So, how can we explain this discrepancy? That was the beginning of my journey, not a theory, nor a blow by aliens, but the discovery of an unanswered question which I wanted to answer. I then looked into Aloys Grillmeier and his magisterial work on ‘Jesus Christ in Christian Belief’, a multi-volume encyclopaedia on how early Christians of the first five centuries reflected about Jesus Christ (2nd ed. 1979). Grillmeier discusses the relation between the historical Jesus and the Lord alive in his Church, in prayers, liturgy, creeds and controversies. The index to the first volume, covering the period up to the year 451 AD, notes only five references to the Resurrection: The Gospel of Peter (2nd c.), Eusebius of Caesarea (4th c.), and three texts of the fifth century. Amongst the many Latin terms in the index, resurrectio is missing, and the Greek word ἀνάστασις (‘Resurrection’) refers only to the apostle Paul and to the fourth century Alexandrian presbyter (and ‘heresiarch’) Arius. Or, take another, more recent example, ‘The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies’ (2008): on 1020 pages with chapters on ‘Interpretation of Scripture’, ‘Doctrine of God’, ‘Christ and Christologies’, ‘Doctrine of Creation’, ‘Early Christian Ethics’ and other topics by most eminent scholars, there is not a single reference to Christ’s Resurrection. I hope you get a feeling for the reality of a problem that needs explanation, and see that I was not driven by revisionist energies.

>Let’s have our statements about the past based on the historical record, hmm, and not on attempts to turn that record upside down.

agreed.

>Considering that Tertullian has Marcion’s works before him, and works about Marcion before him, and lives within half a century of the time when the heretic got the bum’s rush from the Roman church, this is all rather cute. It can only be advanced by ignoring the data in the historical record — selectively, of course — in order to fabricate a fairy-story.

Let us move from a Tertullianist form of rhetoric to a close reading of sources. That Marcion ‘got the bum’s rush from the Roman church’ is more than an oversimplification of what Tertullian reports:

‘For it is agreed that they [Marcion and Valentinus] lived not so very long ago in the reign of Antoninus for the most part, and that at first they were believers in the doctrine of the Catholic Church in Rome during the episcopate of the blessed Eleutherus, until, on account of their ever restless speculation whereby they corrupted the brethren also, they were expelled more than once. Marcion, indeed, with the two hundred sesterces that he had brought into the Church and when at last banished into perpetual separation from the faithful, they spread abroad the poisonous seeds of their peculiar doctrines. Afterwards, when Marcion had professed penitence and agreed to the condition imposed upon him, namely, that if he could bring back to the Church the residue whom he had instructed to their perdition, he should be received into communion, he was prevented by death.’ (Tert., De praescr. 30)

According to this text by Tertullian, there was, as S. Moll (The Arch-Heretic Marcion, 2010, 45) comments ‘much vacillation or wavering back and forth as to Marcion’s status of membership of the church’, although Tertullian states that Marcion at first was faithful to the doctrine of the Catholic Church in Rome, and at the end of his life ’should be received into communion’ which was only prevented by his death. Moll is also reluctant to state that Marcion was expelled by the community of Rome, and I agree, as the above text is the earliest information we have about it (nothing of this is mentioned in Tertullian’s Against Marcion). While Tertullian lived and wrote at a time when communities were more and more directed by a monarchian bishop, developed mechanisms of exclusion, based on a differentiation between orthodox and heretics (although Tertullian himself is a good example that it was not, yet, clear what orthodoxy or catholicity meant, and that one could rather leave one community and join another and think that one lived on the orthodox side), a few decades earlier when Marcion lived, Justin and even after him Irenaeus had great difficulties to single out the wolves from the sheep. That none of the authors prior to Tertullian mention that Marcion had been expelled must make us even more cautious not to overinterpret Tertullian. As late as the sixth century, we know from the Chronicle of Edessa that Marcion was not expelled, but that he simply had left the catholic church. Similarly, authors after Tertullian convey information about Marcion’s life which differs substantially from Tertullian and from each other so that it is hardly possible to create from this evidence a coherent picture of Marcion’s life (see more in S. Moll, ‘Three against Tertullian’, JTS 59, 2008, 169-80). Or shall we believe with Ps.-Tertullian and Epiphanius that Marcion abused a virgin and was already expelled by his own father, a bishop?

>But Dr Vinzent is someone I have met (a rare event). That Dr Vinzent is a very capable patristic scholar, doing much excellent work, including getting Cyril of Alexandria, Contra Julianum, into a critical edition and modern languages. It’s hard to imagine such a man peddling such stale old revisionism. After all, we’ve all seen this kind of trick before, haven’t we?

thanks for the flowers, and sorry that I caused you pains. I hope to be able to show that what I am suggesting is far from being old, stale and revisionistic, but on the contrary a close reading especially of Tertullian.

To give you one example, an important one – the question of circumcision of the Scriptures:

None of the first authors who engage with Marcion mention him having shortened or circumcised the Scriptures. On the contrary – they only let us know that he put forward awkward interpretations. In contrast, however, we are told by Tertullian that Marcion accused people who upheld the Jewish belief of having combined the Torah, the Prophets with the Gospel which presupposes that these others have produced such a combined, enlarged edition compared to the stand-alone Gospel that Marcion used:

‘If that Gospel which among us is ascribed to Luke … is the same that Marcion by his Antitheses accuses of having been falsified by the upholders of Judaism with a view to its being so combined in one body with the Law and the Prophets that they might also pretend that Christ had that origin’(Tert., Adv. Marc. IV 5).

Already Irenaeus must have known Marcion’s criticism of his fellows, as he rhetorically retorts to Marcion that not Irenaeus and those who use a combined version of Tora, Prophets and Gospel(s) are judaizing, but, on the contrary, that Marcion is circumcising the Scriptures, a particularly fine rhetorical answer, as he accuses Marcion to be nothing else than a Judaizer himself who does what he rejects (Iren., Adv. haer. III 11,7). In one sense, Irenaeus is certainly correct, as Marcion had picked up a number of features from his Rabbinic colleagues, for example the Ketubim (Scriptures, not Torah or Prophets alone) orientation and the belief in the resurrection (of course, not of the body in Marcion). Tertullian follows Irenaeus and advances the same criticism against Marcion. I cannot see, how else one should read Tertullian’s admission of Marcion’s argument, even if, then, Tertullian tries to counter-argue that Marcion’s argument presupposes that not Marcion produced the first edition, but that the ones he accuses must have produced a product prior to Marcion’s accusation. What Tertullian, of course, omits is that publications even in the second century were a multi-staged process. The first stage was often a publication of memoranda or memorabilia (apomnemoneumata) for the classrooms (this is what Justin, for example, talks about when he speaks of the so-called Gospels). As I explain in the monograph in more detail – and as I will explain in another forthcoming monograph in even more detail – the discourse between the various teachers in Rome (also their competition and disagreements) was intimate, intense and by far not as antagonistic as writers like Irenaeus and Tertullian later try to make us believe. Recent scholarship has shown to what extent Irenaeus, for example, builds on Valentinian theology, and similar adaptations and adoptations are shown in my book of other teachers in the second century.

>It’s always done in the same tired old way. You take whatever the historical record says, imagine the opposite, then find excuses to selectively ignore the record until you create a vacuum on the subject you want to fake, and then proclaim that the vacuum proves that Jesus was an astronaut (or whatever). Of course it isn’t very honest, but the faker often hides this from himself by various excuses. It also tends to bring the humanities into disrepute.

again, strong language. Having gone through all the first, second and third century evidence, and concentrated on the first two centuries, I hope that I have not overlooked anything and present everything of relevance. I asked and ask colleagues to point out where I missed something – already the reviewers have highlighted a few omissions which, on reflection, however turned out to have strengthened the argument of the book.


>Can anyone even find this trick interesting these days? Haven’t we seen it so many times before?

Writing a book is a means of transparency, presenting arguments and being ready for criticism. Where there are counter-arguments, I will engage with them.

>So I have a theory. Clearly Markus Vinzent has been abducted by aliens, and replaced with a clone.

Not every theory is correct. Whether mine is, the discussion will show. Whether or not I have been abducted by aliens and replaced with a clone, only the ones who know me and have met me will be able to judge. Know yourself – as we know – is the biggest challenge in life.

>The pseudo-Markus is vainly attempting to establish his place as a scholar, but has not realised that revisionism is now old hat.

This, at least, is an argument which needs little disproval. I have got my third chair in the course of my life, do not aim for another one, nor for any other position, accolades or similar things, and simply follow the scholarly interests in the best ways to find out how best to make sense of the evidence we have.


>And obviously we must now all campaign to have the real Markus Vinzent back.

Dear Roger, your detailed blog entry is part of the compaign, as it allows me to respond and engage with your concerns.

>Some may protest that there is no actual evidence of abduction, and this is true. But then, it’s more evidence than there is for a first century Marcion!

First century Marcion? We know, he is called the old man amongst the teachers in Rome, but I would not go too far back, rather move the dating of other texts.

Best yours Markus

PS to Tom on Papias, Justin, Irenaeus etc.

We do not know when Papias wrote. Scholars like T. Rasimus place him in the 140s, hence make him a contemporary of Marcion and cannot be taken as evidence for a priority of Mark or Matthew to Marcion. In my book I have a few paragraphs on Papias, and it is certainly interesting to see that Papias (of course in the fragmentary state of his work) does not mention those authorities that are dear to Marcion (Paul, the Gospel which we know as Luke), while he refers to those that Marcion does not use (Mark, Matthew …, the Jewish Scripture). Who reacts to whom?