Marcion And The Dating Of The Synoptic Gospels - Professor Markus Vinzent 

Jacob, do everything you can to return Dr. Vinzent over and over. You have great guests but it's hard to match this man's dedication to accuracy vs. having an agenda. He truly is unique and he really appreciates your work, as does everyone here. KH

Bro, this is probably your best video. And probably some of the most important work being done on any ancient text right now. Also I like the jump in production values and intro.

Outstanding discussion. Super informative and extremely interesting. Jacob, WELL DONE in getting such a definitively knowledgable scholar as Prof Vinzent on your show.

Fascinating presentation. So fascinating that I'm going to watch it again. Great work in getting the interview Jacob. Please do this again.

Dr. Price has thought this for a long time.. Reading his books convinced me long ago of late 2nd century dating of the synoptic Gospel‘s...

Had never heard of Marcion Gospel .... I am from of Sanatana Dharma and I love the story of Lord Jesus and various Gospel particularly Gospel of St Thomas

Great interview! Really got me thinking. I have often wondered about Marcion's contribution to the development of Christianity and the Canon.

Great to see interviews like this. I recall stumbling across one of Vinzent's books a few years back, feeling sticker shock at the price, and then looking on RU-vid to see if he'd done any popular engagements like this. At the time there was nothing, but I'm glad your channel has started to fill that gap.

this is becoming the "Go to" channel for scholarship on the origins and motives of Christianity

Incredible discussion. Thanks to both of you for helping me work through this material.

Wow! Most impressive and eye-opening discussion. I love the direction this scholarship is taking and look forward to more.

this was fantastic! best postcast ever. never saw Jacob excited like this😀

Im going to enjoy reading Markus Vinzent book

I’ve rewatched this four times. Fascinating.

Absolutely thrilling scholarship. Thank you.

Excellent guests comments . Thanx

Once again a masterful interview. I don't believe in Marcion primacy but could not quit listening

Wow! One of the very best presentations so far on these very formidable core timeline questions about the creation of the NT in World History Thank you so much! I will be getting some of his books!

Fantastic episode

I saw some of the later episodes of Jacob's channel featuring the esteemed Dr Vinzent but only now watched this foundational one. I am an avid watcher of this channel but I come with my own agenda. Being a former Christian minister who converted to Judaism, I am deeply concerned with tracing the endemic anti-Jewish bias which is visible in the NT and the patristics to Christian origins. If we accept the Marcionite origin hypothesis, a profound irony comes into view. Marcion with his radical distinction between the faith of Israel and the newness of the heavenly visitation of the Christ inoculates his religion against anti-Judaism. For Marcion, Jews are an irrelevancy. It is very hard to imagine the "rejection of the Jewish messiah by the Jews" in the Marcionite scheme. On the other hand, the judaisation of post-Marcion proto-orthodoxy sets up the antagonism between the Jewish people and the developing church. I wonder if this antithesis is not better understood as reflecting an antagonism resulting from the aftermath of the Jewish wars - the Bar Kochba war being even more important than the first Jewish war of the previous century. In this respect it may be fruitful to note that R' Akiva, one of the pivotal rabbinic 'fathers', was martyred during or in the aftermath of the Bar Kochba war. Among his students was Aquila Ponticus of *Sinope* who provided a very literal translation of the Pentateuch into Greek, following R' Akiva's strict adherence to every literal nuance of the text also in the Greek as best as possible. According to the Syriac Epiphanius all three non-Septuagint translations of the Torah were made by converts to Judaism: Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion. Aquila is considered the same as Onkelos the Proselyte who wrote the standard Aramaic translation (Targum) which bears the stamp of R' Akiva's exegesis in many places. It is entirely possible that Marcion and Aquila know one another. Marcion was a ship owner and provider of services to imperial Rome and Aquila, reported by Epiphanius to have been related by marriage to the emperor Hadrian, may well have been charged with some imperial duties that brought him into contact with Marcion. In this period Jews and non-Jews alike were dealing with Jewish-Roman relations and the influence of Jewish messianic politico-religious ideas on Roman imperial consolidation. I am not a great fan of the Flavian conspiracy theories but in the Antonine period during and after the Bar Kochba war a clarification of the relationship between burgeoning rabbinic Judaism and the imperial interests may well have been on the books. Marcion's choice of a complete divorce and Aquila's choice of retreat into Jewish consolidation could have been living in peaceful coexistence. Nailing Judaism on the cross of proto-orthodox perverse appropriation of the Hebrew canon to canonical Paul's anti-Torah mystery religion is in my opinion the main cause of the sickening mode of thinking which is anti-Judaism and which produced the New Testament.

this is really overwhelming science and truth!

There should have been many, many follow-up questions asked of Vinzent. For example -- Who were the authors of the four canonical gospels? For what purpose were they written? To be read in church? To be given to bishops? To be distributed to potential converts who had different religious traditions? Why do the included miracles differ in these gospels? If the gospels were written after Paul, why do the gospels not mention Paul?

âbsolutelyamazing! thanks for brining light into the darkness! I always thought "Why do the gospeös never mention good old Paul? Why does Paul have absolutely have NOTHING to do with the gospel narrative??? That made and makes NO SENSE at all! Thank you thank you from Germany!

Another great podcast!

Really love to see you get into the nitty gritty of his theory, I am curious how he believes Mark is derived from Marcion. His off hand comment here that Mark isn't written in very good Greek compared to Marcion seems a little thin as an argument to me.

Great job!!! You're getting better and better!

I have a consuming interest with the question of when the synoptic gospels were written I find the subject fascinating

Great stuff.

Great video.

Always very informative and entertaining thank you for your channel

Wow! I need to learn more about Marcion and his collection of texts. Thank you Jacob!

This is coming a year too late, but I am glad for the ‘archives’ today. Such an interesting discussion; giving me pause to re-read certain texts in a new light. Thanks.

This video demonstrates how advanced European scholarship is vis a vis the synoptic question .

This video is thoroughly entertaining , I enjoyed every bit of it

I finally found an explanation for all of these names that appear in Acts, the Pauline Corpus and the Pastorals which perplexed me. They seemed to have a basis because they stretch across the 27 texts even though some are minor bit cast members in this grand theatrical production. Andronicus being one such example for whom which Paul sends greetings. He is mentioned only once. The fabrication is fascinating. I wonder if the redactors actually engaged in purposeful deception or did they actually believe the Holy Spirit was guiding them in this matter. I feel for the most part the latter to be valid. I don't think they were trying to be intentionally deceptive.

Professor Vinzent said, "The burden lies on those people who date these texts (Gospels) early", citing the noteworthy absence Gospel narrative references in the pastoral letters. However, one should keep in mind that the Gospels chronicle Jesus' ministry "to the lost sheep of the House of Israel", i.e. the Messiah's offer of the Kingdom to Israel as fulfillment of the Old Covenant. This is _not_ the programme for the Church. Separating Law observance from the "The Law of Liberty" was a continuing source of confusion and division in the early church (e.g. Galatians). Because of this we can understand the lack of references to Gospel narratives in letters to the churches because those narratives deal specifically with Old Covenant issues. Churches still get Jesus' Old Covenant sermons mixed up with New-Covenant-specific teaching resulting in no end of doctrinal confusion.

Thanks

Would be interesting if we knew that Paul's confrontation with Peter at Antioch was actually Jerusalem revoking their agreement with him

Where is the intro part filmed? The Caucasus? The Alps?

Interesting enough. John's gosple is full of gnostic symbol, its seen like a polemical tool for thomistic comunity..

To be honest, I would have liked to have heard some challenges. Luke-acts doesn't know anything about the bar kokhba revolts, which seems important hearing this. Talking about the same era

I don't buy this critique of Mark's Greek: "someone writing such poor Greek can't have invented a genre", no, it adds something to the mark theory - a response by other early readers to say " I can do better than this". Or, "I can fix this". If Mark is just a cut down of this "earlier text" why wouldn't it carry the better Greek? (Sure, some think it is like Twain, but I think that is Giving Mark more than they deserve...) Additionally, if you think that the Gospels all went through stages of editing it would push the dating of the current "canonical versions" even farther forward than suggested here. This causes other problems... I find it strange how the "Book of Signs" (or "Signs Gospel") gets left out of the discussion because The canonical John seems so much later than the others, but elements of it are early. John itself seems to be a kind of intergenerational collection. - it is like a microcosm of the NT. The "Book of Signs" can't be a response to a Marcion Gospel... How would it then morph generationally to become John by the time our early fragments appear? John shows that there really is no first, many things were being written collected, redacted, edited ... You can't point to one guy like this. Nobody really invented a genre. It seems more likely that Marcion's attitude created a similar legalistic backlash and the doors were slammed on continuing intergenerational developments. He began the institutionalization of the church, and the closing of the texts.

For Marcion to have preceded Luke would require a fundamental shift in what we think of Marcion's theology. I therefore cannot accept this premise at this time. The standard expectation is that Marcion took Luke's gospel and removed the parts he found offensive, and what he found offensive included any reference to predictions of Jesus in the Tanakh, as he didn't believe Jesus was strongly tied to YHWH. If he successfully scrubbed Luke of all such references, then it would be difficult to distinguish that from a Luke that took Marcion's gospel and added these references to the Tanakh. I submit, however, that Marcion did not successfully remove all of these references. The reconstruction we have today makes very frequent reference to the "son of man." This was in Greek, but taken from an Aramaic idiom for "human being." He didn't recognize that this was in fact quote-mined from Daniel 7:13, which was originally in Aramaic, and one of the "messianic prophecies" claimed by and frequently alluded to by the gospel authors. This is of course not only not a prophecy that in any way aligns with Jesus of Nazareth, but the book itself is a known fraud, war propaganda for the Maccabean Revolt. Daniel 7 might have been slightly earlier, but even if completely authentic, this is still a quote mine from the Tanakh that Marcion was avoiding. Marcion even eliminated Jesus reading from Isaiah in Luke 4. It appears to be extremely doubtful that Marcion would have coined the phrase "son of man" as applied to Jesus of Nazareth, and would imply a far different set of motivations to his work. For him to simply not recognize the significance of this phrase when redacting an existing work is far more plausible.

The problem is that Western scholars mostly used secondary sources instead of primary sources as eastern churches has...

Somewhere I once read that Buddhism is Hinduism "packed for export." That is to say stripped of many of its complexities and made easier to understand. It seems to me that Paul is the same thing for Judiasm/Jesus. "Jesus is in the sky, just believe and you will be saved." Don't worry about those dietary laws, and surely don't cut yourself. Just believe and share in the resurrection. I know I am over, over simplifying, but there is that element in Paul. No wonder the Pauline branch spread much faster and wider than the Jerusalem branch.

Great conversation. A tip. Be more precise with your questions. Markus need’s precision, otherwise the answer will be all over the place 😊

Without the Resurrection, nobody today would know who Jesus was today.

Famously Jesus said that he had not come to abolish the law but to perfect it. Why would a first century Jew say anything so obvious, that is not wanting to abolish the Law??? This only makes sense as a reaction to Marcion's ideas.

But if Marcion did not write his gospel, it might and probably was, written much earlier. So the other gospels were also written before Marcion.

One may fairly ask if there were simply liturgical traditions that were constantly under the "Spirit's" influence, and were neither entirely oral nor written. They were geographically dispersed, from which someone like Marcion could derive a more homogenized codex. These liturgical narrative anaphoras would have titular apostolic nomenclature attached, and could be easily collated and edited.

Would your audience understand more of your guest's hypotheses if you summarize those key points at the beginning before your guest drill down into the details and then restate those key points as your guest wanders around each area of their topics?

You get so used to hearing speculative uninformed and plagiarized stuff that when you listen to something like this it makes you really excited. Well done awesome discussion, let's have more follow ups.

So many issues with this theory. First, in Chapter 8 of the very Jewish themed Didache written before the 2nd Century or in the early part of it, there is a quotation of the Lord's Prayer as found in the "Gospel". This version closely matches what is found in the Gospel of Matthew Chapter 6:9-13. Also, the Didache in Chapter 16:7 again quotes from Matthew 16:27. So the Gospel of Matthew referenced by the Didache obviously predates Marcion. Further, since the Didache is a very Pro Jewish writing and Marcion rejected anything Jewish and only used Luke's Gospel, we have evidence that Marcion did not write the Gospels. Second, in the Epistle of Barnabas written between 80-120 AD, it says in chapter 15:9 "Wherefore also we keep the eighth day for rejoicing, in the which also Jesus rose from the dead, and having been manifested ascended into the heavens." So Professor Markus Vinzent is mistaken about the Church Father's not discussing the resurrection.

Lol of course it's all Second Century 🤣

  This is a marvelous exposition, thank you very much! Marcion and Paul need to be further studied. I've only got two minor comments (criticism). 1) "Elite" (writing) is a problematic term. Elite (chosen) by what, in what why? There can be a money elite, a power elite. It would seem that "Bildungselite" is intended. Certainly, there was some level of erudition there. It doesn't mean, however, these authors were at the absolute top-layer. 2) The use of "patriarchal" in connection with 'silencing female voices' is unfortunate. Clearly, it is due to feminist propaganda and distortion. 'Partriarchal' simply refers to a male ancestor, a person typically honoured. It says nothing, absolutely nothing about female voices. Indeed, most societies that honour male ancestors, also honour female ancestors (matriarchs) and, more importantly, give full credit, access and room to female voices. Societies can have female priests, very estimeed holy women, even to a very large proportion and still be partriarchal. In fact, it is even uncommon of truly patriarchal societies to not honour, highly regard and listen to women and for the latter not to have very high agency. The latter days distortion has no place in the discussion of ancient realities. The context of the Torah also needs to be elucidated. It might have referred to specific cultic activity; such as existed also for women. It doesn't have to be taken as absolute; indeed, doing so is polemical and absurd. A society were a partriarch is firmly established has no need and no reason to supress female voices, quite on the contrary. An embattled situation can, for both sides, be different. Let's not forget, that Levantine society had cults the sacrifice of firstborn mal children, dismemberment and ritual mutilation of male genitals would widely abound... all of which have to do with female-centered cults. That some of them have been integrated into the Torah only serves to illustrate the power and intransigence of them. I can hear, as today, many female voices there.

I am someone who grew up in an Evangelical Christian Church and read through the New Testament a few times. I understand much of what Professor Vinzent is saying regarding how each gospel is very different at the beginning and the end of the book. Also is would seem strange that poor fishermen from Galilee would start writing books in Greek. One thing I wonder however is that there is a lot of geographical information in the Gospels. I did not hear any reference to how accurate that geographical information was in your video. When I read the gospels, it seems like the authors were familiar with the places and the times they were discussing. How would Greek Elites know all that information 110 years after the crucifiction and 70 years after the destruction of Jerusalem? I would imagine that Greek knowledge about that time and place would be very limited in AD 140.

Wouldn't that mean that Marcion believe in 3 Gods (the God who created the Earth, the God who sent Jesus, and Jesus himself)?

From whom might Marcion have obtained the narrative involving Gallio, Proconsul of Achaia (Acts 18:12-17) who was in office less than 2 years (circa 51 CE)? Who but an eye-witness would know about it? If Acts is eye-witness to 51 CE then Luke. If Luke be dragged back from the future, what of the others?

If you accept Luke as first Gospel and Mark as intentionally deceptive anti-Christian propaganda, then things start to really make sense. 😮

Perhaps one shouldn't think it remarkable Aramaic was not used. The audience for Aramaic could only be "the lost sheep of the House of Israel", who had already rejected Jesus' Kingdom offer. Jesus told the Jews that the only sign to be given such a generation would be the sign of Jonah. That meant the offer would go instead to the gentiles (prefigured in Jonah's preaching to Nineveh, an un-people, after having himself been entombed for three days and nights but in a fish). A gentile offer would mean a gentile language, including the chronicles of Israel's rejection of the Old Covenant kingdom.

I wonder if the Hebrew Gospels are older than Marcion's? The stuff could have been a precursor as its pretty similar to his but distinct enough, or perhaps it's similar because it's their version of it.

It is very difficult for people with very detailed knowledge to summarize their beliefs before they drill down into blow-by-blow details. This is the job of the interviewer -- who must advocate for their audience. They must insist that their guests present summaries before the blow-by-blows. The interviewer must then re-state the summary for each major section of the presentation. Most interviewers do not do this. They let their guest go on and on. It is easy to fall off the horse either way. The trick is to stay on the horse.

So why wouldn't Mark have resurrection appearances under this theory?

I have a theory. Jesus lived about 40 years later than is usually quoted. It was started by exiled Jews who had fled Jerusalem. Jesus was a militant leader who died after being crucified for his participation in the war. The Romans would not have stood for hero worshiping a trouble maker, so all of Paul’s letters and the gospels were put back into time to throw the Romans off the scent. They reversed the roles, rich becomes poor, first comes last, to soften his image. Marks gospel was first, and Mathew’s was second and attempted to pull the history back to the Jewish faith. The outsiders were drawn in because of its appealing message. Over time the original intention was lost and a new religion was born.

@08:45 - this ‘.. Jesus the Messiah, having been born and having suffered ‘ strikes me as a creed defined against the background of Docetist claims or Jewish objections. Justin’s archetypal Jew, Trypho, objects that 1) The Messiah could not have come in the flesh yet, since he had not been designated publicly as Messiah by the eschatological Elijah 2) The Messiah could not have suffered on the Cross, because he was thus shown to be accursed. These two points of the confession - having cone in the flesh, and having suffered, were the points challenged by Jewish Christ-deniers and docetists - the main opponents of Ignatius and of John the presbyter before him. The resurrection was of course presupposed. If not, the confession is senseless - void.

Professor Markus seems to be undermining Bart Ehrman's claims to "multiple independent sources" attesting to the historical Jesus (in "Did Jesus Exist?" by Bart Ehrman) these sources being: special Mark, special Matthew, special Luke, Q, John and oral tradition.

so... after two millenia, the heretic marcion may be right all along...

pa·tris·tic adjective relating to the early Christian theologians.

John A.T. Robinson Redating the NEW TESTAMENT "One of the oddest facts about the New Testament is that what on any showing would appear to be the single most datable and climactic event of the period - the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, and with it the collapse of institutional Judaism based on the temple - is never once mentioned as a past fact.

It's amazing how such "educated" people gloss over the introduction to Luke, which makes theories like this quackery just seem like ways for PhDs to sell books to atheists.

And also it's glossed over that Luke never mentions Paul's death. But go get that money, sell those books and your soul.

Huh? In the book of Acts Peter mentions the resurrection of Jesus. The majority of historians agree that the book of Acts was written a few short years after the crucifixion and almost timely with the events so what is this guy talkin about that there is no writings of the Resurrection in the first century? Also he beats around the bush and can't even answer the first question going on a long diatribe how is going to develop his answer. It shows he has nothing concrete I can't listen to it anymore. He's one of the modern historian- theologians that are attempting to rewrite passages in the Bible and one of the weapons they use is claiming the age of when the books were written to discredit writings

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul hinges his faith of Christ with the "reality of the Resserection" If you didn't believe, GO TALK TO THOSE WHO WITNESSED IT, says Paul- We know that Luke was a "fan of Paul's" . Marcion was tired of "salvation by the Law" and thus he allows no book , that combines law and grace and simply wrote them out. Marcion did not understand that the law was given to drive us, with empty hands and pockets, DESPERATE- are driven to Jesus as SAVIOR, SOLA FIDE. In todays world, men still try to reconcile Paul and James , when I believe James is FALSE, Paul Correct. The reason Christianity is sola 'fide' today? I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

WRONG! CONJECTURES BASED ON PURE SPECULATION.

In the next ten years, archeology will end this nonsense.

The subtitles are wild. His collection of porn .. a poor line scholar… martian 😂

insanity.