Were Marcionites Gnostic?


Several authors has said they think that at least one of the synoptic gospels is a reaction to Marcion’s theology or texts –

Tyson (2006) Marcion and Luke-Acts: a defining struggle

Knox, J (1942) Marcion and the New Testment, Ams Pr Inc

Charles B Waite (1881) History of the Christian Religion to the Year Two-Hundred

Jason BeDuhn (2013) ‘The First New Testament: Marcion’s Scriptural Canon’

Markus Vinzent (2014) Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels (Studia patristica suppt 2; Leuven: Peeters).

Matthias Klinghardt (2015) Das älteste Evangelium und die Entstehung der kanonischen, Francke a. Verlag, publisher.
Charles B. Waite, in History of the Christian Religion to the Year Two-Hundred, suggested that Marcion’s Gospel may have preceded Luke’s Gospel, and John Knox, in ‘Marcion and the New Testament’ (1942), agreed with Waite’s hypothesis.

Joseph B Tyson in ‘Marcion and Luke-Acts: a defining struggle’ (2006), made a case for Luke and Acts being responses to Marcion, rather than Marcion’s gospel being a rewrite of Luke as more widely proposed (I think Tyson was a student of Knox’s).

Vincent, in 2014 in ‘Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels’ (Leuven: Peeters), argues ‘for a re-dating of [all] the Gospels to the years between 138 and 144 AD’.

Matthias Klinghardt’s Das älteste Evangelium und die Entstehung der kanonischen (2015) is in German.

He wrote in an article in Novum Testamentum in 2008, titled ‘The Marcionite Gospel and the Synoptic Problem: A New Suggestion’ (Novum Testamentum; 50(1):1-27), that an alternative possibility to the problems of the Two-Source-Hypothesis and the Farrer-Goodacre-Theory (to address the Synoptic problem) is the inclusion of the gospel used by Marcion. He argued then it is not a redaction of Luke, but rather preceded Matthew and Luke and, therefore, belongs in the maze of the synoptic interrelations. The resulting model avoids the weaknesses of the previous theories, and provides compelling and obvious solutions to the notoriously difficult problems.
But apparently in Das älteste Evangelium und die Entstehung der kanonischen Klinghardt argues, like Vinzent, that all the gospels are post-Marcion.

Vinzent has also published Tertullian’s Preface to Marcion’s Gospel (2016) in which he claims “the reader will get a better understanding of both Tertullian’s literary response to Marcion and Marcion’s Antitheses and his Gospel, but also gain glimpses of what despite all the rhetoric historically might have provoked Tertullian’s response, namely more intellectual proximity between the two interlocutors than the battle on the surface would intimate.”

The April 2017 issue of New Testament Studies (63; 2) contains a collection of brief essays on the topic of Marcion’s Gospel by Klinghardt, Beduhn, & Judith Lieu [all seemingly with the same title]

Matthias Klinghardt ‘Marcion’s Gospel and the New Testament: Catalyst or Consequence?’ pp. 318-323

Jason Beduhn ‘Marcion’s Gospel and the New Testament: Catalyst or Consequence?’ pp. 324-9

Judith Lieu Marcion’s ‘Gospel and the New Testament: Catalyst or Consequence?’ pp. 329-334
http://sanctushieronymus.blogspot.it/2017/03/marcions-gospel-and-new-testament.html

Bart Ehrman mentions this subject into one of his books:

Marcion himself should not be thought of as a Gnostic; he held that there were only two gods, not many; he did not think of this world as a cosmic disaster, but as the creation of the Old Testament God; and he did not think divine sparks resided in human bodies that could be set free by understanding the true “gnosis.” Moreover, his docetic view does not appear to have been the typical view of Gnostics. Rather than thinking that Christ was completely divine but not human, most Gnostics appear to have thought that Jesus Christ was two entities: a human Jesus who was temporarily inhabited by a divine being. For them, there was a “separation” between Jesus and the Christ. We might call this a separationist Christology. – How Jesus Became God


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