My Man Marcion

One of the first religious thinkers to capture my attention as I began studying early Christianity was Marcion, a theologian, teacher, and preacher in the Second Century CE, who had a radically different conception of Christianity than many of his fellow believers. Marcion taught that Jesus’s appearance on earth revealed a god of love and forgiveness—an entirely new phenomenon in the history of humankind. This new god was unrelated to any revelation or religion that had come before him, including Judaism. Marcion founded churches across what was then the Roman Empire, published and circulated the first Christian scripture, and affected the emerging “orthodox” Christian church (using the word in its widest sense) in consequential ways. Marcionite Christianity itself was suppressed ruthlessly over the next few centuries, but his ideas have lived on. For me, Marcion’s vision resonates with an intuitive understanding of Christianity that I have felt since I was old enough to read the bible.

I grew up in a Lutheran family in mid-20^th century Brooklyn, New York, and was an enthusiastic churchgoer as a child. I went to Sunday school every Sunday, and for more instruction on Wednesday afternoons (under the “released time” provision in city law that enabled public school students to leave early once a week to learn about their religion). I read the gospels when I was a tween, and browsed around the rest of the bible. I became an altar boy (boys only, back then), and later a crucifer—the person who carries the cross at the front of the procession of church officials and choristers at the beginning and end of the service. I loved the liturgy and the music. At the close of service, the choir sang the soothing  “Lutkin Benediction,” which I often hear in my head:  “The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord lift his countenance upon you, and give you peace, The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you,” followed by a crescendo of Amens, like the choral equivalent of a fireworks show. The basic teachings of Jesus—to be kind and forgiving, and  to “love your neighbor as yourself”—resonated with me as a worthy way to approach life, and have continued to challenge me ever since.

But there were many things about the church that gave me pause. The creeds, for example, seemed legalistic and exclusionary. We recited the Nicene Creed once a month at the communion service. It was puzzling: a cross between a loyalty oath and a search warrant. Samples: “I believe...in the only-Begotten Son of God...Very God of Very God, Begotten, not made...” and, “I believe in one Holy catholic and Apostolic Church.”   Why “Very God?” Why “Begotten, not made?” Was my church “catholic and Apostolic”? And was it true  that everyone who couldn’t or wouldn’t recite this creed would suffer eternal torment in hell? That seemed to be the idea, and my playmates, most of whom attended the local Roman Catholic church (across the street from mine), assured me that it was in fact the case—and, moreover, that I would go to hell anyway, because I was a Protestant and didn’t observe the Holy Days of Obligation.

Most puzzling for me was the Old Testament (as the church—then and now—referred to the Hebrew Bible. I found much that was fascinating, edifying, and beautiful. The comforting lyrics of the Lutkin Benediction, I discovered, were from an ancient prayer in the Book of Numbers—the fourth book in the Hebrew Bible. But there they were addressed specifically to the Israelites, and much of the rest of the book was about rules and punishments, animal sacrifices, and divinely sanctioned wars of conquest. More broadly, the God of the Hebrew Bible seemed capricious, jealous, wrathful, and violent. It was hard for me to see what most of it had to do with the message of Jesus.

I drifted away from the church as I went through high school, and in my first year of college took a two-semester course sequence—Introduction to the Old Testament and Introduction to the New Testament—which confirmed my earlier suspicions: That there was something fishy about the insistence of my church (and institutional Christianity writ large) that the Old and New Testaments constituted a seamless whole. I continued, however, to consider myself as essentially a Christian, and over the years read widely both in my own and in other faith traditions, particularly about mysticism and spirituality, which had featured little in the instruction I received as a child. I also continued to feel I had unfinished business with Christianity.

Since retiring a few years ago from a 40-year career in business and economic journalism, I’ve been reading—first casually, then more seriously—about the early Christian church. I found that a revolution has been under way, especially  over the last hundred years, in how scholars and other religious thinkers view the early days of Christianity. Much of what’s commonly understood about Christianity—and much of what many Christians believe today—is surprisingly different than was understood or believed by many followers of Jesus in the first centuries of what we now refer to as the Common Era.

Which brings me back to that fascinating early Christian thinker: Marcion of Pontus (a region in what is now northern Turkey). He was a theologian and teacher who developed a distinctive kind of Christianity early in the second century—which we now know was a time of great turmoil and diversity in Christian beliefs. Marcion founded churches that flourished for several centuries from Western Asia to North Africa and Western Europe, described by a contemporary (and theological opponent) around 150 CE, as existing in “in all countries.” The scripture he assembled, circulated, and taught from consisted of the Evangelion—a single gospel account of the life and teachings of Jesus, and the Apostolikon—ten letters written by the apostle Paul to Christian churches in the mid-first century. Scholars today consider this scripture to be the first version of what came to be known, many decades later, as the New Testament.

“Marcion Teaching”

Mart Sander (mixed media, 2014) Zanderz, kodanikunimega Mart Sander, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Marcion’s Beliefs

Marcion taught that the supreme god of the universe was revealed on earth for the first time in around 28 CE in the person of Jesus, who appeared (full-grown) in Capernaum, then a small trading village on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, forty miles from the tiny settlement of Nazareth. We can know nothing about the “stranger” or “alien” god that sent Jesus, except what Jesus himself revealed: that he is a god of infinite love and forgiveness whose will is to save us and give us eternal life. This god is obviously incompatible with the god of the Hebrew Bible. Marcion believed that the latter god—although he was, in fact, the creator of  the world—was a lesser god, a god of law and justice, inferior to the god of love and forgiveness revealed by Jesus.

Having made this determination, Marcion concluded that the Hebrew Bible, while an accurate account of the creator-god and the history of Judaism, had nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus or the “alien god” that sent him, and thus should not be considered a part of Christian scripture. He also believed that the revelation of Jesus was not intended to supplement or fulfill Judaism, but to supersede it.

Marcion believed that the resurrection of human beings was a spiritual, not physical, resurrection. He also believed that Jesus was not a human being, although he appeared as one.

Finally, he believed that the Apostle Paul was the only true apostle, and that it was Paul’s writings alone that should accompany the gospel in Christian scripture.

These views may seem strange to us today, given the way that Christianity developed after Marcion’s time. But they would not have seemed so strange to many Christian believers in Marcion’s day. Modern scholars have shown very convincingly that many different forms of Christianity were being practiced at the time (several of which I plan to write about in future posts). As stated by the late John M. Knox, an eminent 20^th century American biblical scholar, educator, and author, in one of the key works of modern Marcion scholarship:

It is of the greatest importance to recognize that Marcion was not in the situation of challenging what had become a systematically formulated and generally established theological position; on the contrary, he faced a divided field and was only one of many competing teachers. He never thought himself other than as a member of the true and universal Church of Christ.

Cancelling  Marcion

Marcion was energetically and bitterly opposed by a competing school of early Christianity that biblical scholars today refer to as proto-orthodoxy. Based in Rome, the proto-orthodox leaders put themselves forth in the mid-second century as the true religious heirs of the apostles of Jesus. They were insistent on claiming the Hebrew Bible as a Christian scripture which revealed the only God, and foretold—allegorically—the  coming of Jesus as the Messiah. They insisted that the physical resurrection of believers was real.

History, as the saying goes, is written by the victors, and the victor in this case was the proto-orthodox school in Rome. From the late second century onward its leaders and teachers set about supplanting and suppressing rival churches and rival church documents—especially Marcionite churches and documents. Marcion himself was denounced by a long line of  “heresiologists”—church officials charged with rooting out and cancelling (as we might say today) any teachers or teachings about Christianity that they saw as wrong or dangerous. No manuscript of Marcion’s  writing survived this onslaught, and as a result nearly everything we know about him comes from the scornful and voluminous denunciations written by  his heresy-hunting opponents, who referred to him as variously as “the arch-Heretic,” “the Wolf of Pontus,” and  “the first-born of Satan.”

The proto-orthodox church consolidated its influence and power, and by the late fourth century, had won the war. The Church of Rome became the Roman Catholic Church—the state religion of the Roman Empire, backed by all its social, organizational, economic, and military authority. Roman Catholicism flourished spectacularly as a result, and became by far the most successful Christian denomination. It is still the largest today, with more than 1.4 billion baptized members, hundreds of millions more than all protestant denominations combined.

Coming Attractions

My next few posts, will review what modern scholars have come to believe is the real story of Marcion, including the roots and development of his theological views, and the church’s triumphant campaign of suppression. I will also look at the key role that Marcion’s Evangelion and Apostolikon played in the development of the “canonical” New Testament—the one that was  endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church and is still in use today.

What makes Marcion so fascinating for me is to consider how different Christianity, and the world we live in, might have looked if the Marcionite Church had won the day. It would not, for example, be grouped with Judaism and Islam as one of the Abrahamic religions. Christianity would be radically different. No Adam and Eve and original sin. No ten commandments. No “eye for an eye.” No invocation of divinely sanctioned warfare. No male priesthood (women had leadership roles in Marcionite churches)—and, perhaps, less patriarchy in society in general . No four horsemen of the apocalypse. Instead of a God of jealousy and vengeance, a god of pure and transcendent love. When I look back at my teenage self, I can’t help but wonder whether this kind of Christianity would have felt more worthy and welcoming and if it could have provided a spiritual home that enriched my life.

Further Reading:

Bauer, Walter. 1971. Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Originally published in German in 1934, Bauer’s was a landmark in early Christian studies.

BeDuhn, Jason David. 2013. The First New Testament: Marcion’s Scriptural Canon. Salem, OR: Polebridge Press. A painstaking reconstruction of Marcion’s Evangelion and Apostolikon, with an excellent introduction.

Harnack, Adolf. 2007. Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers. Originally published in German in 1924, and first translated into English in 1990. Harnack, perhaps more than any other scholar, was responsible for the modern revival of interest in Marcion’s life and work.

Hoffman, R. Joseph. 2016. Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity: An Essay on the Development of Radical Paulinist Theology in the Second Century. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers. A pathbreaking,  provocative—and  to me, persuasive—theory  of Marcion’s life and his theology. This edition is a reprint of the 1984 original, with a new “Preface to Marcion Studies.”

Knox, John. 1942. Marcion and the New Testament: An Essay in the Early History of the Canon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. An early and pivotal book that broke new ground in the modern understanding of Marcion’s importance in the development of early Christianity and the formation of the New Testament.

Liew, Judith M. 2015. Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. An extensive and detailed study of all things Marcion, with a wealth of information about the social setting of Marcion, his opponents, and the Second Century CE.

Tyson, Joseph B. 2006. Marcion and Luke-Acts: A Defining Struggle. Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Press. An accessible and elegantly written account of Marcion’s life and theology, and his impact on the development of the New Testament and Christian orthodoxy.