Worth More than Many Sparrows - Essays in Honour of Willi Braun - Sarah E. Rollens
Diamonds and Rust: Q, Mythic Marcion, and the (De)Contextualization of Divine Wisdom
Worth More than Many Sparrows - Essays in Honour of Willi Braun - Sarah E. Rollens
Glen Fairen [+]
Oklahoma State University
Description
How one understands the chronological relationship between Marcion and Luke is not simply about who followed who, but also provides insight into the possible agenda behind such a relationship. For instance, if—as we are told by Irenaeus, Tertullian and Harnack—that Luke was followed by Marcion’s Euangelion, then the overlap between the two texts can be explained by not just Marcion’s need for a source, but was perhaps also in the service of some kind of anti- Jewish agenda, a common scholarly assumption that is given weight when combined with Marcion’s apparent rejection of the Hebrew Bible, and his ditheistic cosmology. On the other hand, if it was the author of Luke who followed and added to the Euangelion then the assumption that Marcion was anti-Jewish is suddenly less convincing. By expanding upon the thesis that Marcion did not redact Luke as is widely assumed, this paper will use Q as both a methodological wedge and as an analogous framework for looking at the fuzzy shape of what could have been Marcion’s Euangelion which, when divorced from his supposed anti-Judaism, seems to emphasize the novelty of Jesus as a de-contextualized and unprecedented Wisdom figure of a new and Alien God.