Marcion and the Creation of Christian Scripture

How the traditional account of the New Testament’s origins got it all wrong.

Nov 15, 2024

Scholars of early Christianity in recent decades have been challenging the traditional Christian understanding of the origins of the New Testament—particularly when and how it took shape, and the role played in its creation by the early theologian and church leader, Marcion of Pontus.

According to the recent academic research, sometime in the early- to mid-second century CE, Marcion, who was born toward the end of the first century in eastern Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) and died in the mid-second century, assembled and circulated the first written Christian scripture—in effect, the earliest version of what was to become the New Testament.

Marcion’s compact work consisted of two “books”—a single account of the works and sayings of Jesus Christ, titled Evangelion (Gospel), and a collection of ten letters written by the Apostle Paul, titled Apostolikon (Apostle). These were the scriptures Marcion authorized and taught from in the many churches he founded.

The much longer version of the New Testament that we know today—which replaced Marcion’s Evangelion with four other gospel stories, and added more letters attributed to Paul, and a few other letters and books—only came together toward the end of the second century, several decades after Marcion’s death. (In this post, I focus on the Evangelion, and will write in the future about the significance of the Apostolikon.)

This modern scholars’ theory is very much at odds with the traditional account of the origins of Christian scripture. Christian churches have long believed that the New Testament took shape in the first century, within living memory of the life of Jesus, and that Marcion—who they later denounced as a heretic—had created his Evangelion much later, by editing an already-existing Gospel According to Luke, and rejecting most of the books in an already existing New Testament.

The reason Marcion did this, they explained, was to bring the gospel into line with his dangerous views about Christianity. (Marcion taught that the transcendent God who sent Jesus into the world was not the God of the Hebrew Bible, and that the Hebrew Bible therefore should not be considered Christian scripture. (See my earlier posts here and here for more on Marcion’s life and beliefs.)

A modern icon of Marcion, courtesy MarcioniteChurch.org

Among an active group of current scholars of early Christianity, the modern theory of Marcion’s primacy is generally accepted. Jason BeDuhn, a professor of religious studies at Northern Arizona University (and author of an analysis and reconstruction of Maricon’s Evangelion and Apostolikon) states:

The familiar account of the history and development [of the New Testament]...is long overdue for revision, riddled as it is with anachronism, teleology, and normative judgements that expose it as a “romantic” account of Christian origins, invented by later orthodoxy, to which a thin veneer of academic respectability has been added.

If the modern scholars’ theory is correct, it fundamentally changes our understanding of how early Christianity evolved:

First, in the modern view Marcion was clearly an early theological innovator, rather than a later theological interloper.

Second, while both Marcion’s Evangelion and the other gospel stories that were added to the New Testament certainly have roots in the first century CE, and reflect the oral gospel traditions that were circulating at that time, the New Testament as we know it today was clearly a product of the second century.

Finally, it suggests that the editorial choices made in the assembling and editing of the later New Testament were driven both by the need to counter the popularity of Marcionite Christianity, and to promote the rival proto-orthodox teachings that formed the theological foundations of the Roman Catholic and other orthodox churches.

Closing the “Canon”

In the modern scholars’ view, the publication of Marcion’s scriptures was a signal event in the history of Christianity (and of religion in general, in many ways). It came at a time in which very few people could read or write, and the accounts of Jesus and his teachings had been passed down—and repeated and shared—orally.

Towards to end of the first century CE and the beginning of the second, some early Christians had begun to write down accounts of Jesus’s life and sayings. Different versions were favored (and copied and preserved) in different communities and regions, and were also shared with other communities. But well into the second century they had not been elevated to, or set apart as, “scripture” that was accorded greater authority than other Christian writings—of which there were many at the time.

Scholars have noted that Christian writers through the middle of the second century did not quote from the gospels that appeared later in the New Testament—in fact, they seemed unaware of them. When they referred to Jesus’s teachings, they attributed them simply as “the words of the Lord,” rather than to gospel narratives.

What seems certain is that until Marcion, there was no Christian “canon” (from the Greek κανών, (kanôn, meaning a measuring stick or standard) defined as a set of religious scriptures understood to be authorized or authentic. Professor BeDuhn writes that, by creating a “canon” for Christians,

Marcion suddenly and exponentially elevated the status of particular texts, and launched them into an undeniably superior authority relative to any others, in a way no one before him had dared to do. That is, he accentuated their place as scripture precisely by including them within a limited canon. In doing so, he set boundaries on what could be used as a touchstone in evaluating various positions put forward as “Christian,” narrowing the range of permissible variety within the Christian movement.

Origins of the Evangelion

BeDuhn and other modern critical scholars agree that the Evangelion was the first gospel story to be widely circulated, but they differ in the origins of the Evangelion itself. BeDuhn and some other scholars, for example, believe that the Evangelion was an early gospel story that Marcion was familiar with—possibly one that was favored in Anatolia, where he grew up), and that he may have edited it somewhat before circulating it—or simply published it as he knew it. Some believe it may have been a gospel associated with the Apostle Paul, or even a written version of gospel as Paul taught it.

Markus Vinzent, a scholar of early Christian and patristic history, and professor at Kings College, London, and a fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, believes Marcion wrote the Evangelion himself, and that he published it in Rome in the late 130s or 140s (although he may have composed an earlier version that he used in his ministry). Vinzent also thinks that the New Testament gospels were written or edited into their final forms shortly after Marcion’s Evangelion and Apostolikon appeared. Vinzent states:

Marcion marks the transition from an oral memory of Jesus’s oracles and perhaps some ‘retelling of inherited narratives’ of Jesus of Nazareth, to the written combination of oracles and similes of the Lord, and, in this sense, became the author of his Gospel, which was the first Gospel of its kind.

Evidence of Luke’s Later Date

One of the reasons that modern scholars have concluded that Marcion’s Evangelion came before the Gospel According to Luke is that scholars analyzing the text of Luke see evidence that its author was editing the Evangelion, particularly at the beginning, which opens with Jesus’s birth story and a genealogy tracing his lineage back to King David, and, ultimately, to Adam.

The Evangelion has no birth story—no angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary, no swaddling clothes, no manger, no shepherds watching their flocks by night, and no stories about Jesus’s childhood. There’s also no genealogy. Instead, the Evangelion begins like this:

In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, when Pilate was governing Judea [29 CE], Jesus came down to Capharnaum, a city in Galilee. And he was teaching them in the synagogue, and they were amazed at his teaching, because his speech was delivered authoritatively.

View of Capernaum from the Sea of Galilee in modern times; photo by Fallaner, via Wikimedia Commons.

An example of the kinds of textual glitches that suggest the author of Luke was editing the Evangelion, rather than the other way around, is verse 4:23 of Luke, where the author is recounting an episode where Jesus its teaching in Nazareth, and someone in the audience asks about the things Jesus has done in Capernaum. But in Luke’s narrative, Jesus has yet to visit Capernaum—an example of what scholars call “editorial fatigue” on the author’s part, missing the error when he appended his new beginning passages to the Evangelion.

Why might the author of Luke have inserted the birth story and the genealogy? The answer is that one of the clear goals of the proto-orthodox church was to emphasize that Jesus was the messiah foretold in the Hebrew Bible, and that he was a descendant of the kings of Israel. This justified their appropriation of the Hebrew Bible as a Christian scripture, and grounded the religion in earliest antiquity.

Scholars have also noted that the writing style of the Lukan birth story is unlike the writing style of both the Evangelion and text of Luke that parallels the Evangelion’s. The introductory passage are written in the distinctive style of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which had been composed between the third century BCE and the beginning of the second century CE.

The Power of Tradition

Despite the wealth of new scholarly evidence of the primacy of Marcion, the old orthodox account of the origins of the New Testament is still very much alive. It remains the consensus view of most traditionally oriented scholars and theologians. Introductory textbooks on the New Testament may mention Marcion in passing, but continue to accept the first-century dates for the New Testament gospels, and avoid the question of whether Marcion’s Evangelion and Apostolikon came first.

We can hope, however, that the efforts of BeDuhn, Vinzent—and the many other scholars who have contributed to the modern theory of New Testament origins—will lead to a better understanding of what early Christians believed, and how those beliefs were altered during the relentless rise of orthodoxy.

Discovering Early Christianity

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