"Christianity": a response to Roman-Jewish conflict: Markus Vinzent
Abstract
The beginning of Christianity is often associated with biblical protagonists (Jesus, Paul, the Apostles etc.) and often linked to historical events taking place around the mid-1st century. This article takes a different view, beginning with the assumption that what was later called "Christianity" should not be anachronistically projected back onto the first century. Even though it built on gradual developments taking place over the course of 140 years, "Christianity" was a novel concept, no older than the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt (135 CE). As most of the early "Christian" writings cannot be dated with certainty, we do not know whether Jews started calling themselves "Christians" prior to this time. The first texts to report such self-descriptions are Marcion’s Antitheses from around the year 144 CE and Ignatius’ Letters (middle recension) which together, and supported by growing scholarship, I take to be from after the mid second century. Before this point, "Christian" texts describe the word as a deprecating exonym (Acts 26:28 attributes use of the term to a cynical Agrippa; 1 Peter 4:16 associates "Christian" with suffering and shame). In what follows I hope to show why and how Marcion created "Christianity" as a label for a third way between Jerusalem and Rome, an innovation which proved successful and was quickly picked up by a number of "apologists" in the late years of Hadrian and the early years of Antoninus Pius.
Marcion emphasizing women spirituality
As in what follows, we can explore the Gospel of Marcion (Mcn) in which authoritative women are present, not the only element which he shared with Tertullian who hated, but also must have loved him. Unlike the Gospel of Mary, Marcion’s Gospel itself has not been preserved in direct transmission, even not in a single fragment, if one discounts some ambiguous texts. And, although it had been neglected for centuries, it has been resurrected almost simultaneously in several attempts over the past few years: Jason D. BeDuhn, in his The First New Testament of 2013 provides an English translation of the reconstructed text (BeDuhn, 2013), Dieter T. Roth, published The Text of Marcion’s Gospel in 2015 (Roth, 2015), where he does not provide the text itself, but gives us a detailed discussion, reviewing the older version that was attempted by Adolf von Harnack in the early 20 th century (Harnack, 1923).
Whereas women are hidden in the text of Mark, in GM the question of authority is openly debated.
Race, Ethnicity and Family in Late Antique Judaism and
Early Christianity
Markus Vinze
The first who came up not only with the idea of Christians being a novel entity,
but also with the designation ‘Christianity’ as opposed to ‘Judaism’ was, as mentioned
before and shown in earlier studies, the Roman teacher Marcion, who had come from
Sinope to the capital in the aftermath of the second Jewish war.46
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