How Can We Analyze Missing Sites of Memory?
Gregory Fewster
PhD Student, Department for the Study of Religion and the Book History & Print Culture Collaborative Program, University of Toronto
While the textualization of oral Jesus tradition enabled texts to function as sites for ancient popular and scholastic commemoration of Jesus, the loss of such texts poses a methodological problem in a traditionally text-oriented discipline. That our current knowledge of second century Gospel text associated with the “heretic” Marcion derives exclusively from antagonistic citations by Marcion’s religious opponents, provides an interesting opportunity to explore strategies and usages of commemorative texts without the actual object over-determining the analysis. In this presentation, I will explore how two ancient Christian writers named Tertullian and Epiphanius critiqued Marcion’s Gospel in part as a means of constructing distinct supersessionist and anti-Jewish forms of Christian identity.
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