THE SAMARITAN TRADITION

Most people don't even know who the Samaritans are outside of the supposed gospel reference to a "Good Samaritan" (the text actually never once uses the adjective "good"). They are the latter-day remnants of the ancient Northern Kingdom of Israel after Israel and Judah split at the time of Eli the priest, slightly before the period of Saul and David. The Assyrian Empire conquered Israel, deporting its leaders and many of its people, replacing them with other (Semitic) deportees from other conquered lands. They named the region Samaria after the capital city of old Israel. Once isolated from Judah in the south (from which our Old Testament stems), Samaritans developed their own form of the ancestral faith, centered on their scripture, the Samaritan Pentateuch (plus the Book of Joshua). Their doctrines were in many respects different from those of the Jews. Jews (Southerners) came to regard Samaritan distinctives as heresy stemming from the intermarriage of Israelites with Assyrian deportees, the result being idolatrous syncretism. But there is no real evidence of such theological influence. Similarly, Samaritans believed their estranged Jewish cousins had corrupted the true Israelite faith under the insidious influence of the “apostate” house of David. They even defined their name differently than the Jews understood it. Jews naturally took “Samaritan” to denote geographical origin, while the Samaritans themselves (re)defined it as meaning the "preservers" of the original Mosaic religion. In Jesus’ day, the two groups were quite hostile to one another. For instance, Samaritans saw the Jewish additions of various prophetic writings to the original canon of Moses as a corruption of the original faith of Israel.

For the Samaritans everything starts and ends with Moses. Instead of obscuring Moses’ original glory with a latter day figure like David they stood steadfast in their hope for the return of a “Prophet like Moses” called a “Restorer” (Ta’eb). In this manner Samaritanism is very straightforward. It isn’t a confused gathering of various “prophetic visions” in the manner that it claimed Judaism had become. God wanted Israel to focus its energies on becoming fully acquainted with the greatness of Moses. Here was the beginning and end of all knowledge necessary to gain the favor of the Almighty. There would be Moses in the beginning and one like Moses in the end who would complete the perfection which was begun by Moses in the future age.

So it is startling to see that the basis of the existing faith and culture of the Samaritan community is a man named Mark, or if you prefer the Samaritan transcription of the name, Marqeh. Second only in status to the very Law of Moses is his so-called “Memar Marqeh,” i.e., the "words" or "sayings" of Mark. The natural question now arises as to when the Samaritan Mark lived. This is not easily answered, as, strangely, almost no biographical information about Marqeh survives, not even within Samaritan circles. Scholars from outside the study of Samaritanism seem to take for granted that Marqeh lived in the third or fourth century. The facts are that a group of Samaritan scholars including Kippenberg, Boid, and Stenhousen all acknowledge a much earlier date for Marqeh - viz. at least the second century CE. Citing evidence for this earlier date, Kippenberg also shows that the argument for a late date evaporates under scrutiny: it derives from the fictitious (and tediously silly) stories which the great (and much later) Samaritan chronicler Abul Fath preserves. Abul Fath admits he doesn't believe these tales himself and would have preferred to leave them out.

The importance of a revised date for Marqeh appears once we put together the small scraps of information available to us. The most obvious reference for his historical identity is his surviving name - Marqeh son of Titus. There are very few Hebrews named "Mark" and even fewer who are called "Titus." His being called a "son" of Titus follows in a general sense many other historical examples from the period. Josephus becomes an adopted Flavian no less than Justus (as we shall see shortly). That "Titus" is still celebrated secretly in the Memar Marqeh as a shopata or "associate" of the divinity (think here of Titus the associate of Paul in Acts) finds confirmation in one of the oldest sections of the text. In a section recognized by MacDonald (a great authority on Samritanism) as demonstrating Marqeh use the common word titah – i.e. “then” – as a secret contemporary reference it is impossible now not to see who this really was. Marcus = Marqeh according to the standard application of Samaritan grammar in exactly the same manner as the Latin Titus becomes Titah. This realization makes my suspicion (you knew where I was going!) that Marqeh was Marcus Julius Agrippa hardly difficult to consider.

We witness the introduction here of titah as a semi-messianic figure, recalling powerfully the way Josephus records Titus’ visit to Jericho during the transition in the Jewish War, one who renews the bounty of nature. Josephus explains that “there is a fountain by Jericho, that runs plentifully, and is very fit for watering the ground; it arises near the old city, which Joshua, the son of Naue, the general of the Hebrews, took the first of all the cities of the land of Canaan, by right of war.” Josephus rhapsodizes about the miraculous powers of this fountain which can restore the barren lands into fruitful earth as if it is symbolic of the “renaissance” associated with the coming of Titus. In the same manner, the writings of Mark preserved among the Samaritans similarly identify Titus as one who will bring rebirth to the Holy Land. Marqeh uges us to “observe the prophetic status of Moses” in the Exodus narrative – i.e., how it points to a return of Moses at the end times – in which “he magnified the True One.” The True One is Marqeh himself, the second Moses. MacDonald capitalizes the letters of the word TITAH in his translation because he recognizes that Marqeh is hinting at something significant which he can’t yet figure out. His problem vanishes if the reference is to Titus, who helps establish the person of the Samaritan messiah, Marqeh himself. Marqeh goes on to argue that the Song of Moses as a whole is really about Titus. He writes that “[a]t the beginning of the Song [of Moses] is Titah” who is said to have “made an extensive garden” (i.e., pardes = paradise) in Israel.

Marqeh identifies Moses as predicting Titah’s coming from the sea as a significant messianic metaphor as did other contemporary writers (cf. Vengeance of the Savior; Gittin 56). “Then [titah] Moses began and said in the sea: he composed his Song a garden of praises”). The purpose of Titus, this “associate” of the messiah, is to conquer Palestine and recreate it as the very Garden of Eden. Marqeh writes that Moses “said ‘Titah’ to rear a fine garden with living trees and also when he began to proclaim the word ‘Titah’ Creation was renewed at that.” It would not at all be unthinkable to imagine that Titus was revered as a semi-divine potentate while his father Vespasian sat in Rome as the ruler of the world. Many scholars have argued that while he stayed with Marcus’ sister Berenice, he acted as a kind of co-regent in the territory.

In the same way we read that “Titah included Creation and Sabbath, Sabbath found an excellent pillar, all of it good, for God established it on the foundation of Creation; thus Moses began with the mighty proclamation. Titah is the Beginning, the opening – wholly excellent! Sabbath is a city wholly blessed! Beginning is an origin, wholly spiritual! Sabbath is a place wholly sacred!” It is difficult to explain the text in any other way, in my opinion, than a historical reference to the Emperor Titus Flavius allowing Mark the ability to “complete” the expectation of a messianic Torah or a renewal of traditional laws governing holiness.

If I am right about this secret reference to Titus, then the Memar Marqeh (and Mark himself) must be located in the late first century. If not, the closest we get is Kippenberg's assertion that Marqeh must have lived much earlier than Crown and others claim. The text of the Memar Marqeh shows that Mark lived sometime in the early years of the Common Era. Again, the only reason most have placed Marqeh in the third or fourth century is their uncritical reading of Abul Fath. Boid, in his unpublished monograph A Pair of Ancient Samaritan Eschatologies, partially disentangles the otherwise puzzling chronology in Abul Fath. He pays careful attention to the fact that Abul Fath must have used two different (and conflicting) chronologies of high priests. There is a strange repeating pattern of people named Iqbon. He must have unwittingly harmonized a "normative" succession of pontificates with a Dosithean list. The Dositheans were a rival (“heretical”) Samaritan sect and would have had their own High Priests. The reason we see two appearances of Simon Magus (as indeed a doubling of many names and events) is that Abul Fath must have attempted to square two contemporary reports as if they followed one another. He must not have realized that he had got hold of a Dosithean booklet; in his day the Dositheans had merged with their opponents. In fact, any historical book he used might not have explixitly identified itself as Dosithean.

Boid and other scholars have argued that the process of integration between rival Samaritan communities had been going on since the start of the eleventh century at the very least, since the two main codes of doctrine and halachah for all later centuries, which were written in the early eleventh century, take great care to speak of the practice of all communities with respect and politeness. Some of the communities which merged into this new eleventh-century orthodoxy were Dosithean (cf Boid, Principles of Samaritan Halachah and his chapter “The Samaritan Halachah,” in the collective volume by various authors The Samaritans, Tübingen 1989). It is also quite easy to identify some of the Dosithean influence on the new orthodoxy. The doctrines of Resurrection and the Tâ’eb were certainly incorporated into "new Samaritan" orthodox theology from Dositheus.

What kind of Samaritanism was it that merged with Dositheanism, and what did its adherants believe? It is difficult now properly to identify the community; however, if we look closely, surviving fragments may tell us something. First, at the time the Dositheans were a separate sect, Samaritan "Sadducees" also certainly existed. Second, the writings of Mark must have been established in a Samaritan community other than that of the Dositheans. Were the Samaritan Sadducees one and the same with the historical community which revered Mark? There are good reasons for thinking so.

The Pseudo-Clementines provide us with a revealing window into the contemporary Samaritan environment in which early Christianity flourished. The followers of Dositheus were identified (here and elsewhere) as a Christian sect. So, too, a "new" Sadducean sect which "denied the resurrection." There was likely also an early Christian "Sadducee" community. [See Justin on Zadok, as well as Karaite tradition about the early sage Rabbi Zadok as a believer in Jesus. Abul Fath's report about the heretic Sakta and his Sadducean offshoot fits somewhere in here, too.] The historical Marcus Julius Agrippa must have favored the Sadducees and been revered by them as their awaited Melchizedek. This may sound fantastic, but the Qumran literature demonstrates that these ideas were still prominent in the last half of the first century CE. Once we realize that the Samaritan Sadducean community attached to the Memar Marqeh must also have rejected contemporary Dosithean doctrine regarding the resurrection and the future messianic advent, we begin to make some headway. For it is impossible to deny that the Samaritan Mark or his original followers rejected the Dosithean doctrines of the resurrection and the messiah. Ben-Hayyim proves in the introduction to his edition of Marqeh (viz. Tîbat Marqe, Jerusalem 1988) that neither of these two doctrines occurs in the parts written by Marqeh. They appear only in the late strata. This means that Mark and his community believed in something other than a future advent of the messiah. So what did they believe? The answer has to be that Mark himself was the messiah; their denial of a "Christ to come" was a by-product of their belief in a "Christ who already came."

Yes, this would be helpful in establishing my theory, but is there any actual Samaritan evidence that Mark was a messianic figure within the early Samaritan tradition? He was and is still celebrated as the "one like Moses" [Deut 18:18] because his name is a numerological equivalent of Moses - i.e. Moses (MShH) = Mem = 40, Resh = 200, Qoph = 100, and He = 5, making 345; Marqeh (MRQH) = 40, Shin = 300, He = 5, making 345. This "fact" is well known to contemporary Samaritans. [footnote: I was informed of this by my Samaritan friend, Benny Tsedaka.]

An unpublished fragment from a copy of the Memar Marqeh from the Leningrad Museum identifies Moses as the "prophet of Favor" and Marqeh as the "prophet of Disfavor." [Ibid. A note on Tsedaka's source - the handwriting and lay-out show it to be a fragment from the unique ms. containing the older recension of Marqeh, which was the basis of Ben-Hayyim’s edition. The fragments in the Firkovitch Collection of the National Library of Russia have been catalogued only generally, that is, many fragmentary mss. have not been fully described. It is not unusual to find a bound volume of fragments, or a bound volume with an old book followed by fragments. The binding would have been done in the mid nineteenth century to save the fragments from damage, before they were sold to Firkovitch. This fragment consists of several leaves.] This fragment is the key to unlock the mysteries of the anti-Dosithean position. The Samaritan Mark was the messianic "one like Moses" announced since the time of Moses. The Disfavor (Fanuta) it is which causes all our distress, says Marqeh, may it be accursed in every place."

For Marqeh to be a messianic figure like the Tâ’eb, there must be no doctrine of a future Tâ’eb, because in Marqeh this person has come. Religious minds by their very nature don't want to confront the possibility that people in the past could have wrongly celebrated someone as the messiah, expected the End Times to appear and then after all the hoopla realized the world was still the same as it ever was. But this is always what happens, as any survey of messianic movements demonstrates. And then it is back to the drawing board. One expects a new messiah, or the messiah’s second coming; in any case, the future, having briefly become the present, soon pops back into its original position as the future. Thus it is quite easy to imaigine that Samaritan future expectation followed the appearance of Marqeh as messiah, as a way of dealing with the ultimate failute of his mission. Disappointed hope turns into deferred hope, since even that variety of hope is better than despair. Theology always rearranges reality to support the sanctity of the original revelation. In other words, it would be entirely possible for Samaritans to continue to believe Mark was their "one like Moses" even after he had died and the fortune of Samaritans had deteriorated and no lasting "messianic kingdom" appeared for the nation.

The hymns attributed to Marqeh include some that explicitly speak of a very recent repudiation of core doctrine. Since the language of these hymns is as old as that of all the rest, one purpose behind them must be the re-definition of the role of the historical Marqeh. History has gone on, and a de-eschatologized, post-messianic understanding of Marqeh is being promulgated, made easier by ascribing it to Marecion himself (just as the Koran has Jesus himself repudiating Christian Christology). If the hymns had been written much later, when the shift in doctrine were taken in stride, there would have been no need to ascribe them to Marqeh. It would have been easier to remove any hymns by Marqeh that didn’t match the new orthodoxy, and to add new ones in the names of their authors. A recollection of an earlier, even higher place for Marqeh is the only explanation for the persistence of the tradition of the significance of the numerical value of his name. You might compare what the Talmud says about Ezra: “If the Torah had not already been received by Moses, Ezra would have been worthy of receiving it.” Much the same is claimed for Marqeh among the Samaritans.The new orthodox position for Marqeh is that of a saint just below Moses in significance. as we just discussed there is a parallel tradition now that no one could ever attain the sanctity of Moses. This could not have been the original tradition. It is rather only a development of the same re-engineering process. The historical priority of the expectation of a New Moses is clear from contemporary fdiscussion of the book of Deuteronomy.

If Marqeh was the historical "messiah" of the Samaritans, we have now the problem of identifying the "new Law" he must necessarily have written for the newly united Israel. Samaritan tradition repeatedly emphasizes that the "one like Moses" was also a "better Moses" who would write a better Law. According to this understanding, the old Torah would fall away and be replaced by something more perfect. The Memar Marqeh cannot have been this messianic text. It is at best a Midrash on part of the Torah, beginning at the burning bush and ending with the story of the death of Moses.

While there are now no direct allusions to Christianity in the surviving copies of Marqeh's writing, there are several unmistakable points of contact with certain aspects of Christian theology (specifically of the "Pauline" variety). Macdonald repeatedly recognizes these in his The Theology of the Samaritans). MacDonald explained the similarities as a reaction to Christian comparisons of Jesus Christ and Moses (MacDonald 1964: 189). But there is another answer, hidden in plain sight. The problem of the original significance of Marqeh immediately resolves itself as soon as we recognize the gospel (in its original form as a “super-gospel” from which the canonical four were derived) as the Samaritan Mark's original messianic composition. The proof for this assertion is found in the opening words of the Arabic Diatessaron in the Borgian Ms which read:

In the name of the one God, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, to him be the glory forever. We shall begin, with the help of God most high, the writing of the pure gospel, the blooming garden, called Diatessaron (a word meaning "fourfold"), the work compiled by Titianus the Greek out of the four evangelists-Matthew the elect, whose symbol is Mem, Mark the chosen, whose symbol is Resh, Luke the approved, whose symbol is Qof, and John the beloved, whose symbol is Het.

The last letter here is Het in the surviving manuscript but it must be a misreading on the part of the Arabic editor for Heh. The two letters look very similar to one another and a sloppy Heh could easily end up as a Het. If my suppositions are accepted the original formula which reveals the hidden source behind the gospel is M + R + Q + H = Marqeh. In other words the historical figure of Marqeh was at once also the author of the lost “new Law” of Palestine which was the gospel. The later editor who transcribed the work from Syriac to Arabic came across a tradition that Marqeh was the author of the original "one" gospel. [See my Against Polycarp for more details about this concept.]

The introduction is the work of the scribe of this ms. (or the work of the scribe of an ancestral ms.), not the words of Tatian himself. Either way, the words are a recent expansion of an old tradition. What is really important is that the name thus formed works only in Samaritan Aramaic, not Palestinian Jewish Aramaic and not Syriac. Here we have the documentation identifying the Samaritan Marqeh with the original single evangelist. We already have the identification of Marqeh the Samaritan with Marcus Agrippa from the names of the son and the father, which are too much for coincidence. Now we have the figure of Marqeh associated directly as the author of the gospel.

MacDonald identifies various allusions in Marqeh to the gospel text. We have just seen that Arabic scholars identify Marqeh as the original author of the gospel. We have also brought forward Kippenberg's observation that within the Samaritan liturgy there is an important distinction between the actual person Marqeh the Samaritan and the school that produced the hyms in his name. If we look at the collection of hymns associated with the Samaritan Mark, they refer to a recent rejection of "former error" and the adoption of a new orthodoxy. The association of Marqeh with messianic ideas a la Marcionitism may well have been what was rejected.

Marqeh was behind the four evangelists of the canon. If the scribe’s explanatory words are old, they are a clue to the origin of the four names as the three titles or throne-names of one person named Mark. Matthew and John are easily explained. We can now account for the name Matthew (Hebrew Mattityahu or Matt(an)-iah = "gift of God") = Dositheos (Greek for “gift of God”) being the name of the representative of all sects disapproved of by the later Samaritan orthodoxy. Dositheos is Matthew who is Mark. He represents the original religion, rejected by the new orthodoxy. He is then re-cast as an innovator. This was made easier by combining descriptions of later sects still bearing some resemblance to the original, on one hand, and the original system, on the other. He is called Dositheos = Matthew in all Samaritan writing to hide the fusion by applying the same name, Mark, to both the original Marcus Agrippa son of Titus (author of the texts lying behind the hymns attributed to Marqeh, who is Matthew and Dositheos), on one hand, and to the school or fictional identity behind some of the hymns attributed to Marqeh, which speak of very recent rejection of error, on the other.

It is not at all difficult to identify when a Samaritan named Mark could have written the gospel and stood at the head of a Church with a significant Samaritan representation. Justin, himself a Samaritan, shows that Marcionites were very popular among his people in the late first century/early second century. Marcion's gospel obviously preserved key Samaritan references - viz. "the good Samaritan" and likely also the material in John chapter four. The Samaritans were also hostile to the "separate" Jewish revelation at Jerusalem and hoped to see its destruction. They saw "Judaism" and those who practiced it as enemies of the true faith. One can see the Samaritan people easily convinced to venerate Marcus Julius Agrippa the friend of Titus as their returning Moses for his involvement in the destruction of the temple. Remember, Stephen is said to have predicted that his messiah would overthrow the temple (Acts 6:14), not to mention replacing the Law of Moses. And many take the speech ascribed to Stephen to be Samaritan in origin. [Johannes Munck, Acts, Anchor Bible]

The connection between Marqeh and Marqion might well explain why the Marcionites venerated only a single apostle. Marqeh would therefore have been properly been called the apostle, because Israel could have only one such figure. It was the same at the time of Moses (see the parallel argument to this effect in the Pseudo-Clementines). The figure remembered in the rabbinic tradition as Apostomos (a coruption of the Greek apostolos) who entered, desecrated and then destroyed the temple (and the Jewish Law) is not merely Marcus Agrippa but also necessarily Marqeh the Samaritan, too