David Trobisch dedicated his last book, On the Origin of Christian Scripture: The Evolution of the New Testament Canon in the Second Century, to a new important figure in the process of creating early Christian literature – Publisher. Finally, the figure of the Publisher appears and with him a whole set of criteria according to which he operates, the logic of choices, his goals. From my point of view, this is a move in the right direction that will allow us to remove wishful thinking and unverifiable paradigms from biblical studies. Trobisch inspired me to my own conclusions, which he probably wouldn’t agree with.
1. The team of ghost writers, editors and the publisher is the “sole author” of the early Christian NT writings.
2. This “sole author” created all the synoptic gospels including *Ev. Subsequent products developing the figure of the historical Jesus were created by the same team. Biblical scholars can rotate the content M, L, Mk and Ev, divide it into hypothetical parts/boxes and place it in subsequent diagrams in one order or another, but they have no chance in the situation we have. Everything was on one table. The publisher was interested in releasing subsequent versions of the story and maintaining its priority regarding the historical Jesus. Over time, creation was abandoned and previously developed products were only copied
3. A similar team was created by the original Pauline Corpus – the letters in Marcion’s version are autographs. There were no other earlier ones.
4. There was no conflict during Marcion’s lifetime. The canonical Gospels are not anti-Marcian. They were created as a consequence of the success of the first one. Publisher, as a responsible person, did not care about any conflicts among the leaders, he just did his job.
Anymarcion was only the propaganda of those who were looking for every possible reason to attack Marcion.
It quickly turned out that Marcion organization was a threat to local, sluggish, poorly managed structures. He was able to operate on a large area and financial development from current revenues.
Marcion was an outstanding leader. It’s hard to make a complaint about this. To discredit him, he was made a theologian – a heretic.
Marcion as a leader – his theology is market, competition and success. It’s a matter of responsibility for the project and for own people. Marcion’s theological views are the creation of publicists financed by his enemies – other unknown leaders who were threatened by his activities.
He built his network of congregations using NT version 1.0. Competitors began to criticize him after the NT 2.0 version was released. Marcion’s structure, like the Orotdoks, used the entire early Christian literature, which, if Larry Hurtado is to be believed, consisted of one-third of the LXX, one-third of the NT writings, and one-third of the Apocrypha. The role of NT in this period was growing but not dominant. The fact that we do not know of any “specific manuscripts” of Marcion shows that his structure offered the same as the competing Orthodox. What mattered was the effectiveness in building and developing the structure. It was a real field of competition. Power struggle.