(May 8, 2016 at 7:46 am)Irrational Wrote:(May 8, 2016 at 1:56 am)Minimalist Wrote: Because he wrote his own...for a different audience. A Greco-Roman audience who didn't give a flying fuck about Herod or Moses but who might relate to real Roman figures like Augustus and Sulpicius Quirinius.
The most important thing you can do to begin to understand this shit is to utterly dismiss the fiction that the church has put out.
Then why didn't he do that with the rest of what he supposedly copied from "Matthew" and made such copied content appeal more to the Greco-Roman audience?
There are several other obvious incidents where he did exactly that. As for why? If you can figure out who he was, why don't you ask him? Good luck with that.
P.S. - "Luke" first appears as Marcion's "Gospel of the Lord," c 140 AD if Tertullian and Irenaeus can be trusted ( big if there.) The earliest extant fragment we have of "Luke" dates to the late 2d/early 3d century (175-225). The church mucky-mucks claimed that Marcion "edited" an existing version of Luke but there is no evidence that there was a version of "Luke" prior to Marcion and, let's face it, the church fathers were generally full of shit.
My guess is that while they thought Marcion had to go they liked the idea he came up with of a written "canon" and edited his to make it conform to the particular bullshit story they were putting out at the time....which includes the alleged epistles of fucking 'paul.'
