RE: Dating Paul's Writings
July 26, 2018 at 11:18 pm
(This post was last modified: July 27, 2018 at 12:53 am by JairCrawford.)
(July 26, 2018 at 11:05 pm)Minimalist Wrote: I have an advantage over you here. I see no evidence for the bullshit story that the "church" put out later. Therefore, I find no reason at all to give that story any credence at all.
We have no xtian manuscripts at all prior to the first century and damn little in the 2d.
What we know is that Justin Martyr, writing c 160 AD, knows of Marcion but never heard of any body named "paul."
We know that both Irenaeus and Tertullian writing in the late and very late 2d century treat Marcion as a heretic. Tertullian credits Marcion with producing the first church canon. Marcion calls it the gospel of the lord and it is most of what later came to be luke. He also included 10 epistles of someone named "paul."
The story of Marcion is that c 135 or so he went to Rome, gave them 200,000 sesterces, and founded a church and in less than 10 years was excommunicated as a heretic. I have never found any reference to this tale in Irenaeus, Tertullian or Hippolytus the earliest sources we have. Celsus, the first Greco-Roman writer to mention anyone named Jesus c 185 AD notes in one of his quotes that "christians utterly detest one another." There was certainly no overall governing body. In fact, we can't find any evidence of xtians in Rome at all during the first century.
And after that, things get real messy.
We don't really need to dwell on that story though. If we look at the Pauline epistles and compare them with Marcions teachings we inevitably run into several differences in theology. That is the main issue with the theory that Marcion wrote Paul. Now does this prove Paul's existence beyond a shadow of a doubt or prove authentic authorship by Paul? No. But that's not the point. The point is that differences in theology cause significant problems with the theory that Marcion wrote the Pauline epistles.
