Mac the Nice
bigstring.com>:
> Easy to see where this is going-
Especially since it's a re-play of an earlier conversation
where Mac attacked Marcion while demonstrating severe
ignorance of the evidence about him. Mac began with the notion
Marcion was the head of gnosticism: already wrong, since
gnostics were separated into many different schools without any
'gnostic Pope' above them.
Then Mac moved along, misattributing the Sethian depiction
of a "crazed, evil creator" to Marcion, who questions the
Creator's goodness w/out labeling him insane. He also insisted
Marcion wrote _Titus_ and _John_, not realizing both are
missing from Marcion's canon, the oldest known NT, and answered
-- when I pointed out what he overlooked -- by demanding I
"present the text of Marcion": a howler, since Marcion's ideas
survive entirely in other materials like Tertullian's
attempted refutation. His own work has been lost for the large
part of two millennia.
Speaking of what's missing, Mac never offered even a scrap
of evidence from the sources showing Marcion attacking the
Jews as a group, leaving his claim of M's anti-Semitism totally
unsupported.
[John 8:15-16]
> So this 'Jesus' created of the Marcionite imagination--whether by Marcion
Mac likes making his failures into assumptions. Unable to
find any evidence backing his assertion Marcion was an
anti-Semite, Mac argued he wrote the Gospel of John in order to
blame him for the anti-Semitic verses there. But Mac
fucked-up that project by confessing he had nothing more to say
than Joseph Turmel, who limits his speculation to dual
authorship, claiming John includes both Catholic and Marcionite
themes.
> But despite the ravings of Cerdo, and Marcion after him, it was Cerinthus,
> yet another great Gnostic heresiarch for whom, contrarily the name of
> Jehovah, and the Jewish Law continued to be sacred! While yet, for him it
> was only the Creation itself that was dirty and beneath the dignity of God.
Mac is confusing Cerinthus with the Ebionites. The source
he quoted earlier, Irenaeus' _Adv. Haer._, discusses them
together, apparently leading Mac to jumble their different ways
of thinking. Cerinthus isn't said to respect either the
Creator of this world or the law he imposed. The opposite: he
teaches the Creation was the work of low angels and he
considers the law their doing, too. By contrast, the Ebionites
-- not a gnostic group -- worship Yahweh, believe that his
world is a divine creation, and consider his laws binding. See
Irenaeus, AH 1.26:1-2.
> There was just something about this Hebrew notion of a god who works that
> struck the high-born Greek/Asiatic sensibility as being quite strictly
> boorish, or which is to say, much too "Jewish".
Heh. The concept of the Demiurge comes from Greek
philosophy, namely Plato's _Timaeus_. And the saying "much too
'Jewish'" is Mackie's own contribution, quite possibly
indicating where the anti-Semitism he imagines in Marcion comes
from.
> So the problem for these
> spoiled silly, silver-spoon-fed Gnostic brats of the purple Roman cloth was
More of Mac's ignorance. If gnosticism is associated with
any one locale, it would be Alexandria. In fact the Dads
assert Cerinthus learned from the Egyptians. Harnack's formula
is "acute Hellenization." And Marcion, Mackie's original
target, was from Sinope, a city on the Black Sea, also Diogones'
hometown.
> how to construct for Jesus some other father. That was the trick, and for
> Marcion, entirely what it came down to.
That is Mac's one trick, entirely what it comes down to in
his posts: argument-by-assertion. Although to be fully
honest I have to admit that he has other kinds of trickery, too.
> other Greek Gnostics were having a hard time to tell him from a Jewish
> Ebionite
Pure projection for pop people. Mac gets himself mixed up
about Cerinthus and the Ebionites, posts his confusion as
though it were the gospel truth, then insists some unidentified
gnostics had trouble dividing the two.
> indeed Cerinthus it was, against whom, tradition says, the 4th
> Gospel was written, and that makes every bit of sense--from the standpoint
Tradition assigns the authorship of the 4th Gospel to John
and passes along a story saying he "rushed out of the
bath-house without bathing" when he noticed Cerinthus was there.
Why? Because he was afraid that Cerinthus' presence would
make the place collapse, crushing him along with the heresiarch.
Irenaeus, AH
3.3.4.
If the Gospel of John was written against Cerinthus -- all
speculation, of course -- its intentions were also aimed
against Marcion, since he too rejected both the Creator and the
Creator's law.
> [1 John 4:3]
1 John 4:3 insists on Jesus' fleshiness -- contrary to the
Marcionite perspective -- but on the other hand 1 John 5:4
says "the whole world is in the power of the evil one," an idea
very much in keeping with gnosticism, with the standard
qualification about the many gnostic schools, differences among
and within them, etc.
> One of the most essential doctrines of Gnostic teaching, nearly all across
> the board but especially in the doctrines of docetics like Marcion is that
> Jesus was made of the spirit and not of the flesh.
Docetism isn't essential to gnosticism, but it's a typical
feature of gnostic thinking. The Johannine writings are
anti-docetist, claiming that anybody who denies the incarnation
"is not of God" as well as depicting the resurrected Jesus
commanding Thomas, a skeptic, to see his hands, feel his wounds
and believe. John 20.
> For this reason, the 4th
> Gospel has absolutely nothing to say concerning the nativity. It says
> nothing more than that "the Word was made flesh."
Um, no. Claiming the Word was made flesh already diverges
from docetism, but the Gospel of John doesn't stop where
Mackie apparently quit reading. Instead it contends that Jesus
was flesh even after his resurrection. John 20 pictures
Thomas doubting and Jesus inviting him to "behold my hands; and
reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be
not faithless, but believing" (John 20:27) -- the very opposite
of docetist christology.
> So anyway, unlike that *sola fide* antinomian, anti-Semitic heretic Luther
Unlike Luther, Marcion wasn't an anti-Semite, according to
the existing evidence. Luther's writing contains plainly
anti-Semitic remarks, but nothing in the sources backs up Mac's
accusation against Marcion.
> Clearly, the Church,
> in its time, had found the way to make of the text of it something far more
> in line with an orthodox epistemology than otherwise would have come of the
> rough prejudices of its Gnostic origins.
Clearly the Gospel of John contains orthodox prejudices as
well as gnostic ones. Since Christian orthodoxy has a
notoriously anti-Semitic history, it's easy to figure what more
than likely goes with which.
[John 8:37-38]
> Jesus has one father, the Jews another.
Mac is playing tricks again, and not even intelligent ones.
To Marcion all earthly beings are Yahweh's creatures, so
verses claiming Jews are from the devil argue against Marcion's
authorship.
Jesus is a heavenly being, not an earthly one in Marcion's
understanding.
> That statement made on pure authority of nothing, and of no more substance
A good description of Mac's meaningless arguments from his
non-authority. I supplied chapter and verse demonstrating
Yahweh and Satan are two different people to Marcion during the
last run through: Tertullian, AM 2.28, where Marcion
reportedly awards Yahweh responsibility for permitting "sin and
death, and the author of sin too--the devil," implying that the
devil and Yahweh are not the same. So if John identifies
Yahweh with the devil, then it's at odds with Marcion's outlook
in doing so.
> of it, for if these are not the words of your darling heresiarch Marcion
Again, none of Marcion's own writings have survived. He's
known only through other sources, e.g. Tertullian's
five-volume polemic against him, the account in Irenaeus, so on
and so forth.
> The Jews have the devil, the Demiurge for a father, and the name of that
> demiurge is Jehovah. That is Marcionism.
That was Mac's reading of the Gospel of John, which places
the relevant passages directly in conflict with Marcion's
outlook (Mackie's unwitting destruction of his own case), since
Marcion divides Yahweh from Satan rather than equating them
and he thinks all earthly beings are Yahweh's creatures instead
of assigning the Jews to Satan.
> There is no other.
In other words, Mac's picture of "Marcion" totally ignores
the historical evidence about him, which shows Marcion
distinguished Yahweh from the devil and believed that everybody
on earth
-- aside from visitors -- belonged to Yahweh: in
both cases precisely the opposite of what Mackie is claiming to
be true.
-- Moggin
