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Marcion's Gospel and the New Testament: Catalyst or Consequence?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2017

Jason Beduhn*
Affiliation:
Northern Arizona University

Abstract

These three short papers were delivered in the ‘Quaestiones disputatae’ session at the 71st General Meeting of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, held at McGill University, Montreal, on 3 August 2016. The session was chaired by Professor Carl Holladay, President of the Society.

Type
Quaestiones Disputatae
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

This is a slightly abridged version of the paper presented in Montréal. For the publication the presentation style was retained; only footnotes and bibliographical references were added.

References

19 BeDuhn, J., The First New Testament: Marcion's Scriptural Canon (Salem: Polebridge, 2013) 80–4Google Scholar.

20 Lieu, J., Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015) 209 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Cf. Lieu, Marcion, 208–9: ‘Thus, both at the macro- and at the micro-level any solution to the origins of Marcion's “Gospel” – or indeed of all Gospel relationships – that presupposes relatively fixed and stable written texts, edited through a careful process of comparison, excision, or addition, and reorganization, seems doomed to become mired in a tangle of lines of direct or indirect dependency, which are increasingly difficult to envisage in practice.’

22 Klinghardt, Das älteste Evangelium, i.183ff.

23 Klinghardt, Das älteste Evangelium, i.117–79.  His view revives a position I have discussed under the label of the Schwegler Hypothesis; see BeDuhn, The First New Testament, 84–6.

24 BeDuhn, The First New Testament, 70–7.

25 This is demonstrated by the fixed order of Paul's letters in the Marcionite canon.

26 ‘Marcion and the Origins of a Christian Scripture’, paper delivered in at the Annual Meeting of the North American Patristics Society, Chicago, 2016.

27 Due to the setting created by the polemical charge that he removed what he did not like from Luke, Marcion's concern has been misread consistently as a matter of ‘interpolation’ in a textual sense, rather than of adulteration of the kerygma by associating it with the ‘law and prophets’.  The latter sense becomes clear when his remarks are read apart from the assumption that they are text-critical in character.

28 See Gamble, H. Y., Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) 211–12Google Scholar.