Transcription
Marcus Vincson, thank you so much for joining me today.
Well, Chris, thanks so much for inviting me again to your channel. I still remember vividly our last conversation that we had in Broro, in Italy. So, face to face, but I have to say, I mean, even sitting here in in a studio like this one, once you've met face to face, it feels differently. It makes it Yeah, it makes it a little easier. I much preferred our our talk in Italy with the nice nice weather and nice food and all that sort of thing, but here we are. We'll make the best of it.
Um, one of the things that we had, we had exchanged some emails maybe about a year ago, not that quite last fall, we exchanged some emails and I had asked you some questions about a text and you had emailed back and said, "Do you notice that text doesn't have the resurrection?" And I didn't really think much about it. I saw what you said and I thought, "Okay, that's interesting." Um, and then as I went, I did start noticing I started noticing how rare the resurrection actually is in many, many early Christian texts. And that led me to this book which you wrote um a few years back now. This is uh Christ's resurrection in early Christianity and with me. Yeah, you got it too. Oh, good. Okay. Yeah. I said my copy is really uh my copy is really dog-eared. But I think one of the uh there's kind of two parts of the book that we'll talk about. The one is the the what and the second part is the why. So we'll save the second part for later, but maybe we'll start with the what.
I think when we think about the birth of early Christianity, a lot of people would think that Christianity was born because of an event. And that event a lot of people would think is the resurrection. And maybe it was a literal, maybe people had visions. You know, we might say people were confused. However you want to describe that. Nevertheless, a lot of people have still placed that at the center of the birth of Christianity. What was it that caused you to re sort of re-evaluate this question and come to a conclusion that the resurrection might not have been central after all?
That that is the key question. I have to say I was brought up uh just like yourself uh by believing in this type of of an event beginning of Christianity. I mean this this was the way it was portrayed in religious studies in in the schools and how the teachers have learned uh it to be and even most prestigious and most famous scholars um for me for example when I was reading the three volumes by Edwards Gilibbecks when it came out in the 1970s um the the core of of of of his books on on Christ in early Christianity was about this event structure and it was so plausible for me um when he says that um Christianity couldn't have come about with um the protagonist Christ um dying on the cross if the resurrection had not turned around the entire movement and in invigorated the people to follow somebody who had just been killed. But then was experienced as being alive within the community. Yeah. So that that was quite possible and that's the way I started.
I I did my training in in in religious studies and theology and and then because I I moved doing my PhD into the 4th century. In the fourth century it was pretty clear, yeah, Christ was raised. Uh he died on the cross. Um and and as I worked on Aaras of Laudisa probably one of the most influential theologians in the 4th century for later orthodoxy so he was a staunch defender of na of the homuzio of the the the divine nature of Christ and in his exegetical work he he placed a lot of emphasis on Christ's resurrection as the definite uh proof of his divinity. So when I was asked in 1991 I think it was so it's a while back um to to give a paper on Christ's resurrection in the second century which was really my entry into the second century when I moved back from the fourth fifth centuries and because when you write a PhD in autation you have to concentrate so I was really concentrating on those two centuries um but then when I had to give this paper on the second century I thought oh it's not a great Yeah. Uh it seems that I'm just digging out the foundations on which the fourth century and fifth century's fathers were relying and they were relying on the same on the same assumptions as I was relying throughout my studies. And so I started doing this paper. The paper was on narratives of Christ's resurrection in in the second century. And of course I didn't find much on that. Yeah. So I thought, well, it's probably just the the the issue of narratives and and Christ's resurrection is more embedded into creedal um formulations or liturgical formulations or related to Easter or to the sun to Sunday worship and so forth. So I left it aside. I I didn't touch it for a quite a a long time until good people from Routledge, the the main editor, came to see me in my office. I still vividly remember um I was sitting in Birmingham at the university and she came to see me and and asked Marcus, do you have something we could publish? And I I gave her the whole portfolio of what I was working on and she was utterly bored. Right? So she she didn't think any of that could could raise the interest of people. Okay. I said, "Well, if I remember um what might be of interest to your readers, because it's is of interest to me, was this astonishing experience when I was digging out a few years ago um the the little we are given as narratives about Christ's resurrection." and she she jumped up and down and she said, "Oh, well, look, uh, we haven't had a book on Christ's resurrection on for patristics." Um, and I don't I don't know of anyone. Um, that that's something you could do. So, I said, "Why not?" Yeah. Okay. Um, and and so I started working on on this issue and the first thing that struck me was that she was proven right. uh I came across in the libraries um along the shelves um on hundreds of monographs let alone um journal articles on Christ's resurrection in early Christianity all written by New Testament scholars and all concentrating on the New Testament writings and then I was wondering what colleagues in Patristics and early Christian history were doing because I could not find one at that time at least one single monograph on Christ's resurrection in early Christianity. So in on the second century, 3rd century and so forth. And even when you go back and I went back to um Grillmer, this famous big Grillmer um who published four or five volumes on on the nature of Jesus Christ as perceived in early Christian fathers and mothers. We I I could only find three entries in the indices on Christ's resurrection and these were exactly the chaps I was working on on the 4th century Aries and uparius. So it appeared to me that my impression that I that I got from the 4th century reading was some kind out of sync with what I discovered in in Buddhistic literature about the second century and the third century. And then I asked myself well there could be two reasons. First of all, Christ's resurrection was a no-brainer for the people in the first, second, and third centuries. So once out of many other things, no controversy because everybody believed in Christ's resurrection and because everybody believed it, there was no dispute and because there was no dispute, nobody wrote about it. First idea. Second idea was well it was more a liturgical let's say a tacit knowledge um not expressed and just lived still I I felt uncomfortable about both of these explanations because a almost nothing that mattered in early Christianity went without being challenged and even if it if things had not been challenged like let's say baptism or or some of the other things um people wrote about it and and then I started looking into everything that was written from the beginnings of early Christianity to the mid late third century that that was my and that's always my approach to read everything at least in the sources and in this case it was quite easy because there was no secondary literature on on all of that. I still remember there was uh one chap a French guy who had written two or three articles on Christ's resurrection in early Christianity and and these were so basic. I mean these only gave us the very few references um in Origen and and a few others. So void of secondary literature um if you take away the New Testament scholarship, I ducked into the writings of everything that existed and and it sounded more and more strange to me what I was reading. I give you a few examples. I I was reading the Didache because it is our first as we know the oldest catechetical literature in early Christianity and the Didache of 16 chapters gives us an introduction into moral and ethics um in the beginning the two ways. Then it takes those new catechumens, people who want to join the Christian community throughout everything that you need to know about early Christian or about your Christian belief, the one you want to join. And so you are introduced into the sacraments, baptism through Eucharist. You're introduced into prayers like the Lord's Prayer which is given. You're introduced into who Jesus Christ was. Um the the small priest, small boy, the son of David, the the way he's been raised. You're introduced into rituals and worship and at the end you're introduced into the eschaton. So what's coming in the future? And and I was struck. I mean, how on earth, I thought, uh, are people being introduced into what they should believe in Christianity without once mentioning Christ's resurrection? And and it this is just one example out of I could say tens or 50s.
Moreover, I discovered that there is not an absolute but a very strong tendency that writings that deal with Paul and Paul's literature when when you see Paul is being quoted, he is being refuted, he's being loved, he's being discussed in the text, then Christ's resurrection figures in this text as well. But as soon as you come across literature like the Didache which doesn't give a bit of Paul or I take another example the Shepherd of Hermas writing whenever it was written but certainly before the end of the second century. So some people even dated like the Didache is being dated to the early 2nd century or late 1st century. What which whichever dating we give those th those writings the Shepherd affirms like with does not know anything apparently of Paul which is a bit of a surprise as well um if that text is being written in Rome but irrespective of how to place it and to date it um the text gives us at least 10 different names of Christ. He like a Johannine text he is the door. Yeah. He is salvation. He is everything that we expect. The only the only name which is not given to him is that he is the risen Christ. The resurrection in all these 60s chapters of this long text, the the the resurrection of Christ is absent. And if we are fair and if we take our New Testament here and the New Testament is a collection of texts, we usually start reading the New Testament from beginning to end. And as always a preface the beginning sets the tone and gives us our glasses through which we read what comes next. So when we have read the first four gospels which repeat the message of Christ's resurrection then we read Acts where the resurrection is assumed because it starts with Christ's ascension and then we are jumping to Paul's letters and it starts with Romans a very strong emphasis on Christ's resurrection which is linked to baptism something we don't find in the Didache here for example where we have baptism but not Christ's resurrection and and then we are settled I think then we come to the so-called Catholic letters and later the Apocalypse and we don't notice because we are so settled on Christ's resurrection once we have gone through four apostles, Acts, and Paul's letters that we do not notice that in the rest of the New Testament, with the exception of Second Peter, which knows and quotes Paul's letters, none of the texts that follow Paul's letters, except that one knows of Christ's resurrection. And what we notice here is what is being repeated in early Christian writings. So there are the exceptions where where we have a debate about Christ's resurrection in a text without the knowledge of Paul. But the stronger emphasis and that's something which I try to emphasize in this book on Christ's resurrection early Christianity is that as soon as we are meeting Paul we meet also Paul's emphasis on Christ's resurrection and in in a sequence of other Christian texts where there's certainly no doubt about their Christian character but Christ's resurrection is absolutely absent. And that brought me to think about first of all the the spectrum from where Christians derived. And I noticed that even the resurrection, not just of Christ, but the resurrection per se, of the resurrection of people as an apocalyptic expectation was far from being part of the majority believes and believers in the time within the Jewish community. I mean the contrary is true that in the Torah in the five books of Moses so in the old Jewish belief if you like the Messiah belief there is no hint at a resurrection of people. The only way the Torah explains that people are going to survive after death is through offsprings. And and the resurrection doesn't figure. It is even so patriarchal that any survival into the future is only talked about men and not women. So women have to produce the offspring together with men. in order to to secure um a future survival after death of male members of the Jewish community and only after the Jews went to exile. So either in 722 with the Assyrians or with the Babylonians in 586 with Nebuchadnezzar where they were taken either to Alexandria or into Persia, later Persia, Babylonia first and later Persia and only after they encountered a kind of a Zoroastrian Babylonian and and and Persian way of thinking They discovered this element of people believing in an afterlife after death either physical or spiritual. And they were talking about a resurrection after death of people. And this was then embedded into the later prophets like Ezekiel famous vision of Ezekiel and in further writings that came after the Torah and were still added to the corpus. So we have this differentiation of old Jewish beliefs without resurrection of people and a rather Persian influenced um sorry Zoroastrian influence later Jewish belief in a resurrection of people and in the times of Jesus of of the beginnings of Christianity and we only need to read um Josephus's um autobiography his life where he describes that he made the move through various schools of his time. He prides himself to end up in the modernists and amongst the modernists and with the modernists he calls the Pharisees. And he says the specific element that these Pharisees have as a belief system in contrast to all the others was that they believed in a resurrection of people after death. So it turns out that the majority belief and the old Jewish belief was still prevalent in the times of Jesus and of early Christianity. And I support that even by checking the tombstone um remains that we have across the the Mediterranean base and we will see that the majority of gravestones do talk about deaths at the end of life and only a fraction of apparently Pharisees influenced um tombstone inscriptions give us a hope of an afterlife. for those people who have been buried. To sum up my long answer is I discovered that apparently amongst the Christians and I won't qualify numbers but a good deal if not a majority were of the old Jewish belief who then entered the Jewish community the Christian community and brought along with them no interest and maybe even a disbelief or simply a disregard for anything to do with the resurrection. For them, the resurrection was bound to a Pharisaic understanding like the Pauline one and wouldn't give them any answer for the question of death because the death of Jesus was the death of Jesus for them. For them it was more important that Jesus was understood as this kind of um self a savior who became um a sacrifice because these were sacrificial Jews and being sacrificial Jewish Christians that Jesus was made the paschal sacrifice was the explanation for for these people and not any kind of resurrection and we may come to the third part of the book why um in the last part of the book I'm talking about the liturgical life of early Christians throughout the first two centuries. Yeah.
Yeah. And we will see that the the core of early Christian ritual until or until Origen is on the paschal sacrifice not on Christ as the risen one. So
Yeah, we stop. No, that's great. That's a really good overview. We did some uh some readings last week in the community on this subject and we read from Ephesians the I think it's the first chapter of Ephesians where it says in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, but it doesn't say anything about resurrection. We read from Hebrews where we get a similar idea about this great high priest who goes and offers himself once for all. Um so we were we were doing a lot of a lot of the readings from your book. I think we did three or four. And it's shocking when you you do start to notice it because I think when we read these books canonically, we just assume the resurrection and you see something like sacrifice and you think, okay, sacrifice of Jesus, right? Um and when you actually start paying attention to these texts, you see that um you see that that's not necessarily the case. So I think like the the evidence that you give suggests that this was a Pauline belief that was not the only belief in early Christianity but when Christianity became a story about Paul that's when this belief becomes one of the essential Christian beliefs. Can you talk a little bit about that and that role that the kind of the centering of Paul's Paul's beliefs became essentially the the Christian story.
This was in this was if you like uh my entry in in my later books and developments. Um so the role of Paul in early Christianity and I I do fully agree with you that uh we usually are taken by this canonical New Testament as it is given to us and and hence we read too much into texts um where that those texts do not deliver but we read into them and you have given nice examples. Yeah. Ephesians 1 and then Hebrews. I mean Hebrews the entire text of the letter of Hebrews does not know anything about Christ's resurrection. Interesting. Um one of the Pauline so-called Pauline texts. Yeah. That deviates and where that's where where the sacrifice is being prominent. Yeah. Milky sedic and so forth. Um, but that posed the the bigger question at the time when I was writing this book about the place of Paul in early Christianity. And this was a key trigger and I struggled with it for a long time because the question of course was if Paul was central from the beginning then how was it possible that so many other Christians um I ignored him um could write books like the Didache books like the Shepherd of Hermas without even noticing him. And this is even true for the second century where people like Justin Martyr as people have always seen um ignores Paul's letters. He might be influenced by them to some extent but for whatever reason he doesn't mention Paul and one of his letters. So that there was a there was a kind of a problem I saw with with Paul and I was was struggling how to resolve that and by reading about the reception of Paul of course I could not ignore um the person and personality and the role that one of the let's say one of the most influential readers of Paul played in the whole game and that was Marcion of Sinope. Now this book on Christ's resurrection was my entry into the in into the discussion and into the reflection on the role not only of Paul but also of his greatest reader Marcion. So I didn't start with a preconception of Marcion or whatever Marcion Marcion I knew just from my very good colleague who invited me to teach with him at Mainz University that was Gerhard May. He was a Marcion scholar the Marcion scholar in the 20th century with Barbara Allen and a few others and Harnack before. So so this was the the man who knew everything about Marcion. I didn't know anything about him. I I wasn't even interested before I I wrote this book. But I couldn't avoid um his position because a I then discovered that prior to Marcion apparently in all these writings which I was reading people did not know of Paul and there were only four or let's say five exceptions and these five exceptions were exceptions because New Testament scholars have placed these five writings into the first century. And these were the Gospels before canonical Gospels and Acts. And then I asked myself, Gio, what is what is the reason for scholars to date these texts into the first century and only these texts together with Paul's letters plus Acts? So how does it come that all the other texts, the so-called Catholic letters were dated later? I mean if you take Schnelle he still dates them to the first 130 years of Christianity but usually the Catholic letters are dated towards the end of the first century or in the beginning of the second century but those um texts that are that embed Christ's resurrection that's the canon that's being placed into the first section and that that suited so neat the old explanation that I was growing up with that it was this resurrection event that created the basis the the start of Christianity. And so I struggled with with um with this kind of a of a placing of these works and I was wondering more and more whether it was wishful thinking in order to have this canonical view of Christ's resurrection as the beginning of Christianity which was the reason for placing these writings into the first century rather than the other way around that because these writings are first century writings they are a um portrayal of the beginnings of early Christianity as an event. And I tell you this book did not have the subtitle when I submitted it to Routledge. It only read Christ's resurrection early Christianity and one night and most of my books and my articles are written after a dream and after a reflection, a subconscious reflection in my nights. One night I woke up and it was clear to me I have to revise the story. It is the other way around. It makes 100% more sense if I place these four writings into the aftermath of Marcion because they reflect a Pauline theology. People today now talk about the influence of Paul on Mark. Hence, if Mark was according to this uh approach the first gospel of the four, then Pauline influence is on all four. If Mark was one of the the baseline uh texts of the two sources theory, then Paul was the inspiration behind Mark and then also behind all the other canonical gospels. So that's a similar approach still placing it in the first century. But I I thought it we have to be even more radical because it doesn't fit all the other texts. And the question then is do we have enough evidence to place these writings into the first century? We might have for Paul. We'll come to discuss that because since this book I spent a lot of time on those questions. But we certainly do not have the evidence for those canonical gospels. And and so I wrote back to the publisher to Routledge. I said I I need to revise the manuscript. So keep keep back. Uh this is not the final this was the final version, but uh it is no longer the final version. U the new version will have a subtitle and the making of the New Testament. And I will revise against 99.9% of all scholarship. I will turn the the cards upside down and I will suggest that a the canonical gospels are post-Marcionite that maybe even the Pauline letters which didn't occur to me at the time but today I'm I'm a bit more wise on that one. how the the Pauline letters have come about. At the time I was concentrating on the gospels and and it and I suggested that only after Marcion had made um a reading of Paul that even Paul's letters had come into the public domain of uh Christians so that even people like Justin could not ignore them even if he didn't like them. um and that even Acts which didn't like and doesn't like the letters either um couldn't ignore Paul and that the second century has to be understood as an integration of Marcion and Marcion's suggestion of these Pauline letters and Marcion's emphasis on the resurrection as we can see in this gospel as well as in collecting these Pauline letters ignoring Hebrews. Hebrew Yeah, if he knew it, right, it it was outside his collection because it was a Pauline writing without the the resurrection. And and so my suggestion was the the debate in the second century in the beginning of Christianity has to be read from a perspective where only in the mid-second century Paul becomes more influential. But then he was tainted at the same time by a debate that was growing in contrast and in defeating Marcion while keeping his collection and that was the suggestion I made. They kept the gospel but they had to rewrite his gospel and they tried it in those canonical gospels and in other gospels. They they kept his Pauline letters but then they had to remodel them. Uh they had to extend them and complement them with Acts with the Pastorals with Hebrews and other writings. Yeah. And they had to complement the Pauline letters with Catholic letters letters of the other apostles that were denigrated by Marcion. They kept the resurrection of Christ one of the core elements in Marcion's theology while emphasizing his birth, his physicality because for Marcion any physicality was of no no regard. So, so they they kept most not everything but most of Marcion's collection of of of writings the the theology of Marcion and struggled with it for a long time whereas Christianity apparently was a movement that was in existence and I never said that Marcion was the creator of Christianity. He was becoming part of it. He was the most influential in the second century. But Christians were going on in the first century and and he and he somehow joined the community. Um and shaped the community and the community shaped itself against him in the second century. The later the more against him. Uh in the beginning I think they were more in favor of him. So, so I remodeled the whole thing and um Christ's resurrection was a core element and I discovered for example that when you look at the gospels their core where all four gospels and if you take Marcion's gospel with it all five gospels are are most parallel is from Jesus's adult life in Capernaum until his death. Even the canonical gospels and if you take my view as rewritings of Marcion's gospel, they're only parallel as long as we have Marcion's gospel with the exception of the resurrection. So people struggled with particularly this element and that's why in Mark's gospel we don't have the birth stories just as in Marcion's gospel but we also don't have the resurrection appearance again against Marcion's gospel he has it but Mark doesn't only Mark 16 was later added to also have resurrection appearances and then you compare Matthew and Luke, very differing birth stories and very Yeah, exactly. and very differing differing uh u resurrection appearances. In in Luke, Jesus appears in in Jerusalem. In Matthew, Jesus appears in Galilee. in John. Well, he combines both traditions and suddenly you have appearances in Jerusalem and in Galilee. So, the diversity couldn't be larger in the birth stories and in the resurrection stories. Why Marcion didn't have the birth stories and in the resurrection of Christ, he was a loner? Because he was basing his ideas on Paul. But a majority apparently of Christians didn't buy into it and it took a long debate until it came to a canonical uh revision of these texts. So they were harmonized.
I wanted to come back to um one of the one of the things you said about about this coming in in the second century. Excuse me. Um there's been there's been a a story about an early quote unquote heresy in the early church and this is Docetism. the idea that Jesus only appeared to be a human. And one of the things that struck me as I read your book is I think this gives us a very different sense of what this so-called heresy is about or what this controversy is about. that what I think we're actually seeing is not not somebody who all of a sudden came up with the idea in the second century that Jesus may have just been an appearance of a human, but actually the entering of the resurrection into the tradition and people wrestling with that and whether that meant Jesus as a physical or a spiritual being both both throughout his life and after his death. Is that is that a fair assessment? Are we actually seeing a resurrection controversy?
It's precise. It's a precise assessment. Yeah, my my view is even that um prior to Marcion I think um there was the assumption of Jesus being a Jew and as as these people were Jews right and he was a historical person. He was uh like Hillel and Shammai and and some other rabbis um a historical figure and and they might even have agreed that he was killed for right or wrong and and that he has that he has left a legacy. Yeah. A legacy of how to deal with the Torah. um and and surely a more radical one than even Hillel um supposed to to have taught about the Torah and that was the background noise. Yeah. And that was where Christians rallied around before being even Christians. Yeah. A Jewish community um following a certain teaching of a certain rabbi. And I think that's what it was. But with Marcion we have a different uh take and if you like that's why Marcion's very often called a Docetic teacher. Yeah. Um no it was a middle Platonic teacher. He was no more middle Platonic than Philo of Alexandria. For Philo you could also say Philo is a Docetist. Why was he a Docetist? I mean in in this heretical nomenclature why was he Docetic? Because for him the cosmos this physical world in which we live and now have a conversation was nothing of substance in in this sense he was a Platonist. When you read his work on the the creation of of the cosmos, he says God and for him the Jewish God um did not did not create this world. The only thing he created was on the very first day a cosmos noetos, an ideal cosmos, a cosmos of ideas, just as Plato says. And only the demiurge, the right hand, as he says, which he calls Logos, that is the one that created this messy world out of physical stuff. And you see very similar um Marcion takes the idea of the of the Messiah the Messiah the real Messiah to him and in that sense he is very much a middle Platonist like Philo. Messiah is not a physical entity he is an idea of the absolute transcendent God and this Messiah is like Philo's Logos the one who saves the world. The the only difference is that for Philo this intermediate Logos was like the Shekhinah so like the the the the shining of the transcendent God and this shining transcendent Logos was also the creator of this world. I think here Marcion was more radical to say, well, this cosmos is not simply not the ideal cosmos, but is is a pretty terrible cosmos. And this one has to contextualize with the experience of two or three Jewish Roman wars, the the catastrophes where the first and the second world wars were similar. the experience of the despair that nothing holds and and I think in in that regard he is a middle Platonist but he infused the older Christian idea of a rabbi who taught a different form of Torah. He infused with a middle Platonic idea of a transcendent Messiah who comes down and hence cannot be touched. He goes through doors. He He cannot be understood because he performs miracles. He He cannot be really followed. All of the apostles are simply going the wrong way. The only apostle is the one who didn't see the physical body of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, but he only experienced the res the resurrected Christ in his apocalypses. And that's why Paul is the only one who receives this divine message. And so you can see it's it's turning a a Jewish belief into a middle Platonic Jewish belief even further than Philo does. And and this raises this issue of Docetism because for for Marcion I wouldn't call it Docetic because that's the heretical nomenclature but it's a middle Platonic form of Christianity and as I said the canonical people Christians after Marcion they bought into 99% of Marcion's theology and ever since we believe in a divine Christ in a transcendent body the 1% they complemented is what people complemented in and to Philo to maintain that Yahweh the Jewish God is a historical God that the Messiah is a historical figure that Christ has a physic a physical body and that even the resurrection should be understood in a physical sense.
And that is the debate then in the second and third century, late second and third century.
Yeah.
Yeah, one of the, uh, one of the really shocking implications of this, um, I mean, I think I think this one scholars have kind of hypothesized for a long time, but I think your book puts some real meat on it is that a lot of the stories we get even in the canonical gospels are not being driven by memory or oral traditions. They're being driven by theology. So when you have a theology emerge that Jesus needs to be a physical being, all of a sudden you have the development of stories about eating fish and stories about, you know, um, people touching him and seeing that he's not a ghost or things like this. Can you talk a bit about that because that I think that's shocking for people who imagine that there's oral traditions being passed down as opposed to these stories actually being formulated to fit theology. Is that is that a fair assessment?
It's it's uh spot on I think because that is it's always been interesting that this is the way and antique literature has worked be it in Homer be it in in the second sophistic uh it's just the nature how religious and and and antique writings have come about and this is why on these channels we talk so much about uh when we compare literature with apoc players with uh Luke, Lucian and and other writings here. Um the exception has always been the Christian literature. Even in the Jewish literature um colleagues from working on Jewish writings have little problems to say, well what we read about Moses um about Abraham these are theological stories. Um we we don't need to go and dig out um the Mount Sinai. We we don't need to dig out the holes of Moses where or the burning bush, right? Of course, for for pilgrimages, it's nice. Yeah. And and people always want to clutch and to have a physical sense to it.
But with the Christian writings, I think 90% of everything that we have is not historical writings. Of course, there there are historical and geographical and locations which we can point to and where we can hang um stories on, but that's the way you write a novel. Yeah. You don't pick it out of the air, but um you write about a location like Berlin or or about New York and Paul Auster writes his his whole life story on on on on hundreds of pages, right? But you wouldn't go down um New York and and and and see whether you find the the graveyards of the people he's writing about. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
I think it's a mistake to to to move away from the fact that we're dealing with highly sophisticated literature. Yeah. And that we're dealing with authors. authors that put together writings and that these writings do not circulate individually. They're not made out of oral memories. And and this was a the one of the big mistakes I mean that we were talking about um oral memories. Where are these oral memories in in Jewish history? Where are these oral memories in the Quran? Where are these oral memories in in Zoroastrian literature or in Hindu literature?
One of the things that really struck me about this book is that you trace a powerful potential Samaritan influence on the theology and thinking of early Christianity. Um and it is it is true we get such a interesting connections to Samaria and we see it played up in John's gospel for example where Samaria becomes a big focus. Um we also have a lot of figures come out of Samaria which would be um other people well the so-called Simon Simon Magus or we could say Simon of Samaria um even Justin Martyr has origins in Samaria like there's a deep connection to Samaria here um how how should we understand that as being part of this earliest Christian movement that was that was really interesting to me and something I want to think more about.
I think here we are in the very beginnings of research um although there is in the meantime after 15 years there is more about Samaritan Judaism um Samaritan Christianity written and I think um we we have to dig into that more deeply. I I remember there is this wonderful book about um the the Hebrew gospel um material. Um and I think that's an avenue which I haven't fully uh traced since then. But um the more I I'm thinking about it, the more we have to broaden our um trajectories and see the the the difference and and the few commonalities. But I think the Samaritan um forms of early Christianity is is most of most interesting. One of the thing when I I did a video not too long ago on the Samaritans and it this was from my research into ancient diasporas as well, but I thought of how often Samaritans Samaritans and Jews lived side by side in diaspora and how often Paul instead of saying to the Jews writes like to the Hebrews or to the circumcised or things like that which is certainly a more inclusive category than just than just to the Jews.
I want to ask okay one more question. This is the second one. Um this is about Papias because it strikes me that Papias is somebody that gets used by Eusebius. Um and one of one of the sins of Papias apparently according to his later interpreters is that he believes in a millennial reign of Christ. Is it possible that this is a glimpse into an earlier pre-resurrection sort of belief structure that people are looking for a return of Christ as opposed to a resurrection of Christ?
I believe so. Yeah. I think um this is also an explanation why people who believe in uh Christ's resurrection are not in favor of um a millenarian um reign and um to physical comeback. Um I think this idea of a physical reign for thousand years um very present in Irenaeus might even have been one of the reasons why Irenaeus's work in the East wasn't highly appreciated was it was appreciated by by some of the authors but apparently not by many because until today we only have a fragment the Irenaean fragment of Irenaeus's work in Greek um we have more of Irenaeus in Armenian than and in Latin than we have him in Greek. Yeah. So his view like Papias's view um apparently worked against these authors with Papias. It's it's it's very sad because we we even have not translation into Latin or Armenian which has survived. So all we have are the very few fragments that Eusebius gives us and unfortunately people quite often if not almost entirely disregard um the other fragments that we have by other authors on Papias. It was quite interestingly the very first entry for me into patristics that I had to assist as a very young student in 1984. So you can see how old I am. Um I had to assist and and write my um dissertation on Papias. That was my first dissertation and it was um accompanying the um editing of Papias's fragments out of various manuscripts that existed. And ever since I point to this highly important Latin um fragment of Papias which gives us irrespective how you translate it there is a bit of discrepancy between people other people and myself. But if you just take those text elements that we agree upon, then this fragment tells us that there is a a meeting between Marcion and John and this John the gospel writer. Now if that is Marcion's view sorry if that is Papias's view in this in this fragment irrespective of further detailed translation it tells us two things John writes the gospel at the time when Marcion is around so John cannot be written 100 or 110 he writes in about 130 135. Second, there is an interchange between these various schools. The Johannine school in potentially in Ephesus, Marcion's school in Rome. So we we have this kind of a debate between scholars, literary scholars, people who work on gospel material, work on Paul. And so I think Papias is with the little we have of him is very very important that Eusebius doesn't mention that kind of an exchange of course works for his theory that John writes way back in the first century.
Yeah. That Marcion is way later. Um and and that yeah so that will
Very very interesting. Okay. Um, we'll leave it there, but um, Professor Vincent, tell us where we can find out more about what you're doing. You're very active online. You're doing a lot of things. Where can people go to find things?
Yeah.
Um, well, the latest uh, which you can access um at the moment is my reconstruction of the Marcionite collection of Paul's letters. Um, unfortunately that's not yet translated into English, but there is an English translation being done um and published very cheap. um and available on Amazon by Mark Bilby, one of our colleagues with whom I've worked on the reconstruction of the Pauline letters. It's simply called Apostamus. So if you want to read more about this collection of Pauline letters by Marcion, that's the first point of access. I hope we have submitted um the manuscript that's been accepted. So Cambridge University Press is going to publish this book which I um published with the German publisher Herder. It's the let's say it's the content description of those 10 Pauline letters in comparison with the canonical letters and we are also having submitted the entire manuscript of three volumes introduction plus two volumes reconstruction. I think there will become four volumes at the end. Um and that will be published with Peter's but I reckon because of the of the complex editing process of these four volumes at the end I think that will take another two years until they are going to be published. So I hope next year we have the Cambridge University Press volume in English and a year after the reconstruction volumes and of course like today with Chris um who is um friendly enough to invite me um we just follow my my work on YouTube. There's our Patristica channel which is our own channel done by my former student Czech Bull Mark Bilby and yeah here and there where I'm giving papers I'm going to naps um I'm usually at at a number of conferences and if you want to invite me please just let me know.
Perfect. Okay Dr. Marcus Vincson thank you again for taking the time to join us today.
It's always a pleasure with you.