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Archive for the ‘Jordan Almanzar’ Category


The Oldest Gospel and the Formation of the Canonical Gospels

In Canon, Jordan Almanzar, Marcion, Matthias Klinghardt, New Testament, Peeters, Synoptic Gospels, Synoptic theories on December 23, 2022 at 12:21 pm

2022.12.13 | Matthias Klinghardt. The Oldest Gospel and the Formation of the Canonical Gospels. Biblical Tools and Studies 41; Leuven: Peeters, 2021.

Review by Jordan Almanzar, Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts.

Matthias Klinghardt’s study, The Oldest Gospel and the Formation of the Canonical Gospels, is a two-volume work in which he proposes Marcion’s Evangelion as the key to explaining origins of the canonical Gospels. The work was inspired by a certain disharmony Klinghardt sees in 19th-century scholarship existing between two discourses that largely took place in Germany: 1) the so-called synoptic problem and 2) the relationship of Marcion’s Evangelion to canonical Luke. These discourses developed simultaneously yet independently of one another, and Klinghardt seeks to not only bring them together, but to display the results of doing so.

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The Text of Marcion’s Gospel

In Brill, Dieter T. ROTH, Early Christianity, Jordan Almanzar, Marcion, New Testament, review, Textual Criticism on September 3, 2017 at 10:40 am

roth

2017.09.18 | Dieter T. Roth. The Text of Marcion’s Gospel. New Testament Tools, Studies and Documents 49. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015. ISBN: 9789004245204.

Reviewed by Jordan Almanzar, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen.

Dieter T. Roth has taken up the ambitious task of reconstructing the Gospel portion of Marcion’s “bible”. His objective is not a new one, as the first attempts to reassemble Marcion’s text are generally traced to the 18th century (Roth, 8). [Roth credits J.S. Semler as the first scholar to attempt a resemblance of Marcion’s text, however, he also mentions Richard Simon’s work from nearly a century earlier.] Even so, scholars have long awaited a book such as the one Dieter T. Roth has produced.Its value lies chiefly in the intentionally convenient layout, which is the result of Roth’s patient classification and arrangement of material. Therefore, the book can be immediately used and appreciated by anyone interested in Marcion’s Gospel. Most of the work is an explanation of the difficulties of the task along with details on the methods employed to do so; however, readers can begin using it as a reference tool at the outset.

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The Challenge of Marcion

In Cambridge University Press, Jordan Almanzar, Judith LIEU, Marcion, Mohr Siebeck, review article, Sebastian MOLL on March 1, 2017 at 4:36 pm

9781107029040

2017.03.05 | Judith M. Lieu. Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. ISBN: 978-1-107-02904-0.

Sebastian Moll. The Arch-Heretic Marcion. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010. ISBN: 978-3-16-150268-2.

Review article by Jordan Almanzar, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen.

Introduction

The significance of the second century for understanding Christian history is summed up by Gerd Lüdemann, who explains that from the first generation until the end of the second century, “more important decisions were made for the whole of Christianity than were made from the end of the second century to the present day.”[i] The contours of orthodoxy were defined in those years and it was during this time that Marcion and his followers were extracted from the orthodox and branded with the dishonorable label of heretics. Read the rest of this entry »


The Text of Galatians and Its History

In Galatians, Jordan Almanzar, Mohr Siebeck, Stephen C. Carlson, Textual Criticism on June 14, 2015 at 1:40 pm

carlson

2015.06.14 | Stephen C. Carlson. The Text of Galatians and Its History. WUNT II/385; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. Pp. xiv + 308. ISBN 978-3-16-153323-5.

Review by Jordan Almanzar, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen.

Many thanks to Mohr Siebeck for providing a review copy.

Carlson’s study represents the first attempt to implement means and methods drawn from computational biology in reconstructing a critical text of the book of Galatians. To that end he collates and analyzes 92 witnesses and writes his own software that is able to analyze and interpret 1624 variation units in Galatians. Furthermore, his software was designed to account for significant levels of contamination in the manuscript tradition—something that has never before been done. But his study is not purely mechanical. Carlson is well aware of Zuntz’s warning about the pitfalls of purely statistical reconstructions of New Testament stemmata. Read the rest of this entry »