I don’t know what you are referring to. That Trobisch is right about the canon development does not mean he is right about everything else. So can you identify exactly which thing I question in Trobisch here that you are asking about?

I share your perspective, Paul.

Though I think their reconstructions in principle could maybe be good enough to carry their argument, I really don’t see it carrying their argument. That is, even granting the reconstruction is good enough (which is questionable, as you note, but even assuming it’s not) I still do not see how their conclusions logically follow from their own premises.

They have to insert too many ad hoc suppositions (indeed, whole bales of them), which necessarily tanks the probability of their thesis. Failure to understand that is a common feature of Christian apologetics, and I think the problem is these guys all were trained (either literally or by immersion in the literature) on Christian apologetics and still think those methods are valid. Hence they don’t notice things like the cumulative impact of assumptions on probability, or even that they are accumulating assumptions. Similarly in how they change the evidence (e.g. Marcion refers to the Gospels already existing, which they inexplicably convert into his denying it) and omit or diregard evidence (such as that the Gospels are all arguing with each other, and over pre-Marcionite concerns, and thus cannot have been compiled as a coordinated response to Marcion).

In the past Neil has usually been good about avoiding these pitfalls. But he’s been backsliding lately and I cannot account for that.

I, too, though, think this question is worth exploring, because there is legitimate suspicion over the honesty of the anti-Marcionites and the curiosity of his (lost) New Testament being the original one, leaving a credible door open for Marcionite Priority theories. They are not crank. They are just not as evidenced as claimed. Which is not a scandal. Just a disappointment. I think it would be a great step forward if it could be proved. But it’s just not the best explanation of the evidence all told.

It’s a bit funny to see you two arguing, as if Neil Godfrey wanted to have you on your side, not succeeding, in response accusing you of this and that – in the context of Marcion priority, of misreading Tertullian. And how do I know as a lay person, it’s just my hobby. Confusing. I come back to Vinzent’s thesis from time to time because it’s so, so intriguing, and reading Godfrey’s blog today one may say the idea is getting traction.

But on what basis, again? They talk there as if we have Marcion’s writings to compare with “our” epistles and gospels. Do we? How credible are the reconstructions? It all seems to be about reading Tertullian in a certain way, but all that it POSSIBLY leads us to is Marcion’s claim that his gospel was the original one. Is that all? What am I missing? Granted it’s true… it’s just his claim. What means do we have to positively verify it?

That’s what I was hoping to find in “Resetting”, but I didn’t, to my disappointment. “Perhaps… presumably… may have been… seems to have”. Maybe this, maybe that. The book closes with words: “hypothetical realm of the imagination”… well said. That’s where we all are.

So, just posting random insults is now your schtick?

Why have you abandoned actually making arguments and presenting evidence and are now just slandering people?

I don’t get it, Neil.

As for Jerusalem being a ruin: Josephus and Dio both record that it was ordered to remain uninhabited and a legionary detachment was stationed there to ensure it; and archaeology corroborates this. As I wrote before:

The only evidence of its occupation is by the 10th legion of Rome (whereas a remarkably scant use of Jewish graveyards outside the city in this period indicates almost none even made the journey to Jerusalem to bury their dead). Cassius Dio reports it otherwise remained a ruin until Hadrian rebuilt it, exactly as Josephus explained it would (hence decades later Josephus explained Titus had to grant him new properties to compensate for the ones he could no longer make any use of in Judea owing to Jerusalem becoming a military camp).

All confirmed by Jonathan Price in “The Jewish Population of Jerusalem.”

There is no evidence of any change in that status until Hadrian planned to rebuild it.

So, what are you talking about?

Sorry. “Jerusalem” hadn’t what? I don’t know what that is a reference to, or what argument it is supposed to be, or for or against what conclusion.

Er, no, Richard, Jerusalem hadn’t. Once you get a PhD does that mean you don’t have to do any more research before spouting any old thought that comes to your head from way back?

Oh my god. You have a PhD, Richard, so please do a little research before you post ignorance here. What was your source for what you have just asserted about the condition of Jerusalem here, including the state of a temple at that time? I would really like to know!

I can give you a few books and articles to read up on if you are seriously interested, sources that will make clear to you what we rely on for our information about the Diaspora and Bar Kokhba revolts, the condition of Jerusalem and state of the Jewish cult, including sacrifices, and the ambiguities of evidence extant about the temple itself.

But if you really want to know email me, because I won’t bother returning here after your previous childish put-downs to my simple request for a straightforward yes/no answer on whether you had actually read a work you attacked.

The evidence also establishes that Matthew copied Mark, and Luke copied Mark and Matthew, and John replies to both Mark and Luke, so we know their relative chronology (see Chs. 7 and 10 of OHJ). Since Mark used the Jewish War of Josephus (emulating its Jesus ben Ananias tale from the 60s to construct a narrative for Jesus Christ), which was published in the late 70s, yet Mark has no similar knowledge of the Antiquities of Josephus, but Luke does, that puts Mark pre-90s. Luke also shows no knowledge of even the looming Bar Kochba revolt (nor does Mark), compressing the available timeline further.

Instead Mark repeatedly references so as to explain the destruction of the temple in 70 (not just in Mk 13 but also in the fig tree narrative and elsewhere: e.g. see my discussion of Hamerton-Kelley’s work in OHJ). So he definitely is aware the temple was destroyed and even needs to explain why that happened and didn’t trigger the end of the world. He is not talking about a mere prediction. He is trying to explain why it failed (why the world did not end as predicted), which entails knowledge of what had happened. This cannot reference the Bar Kochba revolt because that wasn’t the issue then (the temple, and Jerusalem, had already been an uninhabited ruin for sixty years by then).

Thanks, William. That’s some startling context! I hadn’t known that rabbit hole.

But:

“Bruce Metzger and Kurt Aland who believed that because we have so many manuscripts of the New Testament, we must already have all the true readings and that conjecture is impermissible”

If Powell told you that was their position, he lied to you. They say exactly, literally and explicitly, the opposite. That’s why the critical text they developed acknowledged endless variants and established a grading system for them, establishing disputability, even measuring it. When Metzger’s most famous student, Bart Ehrman, argues against the likes of Wallace that all this further entails there will be variants we don’t know about because our manuscripts are neither complete nor early enough, he is literally repeating Metzger.

As for Powell’ss treatment of the Synoptic Problem, I don’t know what he argues, but it’s quite old (now thirty years out of date), so it is probably subsumed and mooted by more recent studies (e.g. by Goodacre et al., and even in re: Matthaean priority there are more recent studies). In any event, lots of people try this every decade, and there is a reason it fails to convince. So I’d need some reason to believe Powell somehow worked magic everyone else failed at for half a century, including all the latest textual experts on the problem. Not impossible. But not likely.

And to that now I would even add myself, since I would really have loved Matthew to be first (it’s the most fantastical Gospel, and thus all but assures its content is entirely fake; it’s also among the highest scoring Rank-Raglan myths of all time), but my literary-structural analysis finds that to be very improbable.

In Chapter 10 of Historicity I show that Mark is written with such a consistent structure that Matthew breaks up and repurposes into a completely different structure that the reverse thesis doesn’t work (it can’t explain features the other theory does). This is corroborated by the MacDonald thesis, whereby countless odd details are explained by Mark’s emulation of Homer, that Matthew ruined by rewriting, yet kept enough to beg the explanation of how Matthew could anticipate Homeric structures he wasn’t even aware of. It’s the same kind of problem: it looks like an inexplicable mess in one direction, and a perfectly predictable redaction in the other, which pretty much nails Markan priority as assured. By the time we add Goodacre’s evidence of authorial fatigue, the improbabilities of the alternative are stacking in geometric progression.