[3] Vinzent held academic posts as senior research fellow at King's College, Cambridge (1991-3), senior research fellow at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaft (tenure), Berlin (1993-5), C4-professor (non-tenure) for history of theology in the times of the Reformation and Modernity, University of Mainz, Germany (1996-7), C4-professor for history of theology (tenure), University of Cologne, Germany (1997-9), HG Wood Professor of Theology, University of Birmingham (1999-2010), including a stint as head of department (1999-2001).
He is now co-leading together with Marie-Anne Vannier (Université de Lorraine, Metz) a major research project on ‘Teaching and Preaching with Patristic auctoritates – Meister Eckhart in France and Germany, past and present’, funded by the French Agence National de la Recherche (ANR) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (2018-2021).
In a series of monographs he has published on early Christian beliefs (Monarchianism, Trinity, Apostles' Creed) and their reception in the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment and in contemporary theology.
Key concepts like Christianity as a separate 'religion', being based not only on sayings of a Rabbi Jesus, but on the exemplary life of a divine messenger and saviour Jesus Christ who died on the cross and rose again, the 'Gospel' as a new literary genre that encapsulates the novelty of Christ's message and of Christianity, the 'New Testament' as the title of the collection of the foundational writings of this new religion (in antithesis to the 'Old Testament' of the Jewish law and the prophets), the introduction of sacraments, new ways of fasting and asceticism all go back to this Roman teacher.
In a very recent new manuscript discovery at the Wartburg Castle of Eisenach, Germany, Eckhart’s own vernacular translation of some of his Latin works seems to be preserved (with a parallel codex in Berlin and fragments in Munich).
[10][11] The Roman teacher and merchant, Marcion of Sinope, is regarded by Christianity as one of its key thinkers and founders, and is associated with the first compilation of a gospel and 10 Pauline letters.
For Vinzent, it was Marcion, who through the corpus of the ten Pauline Epistles and his one Gospel, helped to spread the belief in the Resurrection of Christ throughout Christendom.
Through the collected texts of his Gospel and the ten Pauline Epistles, which he came to publish as ‘the New Testament’, the first collection ever to take this name, Marcion gave a previously ‘Jewish sect’ an increasingly Christian profile, thus setting in motion their establishment into the institutional environment of the Roman world, in that Christianity had finally come to shed its Jewish identity.
Markus’s project enjoys a scholarly connection to reconstructions of the Gospel of Marcion undertaken by Theodor Zahn, Adolf von Harnack, Dieter T. Roth, and Matthias Klinghardt.
Further still in his analysis, Vinzent holds that the Resurrection of Christ became an important element of belief only in those circles most influenced by the writings of Paul and the Gospel of Marcion.
[16] Vinzent supports the investigation of David Trobisch and Matthias Klinghardt (2011), which examines the origin of the post-Marconite gospels as ‘canonical redaction’.
[19] Vinzent sees evidence of this editorial intention in the writings of Origen of Alexandria, Irenaeus of Lyon, Tertullian, and Justin the Martyr.
[21][22][23] • Although originally compiled for his own teaching, the text of the Gospel of Marcion reached a far wider audience than first intended and was subsequently plagiarised, revised, and distilled into pseudoepigraphia attributed to pseudonyms, e.g., Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, but also to other prominent authorities, i.e., Peter.
• Because of this situation, Marcion was likely to have felt himself compelled, firstly to publish the texts of the Pauline Epistles and the Gospel, and secondly, to provide the collection with a preliminary introduction, i.e., disclamatory statement.
In these statements, Marcion points to the inconsistency of his ‘New (Marconite) Gospel’ with its inclusion alongside the Hebrew Bible and its reconstruction in pseudoepigraphia by Jewish writers.