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This study explores Marcion's ideas through his writings and the writings of early Christian polemicists who shaped the idea of heresy.
While the public has easy access to religious literature on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, there is little opportunity for the general reader to assess the more skeptical works of biblical criticism. In Jesus Outside the Gospels, Professor Hoffmann argues that very little is known about Jesus apart from the Gospels. He contends that the Gospels were intended to establish not the history of Jesus, but his divinity. The four books, attributed to men called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were written some two generations after the events they intended to describe. Hoffmann analyzes and quotes extensively from non-biblical sources written 1,900 years ago, providing a picture of the man called Jesus that is quite different from the man portrayed in the Gospels. Sources analyzed at length are the Talmud, Josephus, and Tacitus, as well as Gnostic and Apocryphal Gospels. The author holds to a controversial view that the Gospels are in reality the missionary propaganda of a first-century messianic cult and are far from objective biographies or historical annals. Jesus Outside the Gospels is essential reading for anyone desiring a careful and critical study of the New Testament.
This is a short, accessible analysis of Christianity that focuses on its social and cultural diversity as well as its historical dimensions.
The author presents new arguments which support the view that Paul, not Jesus, was the founder of Christianity. He argues that Jesus and also his immediate disciples James and Peter were life-long adherents of Pharisaic Judaism. Paul, however, was not, as he claimed, a native-born Jew of Pharisee upbringing, but came in fact from a Gentile background. He maintains that it was Paul alone who created a new religion by his vision of Jesus as a Divine Saviour who died to save humanity. This concept, which went far beyond the messianic claims of Jesus, was an amalgamation of ideas derived from Hellenistic religion, especially from Gnosticism and the mystery cults. Paul played a devious and adventurous political game with Jesus' followers of the so-called Jerusalem Church, who eventually disowned him. The conclusions of this historical and psychological study will come as a shock to many readers, but it is nevertheless a book which cannot be ignored by anyone concerned with the foundations of our culture and society. -- Book jacket.
An investigation into the motives behind writing the canonical versions of Luke and Acts Building on recent scholarship that argues for a second-century date for the book of Acts, Marcion and Luke-Acts explores the probable context for the authorship not only of Acts but also of the canonical Gospel of Luke. Noted New Testament scholar Joseph B. Tyson proposes that both Acts and the final version of the Gospel of Luke were published at the time when Marcion of Pontus was beginning to proclaim his version of the Christian gospel, in the years 120-125 c.e. He suggests that although the author was subject to various influences, a prominent motivation was the need to provide the church with writings that would serve in its fight against Marcionite Christianity. Tyson positions the controversy with Marcion as a defining struggle over the very meaning of the Christian message and the author of Luke-Acts as a major participant in that contest. Suggesting that the primary emphases in Acts are best understood as responses to the Marcionite challenge, Tyson looks particularly at the portrait of Paul as a devoted Pharisaic Jew. He contends that this portrayal appears to have been formed by the author to counter the Marcionite understanding of Paul as rejecting both the Torah and the God of Israel. Tyson also points to stories that involve Peter and the Jerusalem apostles in Acts as arguments against the Marcionite claim that Paul was the only true apostle. Tyson concludes that the author of Acts made use of an earlier version of the Gospel of Luke and produced canonical Luke by adding, among other things, birth accounts and postresurrection narratives of Jesus.
Originally presented as the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Edinburgh, 2009.